Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  The continued FBI investigations were dispiriting and the prospect of backing for a space programme seemed more remote than ever. ‘We can dream about rockets and the Moon until Hell freezes over,’ one close friend confided to von Braun. ‘Unless the people understand it, nothing will happen.’ Von Braun seized the initiative and decided to set out his ideas in the popular press. Eight articles were published in Collier’s magazine. The series, ‘Man Will Conquer Space Soon’, started in the spring of 1952 and showed his fascination with mastering that remote and infinite frontier. The idea of space travel was made real as he described space stations, shuttles, the effects of gravity, astronauts and their special suits. It was hugely successful – more than three million copies were sold – and at last America woke up to the presence of Wernher von Braun.

  Eight thousand miles away at Podlipki, near Moscow, Sergei Korolev and Nina pored over the pages of Collier’s like misers fingering gold. They marvelled at the detailed picture it presented of life in space. ‘What you will read here is not science fiction,’ pronounced Collier’s. ‘It is now possible to establish an artificial satellite or “space station” in which man can live or work far beyond the earth’s atmosphere … the first nation to do this will control the earth. And it is too much to assume that Moscow’s military planners have overlooked the military potentialities of such an instrument.’ Dr Tikhonravov was mentioned by name, pointing out his claim that rocket ships could be built and the creation of a satellite was now possible. ‘A ruthless foe established on a space station could actually subjugate the peoples of the world,’ said von Braun. ‘Sweeping around the earth in a fixed orbit, like a second moon, this man-made island in the heavens could be used as a platform from which to launch guided missiles. Armed with atomic warheads, radar-controlled projectiles could be aimed at any target on the earth’s surface with devastating accuracy.’ This ‘fast moving star’ sweeping around the earth ‘could be the greatest force for peace ever devised or one of the most terrible weapons of war’.

  Von Braun described the theory behind the launching of a satellite. ‘Nature will provide the motive power,’ he wrote, ‘a neat balance between its speed and the earth’s gravitational pull will keep it on course … circling according to the same laws that govern the moon’s path around the earth.’ He wanted to achieve a stable orbit, where the effects of earth’s atmosphere would be negligible: ideally 1075 miles above the earth. At this magic altitude, moving around the earth at more than 15,000 mph – twenty times the speed of sound in air – the satellite would complete a tour around the globe once every two hours and could see any spot on earth within twenty-four hours: the perfect spy. To launch a satellite into this two-hour orbit it would be necessary for a rocket to achieve a staggering speed of 18,000 mph – almost five times as fast as the V-2 – to attain the right balance between speed and gravitational pull. He set out how a three-stage rocket would achieve this, each stage designed to project it forward at ever-greater speed before falling away. And he was clearly entranced by the romance of it. ‘The earth, more than a 1000 miles below, will appear as a gigantic glowing globe … The continents will stand out in shades of grey and brown bordering the brilliant blue of the seas. One polar ice cap will show as blinding white, too brilliant to look at with the naked eye … while the whole earth will be framed by the absolute black of space.’

  Korolev and Nina followed the series of articles in which von Braun went on to show how a lunar voyage could be achieved. He described the rockets that were needed for the five-day, 239,000-mile trip and the return journey, predicting that man would ‘set foot on the ancient dust of the moon’ by 1977. The intricacy of the space suit, designed to resist radiation and micrometeorites, with its layers of insulation to provide a living temperature, was convincing. The concept of man living in the empty territory between the earth and the stars as they would in any city was described as though the problems of living in space were already solved. Each month as the articles elaborated on the theme, Korolev became convinced that von Braun was involved in a space programme. It was obvious to him that von Braun shared his dream – but, unlike Korolev, he had found the backing to make it real.

  Worried now that von Braun was in the lead after all, he continued discussions with Tikhonravov on how to launch a satellite. Tikhonravov’s team began to research the predicted trajectories of rockets and their satellite payloads launched at various speeds using complicated mathematical models that took into account the variation of fuel expenditure, rocket mass and engine thrust over time, as well as rocket attitude or direction. They predicted how to get the satellite into orbit using different missiles, how to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and even how to recover the satellite. However, Korolev knew he could not get any satellite into orbit until the R-3 left the drawing board and they had run into seemingly insolvable problems.

  The engine for the R-3 was intended to have 120 tons of thrust – more than triple that used in the R-2 with its 35 tons of thrust. As the leading engine designer, Glushko faced the difficulty that in trying to scale up, the larger the combustion chamber the greater the chance that the fuels would not mix properly. This would cause combustion instability with pockets of unmixed fuel suddenly detonating and creating pressure waves that could bounce around the combustion chamber and even rip it to pieces. And quite apart from these difficulties with the R-3, Korolev faced another, very personal setback in May 1952. To his astonishment, one of his subordinates, Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel, was promoted above him to director of NII-88. Whether this was because of Korolev’s passion for non-military projects, or because he still carried the taint of being an ex-prisoner and was not a member of the Communist Party, was never made clear.

  However, events on the world stage were to overtake Korolev’s struggles at OKB-1. In November 1952, America detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb. It was many times more powerful than the atomic bomb, which was hard to contemplate given the scale of the destruction and annihilation at Hiroshima, which had wiped so much of humanity away without a trace. The new H-bomb, tested on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, erased the island from the face of the earth. In January 1953, the new President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to use an atomic bomb against China. The Soviet Union began to prepare for nuclear war.

  In the freezing cold of March that same year, Stalin died, as if bowing out of a situation that could no longer be controlled. He left a power vacuum almost as terrifying as Stalin himself. The man who had ruthlessly killed an estimated twenty million of his countrymen and sent eighteen million more to the Gulag, had been left to die slowly, unattended. In the early hours of Sunday 1 March, he had said goodbye to his colleagues and drinking friends, Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchev. They had eaten a late meal and watched old American movies, as they did most nights at Stalin’s dacha. Stalin slept all the next day and had still not emerged by evening. This was most unusual, but no one dared enquire whether all was well for fear of punishment. At 10 p.m. a brave official found Stalin lying on the floor in a puddle of urine, unable to move or speak coherently. His drinking friends from the previous evening arrived but, for reasons of their own, did not call a doctor and berated the guards for making a fuss when Stalin was clearly ‘sleeping’. By the second day, with Stalin still unable to move and soaked in urine, the guards feared for their lives should he die. Eventually doctors were found to attend him, trembling with fear as they did so. Stalin was suspicious of doctors; his own was currently under arrest and subjected to torture.

  Stalin had had a stroke. He took several days finally to relinquish life, surrounded by doctors, guards and what was left of his family and his fearful, scheming colleagues. When he was unconscious, Beria screamed abuse at him. But when Stalin opened his eyes, looking as though he might recover, Beria fawned in obeisance, shouting orders at the doctors to save him. Nothing could be done. Stalin understood this and a terrible fear was in his eyes, especially when he looked at Beria. The days passed interminably slow
ly until finally death arrived, bringing agony. His face was contorted. He could not breathe. His lungs filled with fluid. At the very last moment, he opened his eyes. It was an awful look, his daughter, Svetlana, recalled; either mad or angry and full of terror. Then he fell back, a surprising serenity of expression that he had never had in life stealing over his face.

  Stalin’s death brought a power struggle within the Kremlin, with Beria, Khrushchev and Malenkov vying to take charge. The outcome would be critical for Korolev. Stalin had been in complete control of matters of defence and he had often backed Korolev; now the future looked more uncertain.

  There was another area in Korolev’s life that troubled him greatly. Still estranged from his daughter Natasha, he was rebuffed every time he attempted to contact her. With the approach of her eighteenth birthday, he decided to write to her:

  I don’t think your behaviour towards me is right, dear Natasha … My love for you is genuine and strong. I often think about you and so wish that you would see me again and that the distance which has developed between us would cease to be … I am very far away from you, but on 10 April I will be thinking about you, here in the desert. Don’t forget your father who loves you very much, who is always thinking about you and will never forget you …

  She did not reply. Korolev confided to Nina, ‘it hurts me so much that she does not want to know me, my own daughter’. Nina herself had been unable to have children. On Natasha’s birthday, Mishin overheard Korolev try to speak to her by telephone from the launch site. When Natasha realized it was her father, she put the receiver down ‘and he just sat there crying’.

  Korolev’s persistent alliance with Tikhonravov and his unwelcome ambitions for space flight had been noted by senior party officials. The R-3 was running into such difficulties that Korolev wanted to scrap the project entirely and move swiftly ahead with a bold new missile design incorporating many of Tikhonravov’s ideas. When he had made this proposal at a meeting earlier in the year, he had run into serious opposition from one of the most senior figures in the Soviet defence industry, Vyacheslav Malyshev. Whatever the difficulties with the R-3, Malyshev was appalled that Korolev would even contemplate scrapping a programme which was so crucial to Soviet military planning in favour of something more speculative. He turned on Korolev, severely criticizing him in public, accusing him of seeking to pursue the more ambitious project because he wished to get into space. Korolev was angry and unguarded, refusing to comply. Malyshev now made darker threats. ‘People are not irreplaceable,’ he said. ‘Others can be found.’ The warning was clear and delivered in such a forceful manner that everyone in the room fell silent.

  An unexpected twist, however, was to hand Korolev the lead in the space race. On 12 August 1953 – less than a year after the Americans – the Soviet nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov succeeded in creating a hydrogen bomb which was exploded in the wastes of the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. In just four years the Soviets had created a weapon twenty times more powerful than their first atomic bomb – but Vyacheslav Malyshev was already looking beyond this. He wanted a bomb with even more power: a second-generation thermonuclear bomb. According to Sakharov’s memoirs, he received a visit from Malyshev, who had now been promoted to Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and charged with leading the hydrogen bomb and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) programme under the intriguing title of ‘Minister of Medium Machine Building’ – a deliberately ambiguous label designed to confuse the West. Malyshev urged Sakharov to write a report immediately on the specifications for the next generation of thermonuclear device. In particular, he was required to estimate the weight of such a weapon. Sakharov was hesitant, but evidently did not feel he could refuse such a senior minister. ‘I had no one with whom to consult,’ he later admitted. ‘But nevertheless, wrote a report on the spot and gave it to Malyshev.’ Sakharov’s spur-of-the-moment estimate – 5 tons – was to have a lasting effect on the Soviet missile programme.

  Armed with this information, the minister paid Korolev a visit. In October 1953, Malyshev came alone to Korolev’s division, OKB-1 within NII-88. His face, usually clouded with mistrust, was wreathed in unfamiliar smiles. He put himself out to be pleasant, which immediately put Korolev on his guard. The usual group of engineers, including Mishin, were in attendance, wondering what motive lay behind Malyshev’s good humour. He enquired about the work in progress and asked what the lifting potential was of the new rocket. He did not like what he heard: a lifting potential of 3 tons. That would not do. Five tons was required. Korolev was up in arms at such an impossible demand, but not for long. After all, Malyshev was the one making the request, and he seemed all the more sinister when he was smiling.

  Korolev and his team were amazed: at the time, rocket technology could barely haul 1 ton. Three tons would be a breakthrough, let alone five. The military order, however, was soon confirmed. Korolev was to design a new rocket capable of carrying a 5-ton warhead and travelling five thousand miles. He could not be completely sure that such an order could ever be fulfilled. This could not be a pale imitation of the V-2 – it would require rethinking almost every aspect of design. There was one small hope. The revolutionary ideas of Tikhonravov, which carried no weight with the orthodox, might give him the impetus for a completely new approach.

  Korolev had already been contemplating a missile incorporating many of Tikhonravov’s ideas. Tikhonravov wanted to cluster entire rockets or boosters together – either in stages one on top of the other or side by side – to make one massive rocket. He had put forward several different configurations for how to achieve a missile that could carry a 3-ton warhead some four thousand miles. These plans had to be hastily scaled up into an even bolder scheme.

  Korolev’s team developed a revolutionary design for a massive rocket made up of a central core with four booster rockets strapped around it – known as the R-7. The five main engines – one on the central core and each of the strap-on boosters – would themselves be built to a bold new plan: they would be multichambered to provide even more power. The aim was to create a rocket with a total thrust of 390 tons, nine times more powerful than any other Soviet rocket.

  The idea behind the multichambered engines was simple. If they tried to scale a conventional combustion chamber up to the required volume, they would greatly increase the risk of combustion instability – creating damaging pressure waves inside the chamber that might destroy the engine. The aim instead was to combine several combustion chambers together, fuelled by one pump, to create a much more powerful engine. In fact, Korolev envisaged a new engine comprising four combustion chambers, each one of which had as much thrust as a V-2 engine. With five main engines in the R-7, it was like combining the thrust of twenty V-2 engines.

  Steering on the R-7 would not be achieved by simple rudders, as it was on early missiles, but with the steering or vernier engines, which could change the direction of the thrust. The boldness of the vision and the sheer scale of engineering involved were breathtaking. It was a quantum leap forward in design. Nothing like this had ever been created before – and some believed it was impossible.

  Korolev was reliant on the leading Soviet engine designer Valentin Glushko, and their relationship, always awkward since the purges, was now tinged with jealousy as Glushko adjusted to Korolev’s success. They had already clashed when Glushko had initially refused to design the next generation of liquid-oxygen engines, the RD-105 and RD-106, which had aimed to provide a thrust of 50–60 tons with a much larger combustion chamber. This carried the risk of vibration and combustion instability and Glushko had opposed Korolev, arguing ‘that he was violating the bounds of his own professional competence’. Yet even these would not be powerful enough for the new R-7, and Glushko’s team were to work on the multichambered engines, the RD-107 and RD-108, which would combine four combustion chambers together to produce a thrust of more than 75 tons.

  However, Glushko refused to build the small steering engines that Mishin had put
forward, which were to control the direction of the missile once the strap-ons had fallen away. In these vernier engines, nozzles for the exhaust could swivel, so, in theory, it should be possible to control the direction of the thrust. Tsiolkovsky had long predicted this would be possible and Korolev was keen to try it – not least because the old methods of using stabilizing fins and exhaust vanes would create extra drag and reduce the speed of the rocket. Glushko did not want to be responsible for a failure. He insisted that it was risky to introduce so many innovations at once and declared ‘it would be impossible to control the rocket with these thrusters’. But Korolev had complete faith in the designs proposed by his staff. It was what the military needed and there was, of course, another benefit of developing such a powerful rocket of which Korolev was well aware: it gave him the chance to realize his aspirations for a satellite. Mishin brought in a group of young engineers from another institute to help solve the problem of these small steering engines.

  A meeting was held at the Kremlin at which Korolev outlined his bold new ideas for the R-7 to the military grandees. To his delight, the design excited much interest and there was general approval for him to proceed. For reasons of security, the rocket was officially designated the codename ‘Product 8K71’. For Korolev, the most exciting aspect of ‘Product 8K71’, or the R-7, was that it would have the power to put a satellite into orbit. Fired up by the support for the new rocket, he wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party putting forward proposals to launch a satellite, but his request was unaccountably removed from the draft. Undeterred, Korolev continued to lobby party leaders, government officials and heads of various ministries. With the approval of the R-7, despite continued opposition, he hoped he was on the threshold of at last realizing his ambitions for conquering space.