Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  Radio communications, however, were working erratically, potentially jeopardizing the chance to obtain the photographs. Although the radio station was situated miles away at Ai-Petri in the Crimea, Korolev preferred to deal with the problem himself. Taking Mstislav Keldysh, the distinguished mathematician and computer expert, and other senior executives with him, he knew that if they left immediately they could be at the radio station at 4 p.m. when Luna 3 should be within range. After a hair-raising ride to the airport and a flight to Simferopol near the Crimean Mountains, the helicopter taking them on to Ai-Petri ran into bad weather. Visibility was zero and a detour was made to Yalta where a car would take them to their destination. They found a driver who seemed remarkably relaxed about being asked to squeeze seven city types in dark coats and homburgs into his Zim and drive in blizzard conditions – fast – the most authoritative one with the intense black eyes saying, ‘Well, dear boy, show us what you and the Zim can do … We really are in a great hurry.’ Looking neither to left nor right, he drove like the wind through blinding sleet as though the devil were behind him, his seven passengers anticipating a head-on crash at every curve in the road.

  On arrival, Korolev swept in with more energy than the blizzard itself, intent on discovering the fault in communication: was it bad design or careless workmanship? He set about a charm offensive; if that didn’t work, the staff at the radio station, accustomed to the peace of a sleepy backwater, would feel the edge of his tongue. Korolev knew there was no such thing as an unsolvable problem. He listed the nuts and bolts of what could go wrong with his usual energy, assuming the radio engineers felt a corresponding urgency. Could it be the aerials perhaps, or their alignment? The workers quietly underlined the point that the design was Korolev’s; they were merely operators. This was not perhaps the wisest of answers to give a man who felt such passion for his creation roaming the skies, its cries unanswered. The cosy little nest of operators was poked until the truth emerged: they had been passing work not confirmed as correct before undertaking the next procedure.

  The next people to come in for the Korolev treatment were at the centre in Moscow responsible for maintaining calculations of the spacecraft’s trajectory. After a night with no sleep, the staff had camped out in the building for a catnap. When Korolev telephoned to discuss the trajectory, the operator informed him that the staff were not available: they were all asleep. She was not prepared to take the matter further as she didn’t know who Korolev was – he sounded like a nobody kicking up a fuss. The lacklustre level of technical backup was intensely frustrating for Korolev, and his anonymity made matters even more stressful. His fabulous craft, his ‘dream’, was flying high, waving the flag for the Soviet Union, leaving the Americans with their mouths open at the wonder of what he had achieved, and back home people were asleep on the job.

  In the end, the mission was a spectacular success. By 18 October, seventeen images had been transmitted back to earth from Luna 3, indistinct patches of dark and white from the moon’s surface – its secret face exposed to the mechanical click of the camera revealing craggy mountains and pockmarked sites of fatal meteor flights. Never before had a celestial body been photographed in such detail. A tentative map of the far side of the moon could be produced revealing different features, the most striking of which Korolev named after Tsiolkovsky. It was a large crater estimated at more than ninety miles across.

  Later that year, the Soviet government rewarded Korolev and Nina with a new house in Podlipki. It was a revelation, a tangible token of appreciation; sufficiently grand to give a feeling of wonder, not so grand as to overawe. They moved in as New Year approached. ‘It had six rooms, a patio and basement floor,’ says his daughter, Natasha. Pink marble surrounded the fireplace in the sitting room. Bay windows to the floor offered views to the far distance. In Korolev’s study was a very large German desk upon which stood a portrait of Nina; he filled the house with pictures and books. Sometimes Korolev would say he was going to rest in the forest and could be found half-dreaming in a deep armchair contemplating a picture called ‘Forest Scene’. In the summer, he sat under the shade of an old oak tree viewing the leafy garden and the larch trees around the border. His daughter said ‘he loved the house’.

  But best of all for Korolev, Khrushchev did a complete volte-face on the subject of space travel. Waking up at last to the fact that the Americans would soon ‘outstrip us’, he called a meeting in January 1960. ‘Your affairs are not well,’ he acknowledged to Korolev, Glushko and Keldysh. ‘You should quickly aim for space.’ Many of Korolev’s original ideas that he had put forward with Tikhonravov as early as 1958 now seemed to be under more serious consideration. Khrushchev even wanted a probe to place the Soviet flag on Mars by October that year when he was due to visit the United Nations.

  Events moved forward swiftly. That same month a Cosmonaut Training Centre (TsPK) was formed, temporarily based in a number of specialist institutes and facilities in Moscow while the search was on for a more suitable site. In charge of the training was General Nikolai Kamanin, whose life was a clear testimony to Spartan denial. Golovanov somewhat unsympathetically recalled a man of ‘terrifying evil, a malevolent person, a complete Stalinist bastard’. Lean and hardened through active service, he expected the same devoted austerity to communism from everyone under his command.

  Like their American counterparts, Soviet doctors were fascinated by the possibility that a man might lose his sense of reality should something go wrong in the capsule. If the cosmonaut lost that psychological, umbilical radio link with earth, would he go mad? To this end they emphasized tests that would stretch sensory deprivation and isolation to the limit. The dreaded windowless cell of silence became a subtle weapon of terror where the slowly passing days and hours could transform alert young men into subdued and passive zombies. Night and day did not exist in the chamber. No stimulus was allowed; books and music were forbidden. If an inmate drifted off to sleep, a light would shine in his eyes. He could talk to his keepers, but no reply was forthcoming as they were left to linger in the silence of their concrete coffin.

  Oxygen starvation tests, beloved of the doctors, were also part of the programme. The would-be star man was locked into a cell while air was pumped out of it. The doctors observed, taking notes while their patient repeatedly wrote his name on a piece of paper. As the oxygen oozed away, the name writing became a scribble and the patient would lose consciousness. Why, asked Korolev, do we have this test? In a space capsule, he explained, an individual would only ever face a situation in which he either did or did not have oxygen; there would be no prolonged state in between. But the doctors won. Equally detested was the centrifuge capsule where the hopeful star traveller was spun until his eyes could no longer focus and the heightened forces of gravity transformed flesh into the weight of stone. One young trainee recalled: ‘My eyes wouldn’t shut, breathing was a great effort, my face muscles were twisted, my heart rate speeded up and the blood in my veins felt as heavy as mercury.’ Yet he was longing to be selected for the ‘special flights’ and was delighted when he saw his name was on the short list: Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.

  Twenty-six-year-old Yuri Gagarin was from the deeply agricultural region of Smolensk, a hundred miles from Moscow, and had worked hard to win his opportunities. He had grown up on a collective farm where his father had looked after the stock and his mother milked the cows. In 1942, when Yuri was eight, their quiet lives had been transformed as the Germans arrived, four columns of them marching through the village. Yuri had survived the brutal German occupation, and worked hard to escape his country roots and become a jet pilot.

  Now he understood that his application had brought him to the threshold of something extraordinary. During the last days of the recruitment tests, he had been asked how he felt about flying something new. He had wondered what could be ‘newer’ than the most up-to-date jets, only to receive the jaw-dropping reply that being sent around the world to view it from 150 miles up in a rocket was newer.
To be the first man to wave goodbye to the world, to look down on it and see the whole sphere as no man had ever done: that would indeed be new. Yet he felt his chances of being chosen first were limited. There were others whom he thought surely stood a better chance, such as the cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Titov had a sharper intelligence, was better educated and had a more sophisticated manner. He had read the classics and could quote them effectively and had acquired the confident assurance that comes from being born into the intelligentsia; it was bred into him – an innate understanding of his worth. Gagarin had no such inheritance with which to impress, only the centuries of dogged endurance bred into his forebears and the hard-won knowledge that survival really was the reward of the fittest.

  The crucial next step was to meet the Chief Designer. They had all heard about this legendary figure, the man with no identity, with no recognizable and familiar persona. There was just the whispered acknowledgement of his existence among the favoured few. Had they in fact met him already and been judged by him? Did he even exist, this man who would apparently play a part in illuminating their names forever in the pages of history?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Why aren’t you dead?’

  On 18 June 1960, the successful candidates were summoned to a room in OKB-1 to meet the mysterious maker of the rockets, a man sometimes known as the ‘Iron King’. Although his name was never mentioned, which gave him an invisible, almost mystical status, the Chief Designer could never be mistaken for a man without identity. On close acquaintance, everything about him was indeed larger than life, as though the years of being incognito allowed him to express himself more fully and completely. He walked towards them and, as he did so, the more observant among them registered how his presence affected those around him. He was not tall, but seemed so. His impressive head was large, his features quickly changed from neutral, intelligent enquiry to a smile that embraced everyone. What Korolev saw impressed him: his ‘little eagles’.

  He spoke with warmth as he introduced himself and learned their names and piloting experience. While they listened attentively, he presented them with a vision of things to come; of journeying into the immensity of space in a machine that could travel many thousands of miles an hour, of arriving at a space station, living there or perhaps moving on to Mars: of the whole vista of a starry universe waiting to be discovered, just as the New World had been in the fifteenth century by those exploring galleons. Some of them would make that journey, one of them quite soon, he hoped. ‘Patriotism, courage, modesty, iron will, knowledge and love of people,’ he said: ‘cosmonauts must have these qualities.’ Unlike his usually ‘controlled presentation’, Korolev spoke with passion, gesticulating wildly to illustrate his ideas and was ‘noticeably carried away’.

  The company felt inspired and asked questions on space travel but Korolev wanted to know more about his ‘little eagles’ and how they had arrived at this point in their lives. He looked at Gagarin, the slight young man with the unmarked face of youth and a warm smile that seemed to illuminate a generous spirit. ‘Tell us about yourself, comrade,’ he said. Gagarin spoke for several minutes and, as he talked, it became apparent that the long and tortuous path from farm and village school to jet pilot had taken more perseverance and steely determination than was apparent in his looks.

  As a child during the German occupation he had witnessed events that had brought him a certain seriousness that an eight-year-old child should not possess. There had been heavy fighting in the nearby woods where he used to play. When the fighting was over, he and his older brother, Valentin, had stolen among the trees to see what had happened. They saw a Soviet colonel lying where he had fallen two days earlier among the drifting leaves and snow. He was still alive – just. They watched secretly as German officers approached and began to question him. The soldier pretended blindness and asked them to come nearer. He could hear the Germans arguing, while the Soviet colonel remained very quiet. The Germans moved nearer and bent over him, the better to hear him. That was when the wounded Soviet released the pin in a grenade he was holding under his back. Gagarin could still remember the wild leap of flame that killed the group, the noise of the explosion and the calls of the frightened birds.

  Yuri knew of neighbours who had been shot. People were rounded up and locked in sheds that were then set alight. When the Gagarin family had been turned out of their house, now occupied by Nazi soldiers, they had dug a hole in the ground and made themselves a hovel in which to live. To help the war effort, Yuri, with his younger brother, Boris, had littered the roads with broken glass and watched the tyres burst on the German lorries. They had been noticed by a great bear of a German soldier called Albert who lived in their house. He grabbed the six-year-old Boris and hung him from a nearby tree by his scarf. Gagarin’s mother rushed to the scene and it looked as though there would be a double tragedy when Albert reached for his gun. Thankfully, he was called away by his superior officer and Gagarin quickly undid Albert’s work and the terrified child recovered. Far from being cowed by these experiences, however, Yuri had found ways to make his own small contribution towards Soviet revenge. Albert’s job was to top up the flat batteries of the German lorries and tanks; every night in the secrecy of darkness Yuri had found a way to render them useless. Although he had no knowledge of chemistry, he found he had a genius for rearranging the liquids in the various cells of the batteries and sometimes he would add a little dirt just for good measure.

  After the war, the young Gagarin had been intent on starting to earn a living. When he explained that he had worked his way up from training as a smelter in a vocational school, Korolev immediately responded, pointing out that he too was a graduate of a vocational school. Gagarin had then won a place at the Pilots School at Orenburg on the Ural River, graduating in 1957 – shortly after the launch of Sputnik – only to find himself assigned a place at the Nikel Air Base near Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. It was here that he had first come across the mysterious recruiting teams.

  Korolev was evidently impressed with Gagarin. He talked to each cosmonaut in turn and seemed pleased with the team. Once introductions were complete, he took them to see their spacecraft: Vostok, meaning ‘east’. They were led through OKB-1 to a large room of hospital-like cleanliness, where white-coated technicians were busy working on the craft. He introduced the cosmonauts to Oleg Ivanovsky, the chief constructor, and Konstantin Feoktistov, the project leader. A fleet of Vostoks in various stages of construction were aligned on both sides of the room.

  The one nearest to completion was a sphere of silver sitting astride a cone-shaped base. This was a surprise for the cosmonauts. Where were the wings, they wondered. They examined the various silver balls with circumspection. The work looked impressive but where were the controls for the pilot? Was it a practical joke, part of the bizarre training? No, the Chief Designer said, the Vostok would be guided. The silver foil covering the sphere would protect them from radiation. Inside the sphere was a reclining chair for the pilot who would have a perfect view of the ceiling inches from his head. Near him was a Vzor, an instrument used when orienting the craft for re-entry. It was made up of distorting mirrors and lenses which gave a view of the earth’s horizon, enabling the correct position for re-entry to be ascertained. It was difficult to comprehend: no wings, no control of power. Was this precarious silver ball really meant to carry men racing through the heavens?

  Gagarin was willing to believe so. When Korolev asked who would like to sit in the ship, Gagarin was the first to step forward: ‘Allow me,’ he said. Korolev noted his natural sense of respect as he removed his shoes before climbing into the pristine silver sphere. The little circular cell was thickly threaded with an electrical spaghetti of wires. These were the unseen nerves that would work the gyroscope and the instruments. There were some controls and switches and he guessed the reclining chair was also an ejection seat. To Gagarin it seemed a marvel of ingenuity.

  Korolev was heartened by his meeting with the cosmonauts a
nd followed their progress closely. Both Titov and Gagarin were doing well and receiving excellent reports from the new training centre being built about twenty miles from Moscow, not far from OKB-1 – which eventually became known as ‘Star City’. In Vostok simulators, the cosmonauts took it in turns to familiarize themselves with the craft: the roar of the engines on launch that were fed through loudspeakers; the correct pre-flight positions of the instrumentation; the orientation of the craft in relation to the globe. The training was intensive because the Soviets still hoped to be ready for a manned space mission by the end of the year. It was evident from the Western press that the Americans could not be ready for manned Mercury flights before January 1960. Korolev was determined to beat them.

  There were still countless technical difficulties to overcome, notably the design of the retro rockets, which were to decelerate the spacecraft below orbital velocity and guide it on a trajectory to fall back through the atmosphere to earth. The safe return of the cosmonaut would depend on the exact firing of these rockets; any miscalculation and he might be condemned to a metal coffin as he hurtled out into space, or a fiery grave as he re-entered the atmosphere too steeply and burned up. Alexei Isayev, who was assigned the task of creating the rockets, was worried. ‘You and Korolev are twisting my arm,’ he confided in Chertok, who had now been promoted to become one of several deputy chief designers. ‘The schedule is too tight and you want to put one more noose around my neck … What if someone does not come back to earth because of me? The only thing I could do is shoot myself!’

  Chertok persuaded Isayev at least to discuss the matter with Korolev one more time. Isayev was determined to step down from the responsibility. ‘You wait and see,’ he said. ‘It will take me two minutes to ditch that job.’ When he emerged from his conversation with Korolev, somewhat shaken, almost an hour later, he was still in charge of the retro rockets. He lit a cigarette. ‘At least I did a deal with Korolev that you [Chertok] will handle the electronics!’