Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  But Korolev’s motivation could not be completely hidden from those who worked with him. His biographer Mikhail Rebrov reports that on a bleak day at Baikonur he suddenly turned on one beleaguered colleague, the Chief Designer Nikolai Pilyugin, and exclaimed: ‘Forget the telemetry – do you want to fly to the moon?’ Nikolai Pilyugin brought him swiftly back to earth. ‘I want to fly to Moscow,’ he retorted. When Korolev persisted, Pilyugin put him down: ‘You are a dreamer, Sergei. When the time comes we aren’t even going to be around.’ Korolev would not hear of that. ‘I don’t know about you, but I want to live to see it.’ Pilyugin just shrugged; it was ‘on the edge of the impossible,’ he said. When Korolev explained that he had been dreaming of this since his childhood, Pilyugin merely retorted that he had only ‘dreamed about a big slice of rye bread’. Korolev finally conceded, ‘so did I’, and they both laughed. But it was nonetheless true that the grinding workload that Korolev carried for years, wantonly spending his energy at an evermore extravagant rate, was all for this ever-beckoning mirage.

  Unlike von Braun, who now had the resources of the wealthiest nation on earth behind him, Korolev was still thwarted while military needs took precedence over space exploration. He had begun development work on different designs for a new and more powerful spaceship, the Soyuz – or Union – as early as 1957. One of the key aims of the Soyuz, Kamanin wrote, was to allow for docking, or ‘union’, in space – which Korolev saw as a crucial stage in space exploration. If docking could be achieved, individual spacecraft, launched separately, could be docked together to build interplanetary spacecraft and an orbital space station. This would serve as a staging post for crews and pave the way for long-distance flights. Soyuz was also designed to accommodate a three-man crew, which was seen as the ideal number for a lunar landing mission. To achieve all this, the Soyuz would have much more manoeuvrability than the Vostok; it could change orbit and adjust attitude with great precision. It comprised three main compartments: the service module with equipment at the rear, the main re-entry vehicle in the middle compartment and docking facilities at the front of the craft.

  In addition, Korolev had also embarked on an ambitious design for a much larger rocket: the N-1. This was to be a giant; his initial designs allowed for a rocket that could be 295 feet high and carry a payload of 40 tons. Never losing sight of the fact that he was meant to be producing rockets for defence purposes, but, as always, with a secret plan for a space vehicle in his back pocket, he deliberately left a certain ambiguity about the final payload. It was presented to his military masters as a ‘universal launch vehicle’ and he took every opportunity for stressing the N-1’s capability for use in creating a space station for military reconnaissance.

  Korolev saw the N-1 as his masterpiece and the revolutionary design embodied unique features. He was preoccupied with obtaining more power yet determined to have a simpler design than the R-7 with its clusters of engines and strap-on boosters. The N-1 would have three stages, with a simpler engine layout and radical new spherical propellant tanks that would be considerably lighter than the conventional ones.

  Yet although Korolev’s name had been touched with magic since Gagarin’s launch, and Khrushchev revelled in Soviet victories in space, he was not prepared to devote serious funds to a moon race. There was no firm commitment for an ambitious programme; for Khrushchev space was principally a vehicle for showmanship. To help foster the illusion that they had conjured up an entire space programme, Soviet intelligence services grandly renamed the bleak launch site out at Tyura Tam: it became the ‘Baikonur Cosmodrome’ – after the town of Baikonur, 220 miles to the north. The aim was to promote the impression that they had a vast cosmodrome at their disposal and this name was used in all public announcements. In reality, the army remained uninterested in a large space programme. The life of the N-1 was, for now, confined to the drawing board, and, with it, Korolev’s hopes of space competition with America.

  Korolev himself was planning another manned launch for August. Gherman Titov would be in orbit more than twenty-four hours, making seventeen trips around the world. This would put Shepard’s suborbital flight of fifteen minutes into perspective. But when Khrushchev learned of the Titov flight, he had plans of his own. He let Korolev understand that Titov must be on his way before 13 August. Korolev had no idea why this date was so important but Titov was successfully launched a week earlier.

  It wasn’t a comfortable flight. Once in orbit, Titov felt miserably sick, as though he were flying upside down. He couldn’t eat, drink or work his instrument panel. Doctors on the ground were concerned. They could see from his sensors that he was in severe discomfort, with vertigo and nausea. On the twelfth orbit he recovered and took a film of the earth. But his heating system broke down, he nearly froze and the re-entry rockets behaved as they had done for Gagarin. He found himself spinning uncontrollably until the heat of re-entry burned through the connection joining him to the instrument section. Once again, his sheer luck continued. At 150 feet from the ground, dangling from his parachute, he could see that he was about to smash into a passing train. He braced himself, fearing the worst, but a gust of wind providentially moved him backwards to the safety of a ploughed field.

  The Americans were left wondering at the Soviet Union’s brilliance. On 13 August, Khrushchev began building the Berlin Wall – and Korolev now understood the significance of the August date. Residents of Berlin woke up to find Soviet soldiers erecting a massive barbed-wire barricade across the city. Khrushchev had gambled on Korolev’s success at a time when he wanted to emphasize Soviet superiority. West Berlin had been a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain that stretched across Europe. More than a thousand East Germans had fled into West Berlin the previous month alone; more than two and half million had left since 1949. Khrushchev had become obsessed with stemming the tide of refugees and blocking the link with the West. While the wall was regarded in the West as a powerful symbol of Soviet repression, Khrushchev was delighted. His rotund figure was seen around the world – the all-singing, all-dancing Soviet leader juggling space technology in one hand and Soviet policy in the other. He made sure Pravda reported accordingly.

  And a few months later, in October 1961, under Khrushchev’s leadership, the Soviet Union exploded the largest nuclear weapon the world had ever seen. Nicknamed the ‘Tzar Bomba’, or ‘King of Bombs’, it was estimated at in excess of 50 million tons of TNT – this one explosion, in fact, surpassed the total amount of explosives utilized in the six years of the Second World War. In a letter to Americans published in Life magazine, President Kennedy encouraged Americans to build fall-out shelters. In the Soviet Union, the urgency of military needs continued to dominate the missile programme. In spite of Korolev’s repeated achievements, Khrushchev made it clear that he was not the only designer of large rockets. Mikhail Yangel and Vladimir Chelomei continued to carry considerable weight in the field of ICBM design.

  Khrushchev still favoured Chelomei, the astute designer who had employed his son, Sergei. Korolev never bothered with social climbing; he felt his work should speak for itself. But Chelomei knew only too well that a certain amount of social clambering could be a beneficial exercise. He seized any opportunity to wine and dine Khrushchev and son in style – on the occasion of Sergei Khrushchev’s graduation, for example, where everyone was well and truly drunk. Money and prestige came rolling in. The exquisitely attired Chelomei, looking a little like a high-class art dealer, sporting his avant-garde ties, would sit in his elegant office behind the desk it took him two months to design and intellectualize at length on matters scientific. A man of culture with an equally cultured circle of friends, he was a brilliant conversationalist. And Khrushchev, with his bucolic roots, sometimes looking as though he were pushing an invisible pig to market, was charmed. Chelomei’s design studio with its emphasis on military hardware grew more and more successful with plans underway for new ICBMs, two space launch vehicles – the UR-200 and the UR-500 – not to mention a space plane, and
even a craft for flying to other planets. All the while, he was attracting funds that should have gone to Korolev.

  Korolev was incensed. With available funds split between different groups, work was held up on his N-1 rocket in spite of his willingness to experiment with variations in order to attract the military. He anguished over its halting progress like a mother over a sick child. To achieve the kind of thrust that was needed for the N-1, he was looking for an engine design that would give over 150 tons of thrust, with more than twenty engines clustered together in the first stage alone. But the relationship between Korolev and Glushko had ‘gone sour’, reported Chertok, and this was having a detrimental effect on the N-1’s development. Korolev needed this pre-eminent engine designer on his team and, deciding to eat humble pie, went to visit Glushko.

  The meeting started fairly well and both men made an effort, but the poisonous infection from past wounds soon festered into accusations and harsh words. Korolev had hoped to persuade Glushko to design new engines using the cryogenic fluids he favoured, but Glushko would have none of it. He accused Korolev of endangering progress with his inability to move forward, pointing out mistakes in the past which he claimed had held up progress. Korolev shouted him down with the Nedelin disaster and the part unreliable propellants had played in it. Both men were shaking. The shouting could be heard 200 yards away.

  Hissing with indignation, the incensed Glushko officially demanded that Korolev redesign the N-1 for use with storable fuels. The matter now reached official ears. The Ministry would investigate and evaluate the two fuel systems. At a meeting in early February 1962 at the Kremlin, once again the irreconcilable faced the unmoveable as the two men shouted each other down. Korolev accused Glushko of turning rockets into ‘powder kegs’. Glushko accused Korolev of being ‘Mr Clean’, the man who wanted to travel in space without getting his hands dirty, and suggested he design ‘steam engines’. Both men were now on fire with anger. Glushko insinuated that Korolev was behind the times: the military were using storable fuels. Senior officials looked on in disbelief at the hostile display as the two men, oblivious of where they were, continued their verbal battle which ended with an outburst from Korolev: ‘If you don’t want to design the engines, then don’t do it. We’ll manage without you.’

  His continuing estrangement with Soviet Union’s top engine designer was not helping Korolev. It was therefore with considerable optimism that he set out for the holiday destination of Pitsunda on the Black Sea later in February 1962 where Khrushchev had called a meeting of the defence command in his dacha to discuss future plans. Yangel, Chelomei and Korolev would present their work; Glushko would also be there. Chelomei began the session explaining his latest ICBM designs, one of which, the UR-500, with military and space capabilities, echoed Korolev’s N-1. His performance was impressive, compelling attention, and Khrushchev beamed as Chelomei won approval to develop the UR-500.

  In marked contrast to Chelomei’s sophistication, Korolev’s presentation was awkward and when he announced that Glushko would not be designing the engines but that the relatively untried Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov would have this responsibility, Khrushchev nearly fell out of his chair. Kuznetsov, who ran the design bureau OKB-276 at Kuybyshev, was acclaimed in the field of aircraft engine design but could not match Glushko’s reputation as the foremost rocket engine designer of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev asked why Glushko was not involved. Korolev replied that Glushko had refused. Glushko immediately locked horns with Korolev. The eminent gathering looked on in disbelief as the two protagonists, angry and inflamed, shoulders hunched, heads down, once more yelled accusations at each other, now sharpened by a growing hatred.

  All this was too much for Khrushchev. Korolev was calmly asking for endorsement of a massive new rocket powered by the unproven Kuznetsov. Khrushchev asked Ustinov to assess the situation and plans for the N-1 were put on hold while costs for the N-1 were re-evaluated with engines by Glushko using his preferred fuels rather than engines designed by Kuznetsov. Meanwhile, Chelomei’s UR-500, which used storable fuels and Glushko’s engines, combined with all his other projects, in effect gave Chelomei the lead role in space. Yangel, too, received approval for parallel space projects, while Korolev’s N-1, with all the dreams it carried, was still little more than designs on a drawing board.

  The rift between Glushko and Korolev now deepened into an unbridgeable chasm; they would never work together again.

  While Korolev’s time was divided between myriad different projects, at the Marshall Space Flight Center in America von Braun was fully focused on how to get to the moon. To launch a craft and travel the 240,000 miles would require carrying a significant weight of fuel. A rocket with over 10 million pounds of thrust would be needed. The Saturn I did not have the power for a lunar landing, even with its 1.3 million pounds of thrust. In January 1962, NASA gave approval for von Braun’s team to develop an even larger rocket, which became known as the Saturn V, a giant, the first stage of which alone would generate 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Longer than a football pitch, weighing more than a light cruiser, with a diameter greater than the combined width of three large removal vans, and with its five clustered F-1 engines, it was claimed it could develop more power than a string of Volkswagens placed from New York to Seattle. And if that would not do the job, von Braun visualized a rocket even bigger than Saturn V, with eight clustered engines, which he called the Nova. That, he reasoned, would get Americans to the moon. The big uncertainty was, would it get them there first?

  Everything would depend on the development of new engines. The first-stage engines, called the F-1, were to be twice the size of any previous rocket engine. To produce the required amount of thrust they had to be capable of burning 40,000 gallons of fuel a minute. The programme manager for the Saturn was von Braun’s long-standing colleague, Arthur Rudolph. They had worked together since developing V-2s in Germany over thirty years before. In developing the Saturn engines, they now faced the ultimate challenge. The larger the engine the greater the chance of creating combustion instability that could destroy the rocket. The slightest disturbance, such as a small pocket of unmixed fuel, would create pressure waves that could lead to a damaging explosion and wreck everything. In seeking to scale up to create the largest rocket engine ever made, von Braun could not guarantee that it was even technically feasible.

  Equally challenging was the work in progress to use liquid hydrogen as a fuel for the upper stages of the Saturn V. It had the advantage of being feather light, but it was mind-bogglingly cold and could shatter metal as it touched it because of the thermal shock. It could find the deepest, most hidden flaws in the welds of metal structures and snap them apart. North American Aviation, builders of the Saturn’s crucial upper stage, had taken on the gigantic technical challenge of designing sophisticated tanks capable of using liquid hydrogen. But for von Braun the thought of the Soviets on the moon was a big incentive to make it work. The idea of passports surrendered to Soviet customs, of concrete spread over its pristine surface as ugly, utilitarian buildings sprang up, made him vow that that prize must never fall to the Russians.

  Even assuming he could create a rocket with enough thrust, it was still uncertain how to approach a journey to the moon – the kind of craft that would be needed for each stage of the journey. Von Braun had always visualized creating a space station in earth’s orbit, which would serve as a staging post to the moon. ‘From this platform, a trip to the moon itself will be just a step,’ he had enthused in Collier’s as early as 1952. The space ship, with accommodation ‘comparable to that on a modern submarine’, could also serve as a launching vehicle for further exploration of the solar system. ‘Space taxis’ would carry sections of the lunar module up from earth by rocket for assembly into a lunar craft. And all this was just a first step in a grand vision of colonizing space.

  Von Braun’s fantastic science fiction vision had become modified and simplified over the years. He no longer imagined that an entire space station n
eeded to be built in near-earth orbit – but the principle remained the same: components for the lunar vehicle would be flown into space separately and assembled in earth orbit. This approach became known as ‘earth orbit rendezvous’, or EOR. The main advantage was that components for a lunar craft were taken into space in sections and therefore a smaller launch vehicle was required. But there were also pitfalls. A rendezvous in space had quite simply never happened before. The Mercury capsule could do nothing so complex, so a new capsule with the power and the ability to manoeuvre would be necessary.

  Von Braun and other supporters of EOR found themselves facing opposition from John Houbolt, a relatively unknown engineer from Langley Research Center. As early as 1960, he came up with a radical new idea: ‘lunar orbit rendezvous’, or LOR. Houbolt’s bold concept envisaged that a booster rocket would launch two craft combined in one vehicle on a trajectory to lunar orbit. One would serve as the command module, orbiting the moon, while the second would fly directly to the moon, landing on the lunar surface. On return from the moon’s surface, the second craft would dock with the command module in lunar orbit. This approach, Houbolt argued, would simplify development and greatly reduce the weight and complexity of the lunar craft.