After Khrushchev’s visit, Korolev welcomed the relief of long days working on his Voskhod project. September passed, while Korolev’s engineers were battling against multitudinous defects. Bolts were out of alignment. The shape of the vehicle had altered imperceptibly during transport. One of the telemetry instruments was not working and would have to be replaced. The third-stage engine was showing minor problems. The date was reset for 11 October. When further problems beset the telemetry system, Korolev was beside himself with fury.
At last, on 12 October 1964, all systems were ready. The hopeful cosmonauts had had a mere four months’ training. The crew commander, pilot Vladimir Komarov, Boris Yegorov, a medical doctor, and Konstantin Feoktistov, the designer, strolled casually to the craft informally dressed in woollen tracksuits and shoes. They inched their way into the oddly placed seats, where the feeling was always that somebody’s elbow was in your face. Despite appearances, on the launch pad tempers were stretched to breaking point. If there should be a miscalculation of any kind, those on the ground would be condemned to watch while the three cosmonauts were consumed in the flames with no possibility of escape. Korolev’s nerves were failing him. People could see him visibly shaking.
It was a perfect launch and the flight went to plan. During weightlessness, unpleasant symptoms were experienced by Feoktistov and Yegorov but they recovered well. Their orbit of the earth, reaching an altitude of over 250 miles, afforded the cosmonauts a most stupendous view and they wanted to prolong the flight beyond the schedule of sixteen orbits. Komarov pleaded with Korolev only to be reminded that this was not in the agreement. Komarov persisted that they had seen so many interesting things, they must continue. Korolev was firm: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ He insisted they began the descent.
There were still enough hazards to preoccupy Korolev. For this trip an extra retro rocket had been installed in case the main ones proved unreliable. He was also worried about the landing on hard ground, although several small rockets were used to slow the descent and minimize a bone-shattering impact. But to Korolev’s utter relief, very soon the three men were sighted, waving at the rescue helicopter. Looking pale and drained by worry at the risks taken, Korolev could hardly believe that it was all over and that it had proved a success. ‘I would never have thought it possible that the Voskhod could be made out of the Vostok and that three cosmonauts would fly into space,’ Kamanin heard him say.
At Baikonur the party mood at the celebratory meal was exuberant. The toasts to the heroes were extravagant; the vodka flowed. Yet ironically, the rotund figure of Khrushchev was not there, nor would he ever be again. There had been a quick, cold revolution in the depths of the Kremlin. Toasts were now drunk to Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev himself was under house arrest.
Once again, America was put in its place by the Soviet Union, which seemed to be operating an advanced space programme. It was assumed that the Soviets had a multiseat space vehicle similar to Apollo. NASA’s two-man Gemini programme had not yet been launched and Apollo was still at the design phase – while the Soviets were evidently roaring ahead. The headlines in America deferred to Soviet capability in space and some reports even warned that the first Soviet manned lunar mission could be as early as 1966.
Meanwhile, the great industrial beast that the space programme had become in America just kept going at snail’s pace, testing engines, designing capsules, slowly working its way through the complexity of the quest. In public, NASA leaders always insisted they would beat Kennedy’s deadline – with men on the moon before the end of the decade. Maybe they wouldn’t be first, but they were confident they would get there.
Hundreds of different companies were now involved in the vast enterprise to produce the complete Apollo spacecraft. Sitting atop the three enormous booster sections of von Braun’s Saturn V rocket would be three further sections: the Apollo command module, a cone-shaped spacecraft, about 13 x 11 feet, with the controls and room for the astronauts to relax. Behind this, the service module would supply power and oxygen. Then came the lunar module, the craft used to descend to the moon. While the lunar module was on its journey to the moon with two astronauts, the command and service modules would stay in lunar orbit with the third astronaut. On leaving the moon, a powered section of the lunar module would return the astronauts to the command module where they would dock. Under its own rocket power contained in the service module, only the command module would return to earth with its crew.
Engineers were working their way through completely new problems. How could they measure fuel in a tank in zero gravity? Would the heat shield be affected by the extreme cold of the lunar orbit? How to deal with computer overload? And the mighty Saturn engines had still to be tamed. It was clear the injector plate would have to be redesigned. In order to obtain the elusive stability, at least fifty modifications were tried before it was realized that designs were being repeated. The great American industrial space machine was lumbering confidently forward when suddenly the Soviets did it again. The latest Soviet star turn was to achieve the world’s first space walk. Their success began to make it look as though the Americans might as well give up.
The first space walk, however, was not the result of advanced technology. It was another of Korolev’s illusions, part of the Vostok package instigated by Khrushchev when he had been in power. The Voskhod 2 was another quick lash-up made from the remnants of the Vostoks modified to carry two cosmonauts, one of whom would leave the capsule and ‘walk’ in space. Leaving the capsule was achieved by adding a pressurized inflatable cylinder made of a rubber-based substance. Airlocks allowed the cosmonauts to leave and re-enter. A specially designed pressurized space suit would be worn for the event. Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut selected to carry out the space walk, trained for every possible emergency. There was particular concern that he might lose consciousness in space – and rehearsals were even carried out for a dramatic space rescue by his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev.
The flight was planned for March 1965. Before this happened, an unmanned flight was made to test the pressurization chamber and the space suit. The flight started well. The craft began its programme of automatically working airlocks, controlling pressure and depressurizing, but then it suddenly exploded. There had been a concern that the airlock would not function and now there was no way of retrieving the flight data to be sure. Korolev was worried. It was known that the Americans were finalizing plans for their first manned Gemini, to be followed soon afterwards by their first space walk, and the need to be ahead was paramount. Korolev went to see Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, and, according to Leonov, ‘presented us with a stark choice’. There was no possibility of further testing, Korolev explained, because there were no more suitable vehicles apart from the one allocated to their mission. They could do further testing and delay the mission for a year – or take the risk. He stressed that there were grave risks, but that the decision was in their hands. Leonov and Belyayev did not hesitate. They assured Korolev they were ‘ready to fly’.
Korolev, however, felt the strain of the decision. He confided in Nina:
We are trying to accomplish all our work without hurry. Our chief motto is ‘the safety of the crew comes first’. God grant us the strength and wisdom to always live up to this motto … I personally always believe and hope for the best outcome even though all my efforts, my mind and my experiences are directed towards trying to foresee and outguess the worst that can happen – an ominous presence that stalks us every step into the unknown.
The pressure of the uncertainties of the mission, the need to beat the Americans and the sheer workload of it all conspired to bring Korolev down with pneumonia. The eighteenth of March, the day for the flight, arrived and no one could keep him away. Looking old and spent, he turned up in bitter, snowy weather still worried about the ring in the airlock and whether it would make the capsule spin. He regained something of his optimistic vit
ality on seeing the two cosmonauts, Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev, and wished them a ‘fair solar wind’.
Although Korolev suffered his usual apprehension at the launch, it went well and, once in orbit, Leonov began his preparations in the cramped capsule, strapping a support system on his back and pressurizing the small exit chamber. He crawled into the pressure chamber, attached himself to an 18-foot rope, depressurized and put his head out, the first man to view what exactly all that emptiness was made of.
As the hatch opened he caught his breath. Far, far below, the world turned slowly. Holding on to the spacecraft, in dazzling sunlight, he eased himself out completely. The shock of seeing the earth spread out below ‘like a gigantic colourful map’, was, he said, ‘an extraordinary sensation. I had never felt anything quite like it before. I was free above the planet Earth and I saw it – saw it was rotating majestically below me. Suddenly in the silence, I heard the words: “Attention, attention! Man has entered open space.”’
Slowly he removed his hands. He was on his own, held like a feather in still air, yet travelling at 17,400 mph. The Pacific Ocean glittered far beneath his feet. The vast panorama was shifting quickly as they moved. ‘I’m feeling perfect,’ he told base as live TV images of him were relayed back to an astonished world. ‘Lenin once said the universe is endless in time and space,’ he later recalled. ‘It is the best description I had of those moments … Nothing will ever compare to the exhilaration I felt.’
All too quickly his ten minutes were over and he became aware of Belyayev urging him to return. That was when a series of ‘dire emergencies’ began to unfold. When he reached the airlock, he couldn’t find his feet or his hands. With a sense of shock he found he had no control. His space suit had unaccountably stretched. The fabric of his neatly covered hands and feet had ballooned. He was suspended in space, with his hands now useless and his feet no longer in the designed footwear. He was meant to ease himself back into the cramped airlock feet first so that he could close the hatch behind him. This was no longer possible but if he delayed any longer the flight would be in jeopardy and his life-support system would fail. There was no alternative. He would have to enter head first. He entered the shaft to find he could not move. His suit continued on its course of expansion.
Leonov was in serious trouble, stuck in the narrow shaft in his overblown, cumbersome suit. He spent twelve minutes struggling with it, trying to get the pressure lower by releasing a valve. He could feel his temperature rising as he struggled in the thin channel. By his feet, the hatch was still open. He would have to perform a somersault so his hands were near the hatch. In the tight, claustrophobic cylinder, surrounded by vast, black space, he slowly turned in the shaft with his unwelcome acres of space suit hindering him. He was exhausted when he finally closed the hatch and Belyayev could start to pressurize the cylinder. His pulse was racing. He could hear the blood thundering in his ears; but he was safe.
His safety, however, and that of Belyayev, was relative. The exit hatch for the space walk had not shut tight. This led to a drop in air pressure which the automatic system rectified by pumping oxygen until it was at levels of 45 per cent. In such an oxygen-rich environment, the tiniest spark could cause an inferno within seconds as it had done for the young cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko. To add to the feeling that the flight was doomed, the automatic guidance system for re-entry had failed. They were in a flying chamber with faulty guidance and a door that did not shut in an atmosphere of almost pure oxygen. On the ground there was panic.
Korolev took charge. He still looked very ill but his mind was fixed on the problem. Belyayev would have to fire the retro rockets manually. In the control room, frantic calculations were made to work out the orientation for a successful re-entry. If the cosmonauts failed to get the orientation right, their fate was better not thought about.
The sums were transmitted. They had to orient the craft but it proved almost impossible. In order to get to the orientation porthole, Belyayev had to lie across both seats. Leonov got out of the way, under the seat, holding on to Belyayev to keep him steady. The task completed, they scrambled back to their seats before firing the engine. This took them forty-six seconds. They fired. With a terrible jolt the pace slowed and re-entry began. But as had happened so often before, the capsule did not separate from the instrument module. They were tied together like a pair of old boots floundering through space. The gravitational loads on the men reached 10 g’s. The forty-six-second gap between fixing the orientation and firing the engines made a significant difference to their landing position. For four hours there was no communication. Korolev had no idea that they were, in fact, safe but very cold, having landed in an area of thick forest in deepest Siberia, where they spent two freezing nights, the craft suspended between two trees above great drifts of snow.
The celebrations were sweet after the struggle of recent weeks. The Americans had still not begun the Gemini programme and were increasingly embroiled in a messy conflict in Vietnam. Johnson had ordered Operation Rolling Thunder – bombing raids of North Vietnam. In March, the first American ground troops landed to protect the US air base at Da Nang. Criticism was rising of the US air force’s use of Agent Orange, a herbicide containing dioxin that stripped vast tracts of dense vegetation bare to expose the Vietcong bases. As American imperialism came under fire at home and abroad, Korolev’s repeated iconic missions in space appeared to symbolize much that was good about the Soviet system. His triumphs could hardly be ignored by those at the top.
Korolev now began to benefit indirectly from Khrushchev’s fall as the Brezhnev–Kosygin duo was determined to reverse Khrushchev’s policies. Chelomei, as number one favourite, soon found the chill winds of reality blowing through his life. Everything in his growing empire was questioned, from his UR-500 to the size and thickness of the carpets in his house. His design bureau was diminished. His UR-200 was cancelled. The glitter and glory of his recent favouritism was swept out with the rubbish – almost. His powerful Proton rocket would still be used to launch a simplified Soyuz craft, known as the L-1, around the moon. The aim was to do this as early as 1967.
Meanwhile, Korolev, who had never lost sight of his original inspiration, sent endless begging letters to those at the top, and was at last rewarded. With Chelomei’s loss of support, more funds would at last come Korolev’s way for the N-1/L-3. The target was set for a manned landing as early as 1968. Korolev suddenly found himself in control of the first 500 million roubles, with the promise of more to come, and work could begin on the launch complex.
Like the Americans, Korolev favoured a lunar orbit rendezvous, but the N-1 would need gearing up to take a greater payload. Six more engines were to be added to the first-stage booster, giving thirty engines in total – twenty-four on the inner perimeter and six new engines centrally placed in a circle. The rocket would now have a lifting capability of over 95 tons, and a new guidance system would be housed in the third-stage equipment bay. Korolev also won approval for a complete schedule of work on the Soyuz from the Military-Industrial Commission. ‘Don’t give the moon to the Americans,’ came the directive. ‘We’ll find all the resources we need.’
At long last Korolev was able to compete directly with the Americans to reach the moon. The infighting between different bureaus and government indecision had caused delays and cost the Soviets a high price in time and resources – which were still split between two parallel programmes. But Korolev was full of hope for the future. ‘Friends,’ he announced to his colleagues, ‘before us is the moon. Let us all work together with the great goal of conquering the moon.’ The year was 1965. He intended to be on the moon by 1968.
Von Braun, meanwhile, had become a target for popular criticism. At a time when there was continued opposition to the mounting cost of the Apollo programme, a popular satirical song from the period by Tom Lehrer summed up the ambivalence that was felt towards von Braun. Why should some ‘Nazi Schmazi’ spend ‘twenty billion dollars of your money’ to put �
�some clown on the moon?’
* * *
Wernher von Braun
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown.
‘Ha, Nazi Schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Space Race Page 33
