by Von Hardesty
As the United States entered the space race in earnest, engineers at companies such as Rocketdyne and Aerojet-Genera did produce “miracle technology” the brilliant development of superior engines greatly exceeded von Braun’s conservative estimates. The two-seater Gemini capsule was launched by a Titan II rocket with only two Aerojet LR87 engines at its base. Rocketdyne’s ultimate masterwork, the F-1 engine, developed an astonishing 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Even the towering Saturn V moon rocket needed only five such super-engines, not 51. With no need for numerous engines, U.S. rockets could take the simpler form of a cylinder rather than a tapered shape. The straight tube therefore became the basic hull element for most American rockets and gave them their characteristic columnar silhouette, which expresses the advantage of high-power engines—and the advantage of a more powerful economy.
The Soviet Union did not have the luxury of the American super-engines in its advancing rocket development, and therefore generally had to use greater numbers of engines in its rockets to generate the necessary thrust. The R-7 that launched Sputnik bore five engines at its base, and its four strap-on boosters all swelled outward at the base to accommodate them. To provide sufficient thrust for the N-1 moon rocket, the vehicle’s first stage required no fewer than 30 NK-15 engines. This mass of 30 engines swelled the diameter of the N-1’s base, giving the Soviet rocket the bell-like shape that von Braun had imagined for his book back in 1952. Coordinating the operation of all these engines proved to be an engineering challenge of its own—in four launches, the N-1 never made a successful test flight.
Piloted versus controlled. American and Soviet spacecraft-control procedures also directly reflected basic differences in the two national cultures. American pilots were groomed as extreme incarnations of the American ideal of individualism, and the early astronauts earned reputations as free-spirited and independent. The Mercury 7 astronauts greatly resented the idea that they would lie in their space capsules as passive occupants little more significant than the chimpanzees NASA launched before them. U.S. spacecraft reflected the philosophy of individualism, in that they were under the control of the pilots.
Soviet cosmonauts were likewise held up by the state as icons of the national character ideal. Soviet spacecraft were controlled like Soviet society, by the party, with the pilot normally taking control only in the event of an unanticipated emergency. Yuri Gagarin launched into space on his pioneering flight with the control systems of his Vostok spacecraft locked to prevent him from taking manual control.
Splashdown versus landing. A spacecraft plunged into water tends to enjoy the benefit of a much softer landing than one that must hit the ground. Water landings consequently appeal to engineers and space travelers alike, but most of the world’s seas are legally “international waters.” Early spacecraft could not make pinpoint returns, so a nation had therefore to mobilize a considerable naval force to ensure that its returning spacecraft—especially during the Cold War—was not plucked out of the water by someone else. In view of the high expense required by ocean recovery, land-recovery methods such as a paraglider parachute and ski-landing gear for the Gemini capsule were studied seriously. In the end, however, the United States accepted the ocean-recovery cost and picked up its astronauts at sea throughout the moon race.
The Soviet Union opted for land recovery of its cosmonauts to keep them within Soviet territory. Since their capsules were not designed to protect them from the landing impact, early cosmonauts had to eject at the proper altitude and return to Earth by personal parachute. The international flight records maintained by the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) required pilots to stay with their craft through the entire flight in order for achievements to be registered as official. The space race ran on the prestige of firsts and records, and the Soviet solution to their problematical “parachute gap” was simply to fudge the reports and hide the truth. The official news agency reported for years that Gagarin and his successors had all returned to Earth inside their spacecraft.
Most of the differences between Soviet and American space hardware and operations represent alternative approaches with similar results. However, their different approaches have sometimes led to significantly different results. American super-engines helped put astronauts on the moon, but the high costs of that approach brought a quick and total end to the Apollo-Saturn programs. The Soviets tried to reach the moon without funding the development of super-engines for the N-1, and failed. But their economical solutions had their virtues: America discarded the Apollo spacecraft system as too expensive, later discontinued the costly shuttle orbiter that followed it, and is now undertaking the costly reengineering of a moon rocket and a crew spacecraft. Through all this, rather like a Volkswagen across the decades, the basic Soyuz spacecraft has remained in production.
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Alan Shepard lifts off from Cape Canaveral on the first U.S. manned spaceflight, May 1961.
5
PORTALS TO THE COSMOS
“In the evenings, all of us poured out on to the street, away from the light sources, and awaited the appearance of the quickly moving, pale asterisk that we had thrown into the sky,” reported Svyatislav Lavrov, an engineer who collaborated with Sergei Korolev in developing the Soviet Union’s first generation of missiles. In the 1950s, Lavrov belonged to a small elite of Russians with an insider’s knowledge of the Soviet space program, and he expressed his profound sense of pride in the Sputnik triumph. For Lavrov—and a vast global audience in October 1957—the “pale asterisk” in the nighttime sky indeed heralded the new space age.1
Sputnik was visible to a global audience, a sudden and awe-inspiring technological feat. Yet the earthly origins of the satellite remained shrouded in mystery, even to most Russians. As late as the Gagarin mission in April 1961, Moscow did little to dispel the mystery, making only vague references to an unnamed “cosmodrome” as the launch site for its space spectaculars. Gagarin kept the launch site secret from his family, and his mother only learned of his epic flight by listening to the radio.2 In time, however, the world learned that the Soviets were launching their robotic and manned space missions from a remote spot in Kazakhstan later to be called Baikonur. It was here that Sputnik had been “thrown into the sky,” to use Lavrov’s words.
The building of Baikonur—as with NASA’s parallel facility at Cape Canaveral—gave architectural expression to the new space age as it emerged in the late 1950s. Both sites embodied in scope and purpose a conception more ambitious than a conventional missile test range. Both Baikonur and Cape Canaveral, then and now, are best understood as “spaceports,” facilities for the conquest of space. As dueling focuses for space exploration, they were very costly and required a vast work force. Each complex occupied a huge terrestrial footprint with numerous launch pads, oversized rocket-assembly buildings, flight-control centers, fuel plants and depots, training facilities, and housing compounds. Each space center, in turn, necessitated allied institutions to sustain the space exploration program—design bureaus, research centers, manufacturing plants, and a global network of tracking and communications posts. Baikonur and Cape Canaveral—not Sputnik—became the enduring symbols of the new space age.
As portals to the cosmos, Baikonur and Cape Canaveral differed in their public accessibility and their overall style, a contrast that reflected in part two distinct political cultures. Baikonur, simply put, was a sealed-off world, always detached and inaccessible, a military precinct carefully hidden from public scrutiny. Ironically, the cosmodrome was built on the eve of the 20th Party Congress, where so many of the secrets of the Stalinist era were revealed and denounced. This so-called “thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev did not, however, reverse the Soviet practice of maintaining strict secrecy about the emerging space program, given all its organic ties to the military. Those who labored at Baikonur, most notably Sergei Korolev, remained anonymous, heroic figures, for certain, but unknown by name to the Soviet populace.
; By contrast, Cape Canaveral—even with its classified military space and weapons programs—operated for the most part in the public sphere, with NASA overseeing an ambitious space program of satellite launches and manned space missions. At the Cape, NASA deliberately showcased the American space program, which was linked to the institutional goal of building public—and critical congressional—support. The American print and television media rewarded NASA’s openness with favorable coverage for the most part, routinely casting the astronauts as heroes. The American space program nevertheless remained vulnerable to public criticism whenever well-planned missions misfired. Moreover, from the outset, NASA faced critics who argued that the agency’s program was too extravagant and the manned space missions were not cost-effective.
By contrast, the Soviets kept operations at Baikonur under wraps, selecting only certain space exploits for coverage and then through the narrow conduit of official propaganda. Life at Baikonur would also be punctuated by technical mishaps, mission failures, and even the loss of human life. Yet these reversals were routinely downplayed or simply ignored in official Soviet pronouncements.3
WHERE THE LAUNCH PAD BEGAN
Early space pioneers had to confront the inherent dangers that came with liquid-fueled rockets. These experimental rockets were never predictable, given their volatile fuel and complex array of motors and pumps. Overheating became a particularly difficult challenge. In the absence of an effective cooling system, a liquid-fueled rocket would explode violently. To fire such volatile missiles required ample space and strict safety measures; these requirements would persist into modern times.
Knowing these realities, Robert Goddard first experimented with a liquid-propellant rocket on his aunt Effie Ward’s farm outside Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1926. Later, Goddard moved his laboratory to New Mexico, which offered an expansive landscape for his experiments. The move was made possible through the active support of Charles Lindbergh and the patronage of Daniel Guggenheim, who subsidized Goddard with a yearly grant of 25,000 dollars. Goddard set up his own test range in the desolate Southwest near Roswell. He used his grant funds to pay his salary and the salaries for his assistants and to purchase supplies such as aluminum, steel tubing, liquid oxygen, and other components to build a rocket. Twenty miles into the desert, Goddard built a test stand and rocket-launching tower. Lindbergh described the pioneering rocket facility: “That tower, made out of the galvanized-iron framework of a windmill and pointing skyward from its concrete corner blocks, seemed to me like a huge cannon aimed at an unwary moon. Someday, I felt, a rocket launched from Earth would strike the distant satellite.”4
The remote desert set the stage for the launch of Goddard’s 15-foot-long rocket, dubbed “Little Nell,” which had to be hauled to the test stand on a specially constructed trailer. Lindbergh recalled the primitive setting: “We would evacuate tarantulas and orange-spotted black widows from the nearby dugout observation post…. An assistant would pour sub-zero liquid oxygen from a big thermos bottle into one of the rocket’s fuel tanks. Stations would be taken—one man in the dugout, the rest of us at the control post about a thousand feet away. At a word from the Professor [Goddard] there would be a flame, a roar, and…a slender object streaking skyward.”5 With his layout Goddard anticipated the essential architecture for future spaceports, where massive liquid-fueled rockets would launch artificial satellites and deep-space probes and send humans to the moon.
German rocket pioneers followed a parallel path to Goddard in the interwar years, also seeking an isolated locale to launch their rockets. These experiments by Wernher von Braun, Hermann Oberth, Klaus Riedel, and other early German rocketeers were initially conducted at a relatively small test range outside Berlin. Once the group received the active support of the German army, they sought out a larger and more secure test range. By 1937, a secret rocket research center took shape at Peenemünde on an isolated stretch of territory on the Baltic Sea coast. The new facility offered adequate space to perfect the A-4 (V-2) rocket that quickly transformed modern rocketry and set the stage for the space age. The builders of Peenemünde—backed by the financial largess of the German army—constructed a complex that was genuinely functional—an ensemble of administration buildings, laboratories, manufacturing and assembly structures, housing units, warehouses, and concrete test stands. Here rockets could be safely launched across the Baltic Sea for miles. German aerodynamist Peter Wegener remembered the futuristic character of the Peenemünde rocket center when he first encountered it during World War II. Approaching one of the test stands, he had the opportunity to see a launch of a V-2 rocket, which “rose slowly, then bent toward the Baltic to disappear in clouds at great height. I remember an excruciating loud initial bang of the rocket engine, a screeching noise, clouds of deflected exhaust, into which a deluge of water was shot, and a reddish jet issuing from the back.”6 Wegener had observed the world’s first fully operational rocket launch facility, a template for Baikonur and Cape Canaveral in later decades.
THE SOVIETS BUILD A SPACEPORT
The concept for the Baikonur cosmodrome was futuristic and ambitious. Once built, the new facility would be the largest in the world. The times were favorable for such a Herculean endeavor, first for the formative military experiments with missiles and then the active program of space exploration. The U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers signed the decree to build the new launch range on February 12, 1955.7 Within three months, construction work began on the site in distant Kazakhstan, in Soviet-controlled Central Asia. The precise region selected for the test range was located 200 miles southwest of the town of Baikonur. The Soviets deliberately associated the name Baikonur with the new space center as a way to confuse American intelligence. The actual site, the Tyuratam railroad stop just north of the Syr Darya River, was a desolate region—1,300 miles southeast of Moscow, approximately 100 miles east of the Aral Sea, and 500 miles west of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. American U-2 spy plane pilots first located Baikonur by following railroad tracks until they came across the rocket complex during its construction.8
Baikonur became a large and complex world during the course of the next three decades. The population may have soared to more than 100,000 by the end of the 1960s, although precise figures remain elusive. The enormity of the cosmodrome can be measured by its array of 52 launch sites, numerous laboratories, factories, schools, palaces of culture, transplanted trees, and artificial lakes. In her book Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, Svetlana Boym has described the huge facility as a “Soviet fairy tale come true,” with the appearance of a “garden city” in the middle of a vast desert, the locale for “mythic” launches of satellites and cosmonauts into space. Even if concealed behind a wall of secrecy, the legendary spaceport represented a monumental triumph of Soviet technology—very much in the tradition of the great state-run experiments of the 1930s.9
Baikonur was part of an entire shadowy world of Soviet technical and industrial centers, or “closed cities,” that remained off-limits to outsiders. During the Cold War, the Soviet regime also established ten “nuclear cities” where scientists and technicians worked on warhead designs and produced highly enriched uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons.10 Not all Soviet projects that were keyed to industrial or scientific progress were classified, as evident in the aforementioned 1930s Five Year Plans: the construction of the tractor works at Kharkov, the automobile factories at Moscow and Gorky, the great dam on the Dnieper River, the vast steel furnaces in the Don Basin, new industrial cities such as Magnitogorsk, and the building of the Moscow subway.
Walter Duranty, then a newspaper reporter for the New York Times, gave an uncritical endorsement to such massive projects, by describing them as the “New Russia” and a “monument to past struggles and to future hopes, a proof of their mighty Today and limitless Tomorrow.”11 Duranty’s selective reportage, echoing as it did official Soviet propaganda, ignored the vast human suffering of the Stalin era. The leadership of the Soviet Union did not hesitate to
mobilize vast material and human resources in the cause of modernization. The West faced the formidable challenge in the Soviet period of gaining accurate data on key economic and technological trends. Baikonur—if clandestine and remote—mirrored this powerful underlying ethos of the Bolshevik regime. “The dialectic of invisibility and conquest was characteristic of the whole Soviet space program,” observed Svetlana Boym. This impulse for secrecy was powerful, even deeply rooted in the Soviet political culture, a pervasive factor in all state-run affairs—large and small. As Boym observed, “the work of thousands of people who made the space program possible—from the Chief Designer to the cleaning women—remained outside official representation.”12
There were practical considerations as well. In many ways, the new site was selected for its compatibility with the requirements for testing the R-7 ICBM. The area had to accommodate a 300-day launch program per year; such a site could be isolated, but the weather—no matter the extremes—had to permit this robust program of launches. Size was another key factor: The test range should be vast, to allow for the dropping and recovery of rocket stages. Radio guidance for the R-7 required two stations separated by some 300 miles from the launch pad. Rail links, at least initially, were vital to allow the shipment of materials and personnel. Once completed, the new facility would have an airfield and a network of connecting roads and highways.13