by Amy Cherrix
Chapter 31
“Light This Candle”
“It is a most impressive scientific accomplishment,” President Kennedy said of Gagarin’s achievement. “And also I think that we, all of us, as members of the race, have the greatest admiration for the Russian who participated in this extraordinary feat.” Kennedy had been asleep while Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 capsule orbited the Earth. For some time, American intelligence reports had suggested that a manned Soviet launch was in the works. Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science adviser, had briefed him on the night of April 11 that the launch appeared to be imminent, and the president accepted that it would likely happen and asked not to be awakened.
Kennedy was more willing to invest in space exploration than his conservative predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. In March, he had received an additional funding request from NASA admnistrator James Webb for two projects: a space capsule development program called Apollo and a new rocket, the Saturn. The three-stage Saturn vehicle that would be used to carry the Apollo capsule into space would be a monster, standing 363 feet—60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty—and weighing as much as a battle cruiser. Kennedy hesitated to commit additional money to both projects at the time, agreeing only to fund the Saturn. However, Gagarin’s successful flight raised the stakes for JFK. America was losing to the Russians. Kennedy summoned key advisers to the White House—James Webb and Hugh Dryden from NASA, budget director David Bell, and science adviser Jerome Wiesner—to discuss the country’s chances of still winning the space race. The general consensus was that an American victory was feasible. However, the cost was estimated at $40 billion.
Eight days after Gagarin made world history as the first human being in space, Kennedy sent a letter to vice president Lyndon Johnson, who was also head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council:
Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
Johnson read the president’s letter and wrote to America’s biggest champion of space travel, the man who had been hoping for a shot at the moon since he had first set foot in the desert at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1945. Von Braun was elated. After sixteen years, Washington was finally asking the right questions.
Von Braun answered Johnson’s letter:
We have an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon. While today we do not have such a rocket, it is unlikely that the Soviets have it. Therefore, we would not have to enter the race toward this obvious next goal in space exploration against hopeless odds favoring the Soviets. With an all-out crash program I think we could accomplish this objective in 1967/68.
By “crash program” von Braun also meant cash program. Getting to the moon wouldn’t be cheap, nor would it be easy. In many ways, the American space program was in its infancy. The Soviets were ahead after the Gagarin launch, and America had yet to prove that it could launch an astronaut and safely return him to Earth.7
Shepard Makes History
MAY 5, 1961
Six days after von Braun replied to Johnson, Alan Shepard was waiting patiently inside the cramped Mercury 3 space capsule atop von Braun’s modified Redstone rocket. His moment had finally arrived. Three weeks earlier, Shepard’s fear that a Soviet cosmonaut would beat America into space had come true. The astronaut knew he had something to prove and that his country was counting on him.
Each of the Mercury astronauts named their space capsule. Shepard christened his Freedom 7. He wore a silvery, skintight space suit that looked like something out of a science-fiction film. The suit was so snug that the astronaut required assistance wriggling into it. Shepard had broken out in a sweat from the exertion. Even something as simple as getting dressed for the flight was a team effort, but only one person would sit on top of von Braun’s missile and blast into space.
Mercury Seven astronaut Alan Shepard in his silver pressurized suit and helmet, as he prepares to become the first American in space.
Shepard was ready. He wanted to go. But more than that, he needed to go.
To the bathroom.
The orange juice and coffee from his preflight breakfast made him increasingly uncomfortable. He tried not to think about it, but there was nowhere for him to “go.” There was barely enough room in the capsule for him, let alone a toilet. The astronauts joked that a pilot didn’t fly the Mercury—he wore it. Unlike Gagarin, who orbited the Earth, Shepard’s simpler mission would be another suborbital flight, meaning he would fly up and back down again. From liftoff to splashdown, it would only take fifteen minutes. After strapping into the capsule, the flight delays began. Before Shepard knew it, he had been waiting for more than three hours.
As time passed, Shepard’s full bladder was becoming a serious preflight problem, and he radioed ground control to report a status update.
Fellow Mercury Seven astronaut Gordon Cooper, stationed in the nearby blockhouse, took the call when he heard Shepard’s voice through his headset.
“Man, I got to pee,” Shepard said to Cooper. “Check and see if I can get out quickly and relieve myself.” Cooper relayed the request, but the engineers hadn’t anticipated something like this. They didn’t have a full-bladder contingency plan. Removing the astronaut from the capsule was not an option, according to von Braun. It would take longer to escort Shepard to the bathroom and remove his space suit than to launch and land Freedom 7. The delay could result in the scrubbing of the flight altogether. Cooper relayed the bad news. He would have to hold it. Shepard responded with a suggestion that he be allowed to relieve himself in his space suit. Again, the request was denied. None of the engineers knew what would happen if liquid was introduced into the capsule environment. Would it short-circuit electronics? Electrocute the astronaut? The safest option was for him to wait.
As minutes ticked by, the try-to-hold-it strategy weakened along with Shepard’s bladder. Finally, without another alternative, the engineers permitted the astronaut to relieve himself in the space suit. Physically, Shepard felt better, and none of the engineers’ fears came to pass. But Shepard’s patience, like the urine soaking his space suit, eventually evaporated. “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle,” he snapped.
After four tense hours on the launchpad and one unscheduled bladder release, Shepard blasted off. Forty-five million Americans gawked at their televisions as the rocket hurtled Shepard’s capsule into the sky. Freedom 7 traveled 116 miles before dropping safely into the Atlantic Ocean fifteen minutes later. The country rejoiced. Shepard was the first American to leave Earth. He had not matched Gagarin’s technical achievement by orbiting the planet, but he had renewed America’s confidence that it could win the space race.
Three weeks after Shepard’s flight, on May 25, Kennedy addressed a special joint session of Congress and announced his plans for America’s future in space.
“These are extraordinary times and we face an extraordinary challenge,” he said. “Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom’s cause.”
In a conference room at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, von Braun and his closest associates listened to Kennedy’s remarks.
“Now it is time to take longer strides,” Kennedy said. “Time for a great new American enterprise. Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. . . . I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Upon hearing Kennedy’s announcement of the deadline, the Huntsville conference room burst into cheers and applause. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space,” Kennedy said
. “And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The following year, on September 12, 1962, President Kennedy delivered an iconic speech of his presidency, “We Choose to Go to the Moon,” on the Rice University campus in Houston, Texas. The moment cemented America’s commitment to landing a man on the moon within ten years. His rallying cry set the tone for the decade. Von Braun knew the challenge that lay ahead of him and everyone at NASA. It was an ambitious schedule, but he was elated. Wernher von Braun had finally earned his moon shot.
Kennedy’s ten-year timetable injected the space program with enthusiasm and an infusion of cash. The NASA annual budget dramatically increased, totaling $5 billion by 1966. In response to the demands of the moon shot, aerospace industry development exploded around the US as NASA facilities in Florida, Houston, and Huntsville expanded. The space agency had only ten years to figure how to accomplish the seemingly impossible. When Kennedy’s countdown began on Project Apollo, most of the technology required for achieving his goal had not been invented. Apollo was a NASA project, but the agency employed subcontractors to complete specific tasks: small-town textile mills in South Carolina manufactured fabric for space suits, and aerospace engineering giants with names like Rocketdyne manufactured the rocket’s engines. More than four hundred thousand Americans all across the country dedicated their skills to Project Apollo.
A Soviet Moon Rocket
America’s overwhelming—and public—commitment of resources to the Apollo program did not go unnoticed by Korolev. What the United States and the Russian people didn’t know, however, was that Korolev also had plans for a moon rocket, the N-1: a thirty-five-story giant weighing as much as four hundred double-decker buses. The project had been approved two weeks before Kennedy’s Rice University speech, with a hefty price tag to match. The estimated cost of manufacturing and launching ten of the rockets was 457 million rubles. Korolev knew he faced an uphill battle for funding.8
As the prospect of Korolev’s N-1 brought him closer to his dream of space travel, his past came back to haunt him in the form of two old rivals: Valentin Glushko and Mikhail Yangel. Korolev felt that Glushko had betrayed him by working with Yangel on the R-16 (the rocket that had exploded during the Nedelin disaster), but he also knew Glushko was the Soviet Union’s best rocket-engine designer. Yet when Korolev approached him about building the engines for the N-1, he found himself in unpleasant but familiar territory. Glushko still insisted upon using the hypergolic fuels known as “devil’s venom.” Korolev was adamant in his refusal. Once again, the rivals vehemently disagreed.
Instead, Korolev chose Nikolai Kuznetsov, a skilled airplane engine designer who had never built a rocket engine. Kuznetsov proposed powering the huge N-1 rocket by clustering its engines. Whereas von Braun’s Saturn V had a cluster of five engines in its first stage, Kuznestov recommended thirty. The Soviets would have to choreograph the simultaneous firing of six times as many engines as the Saturn V. The only way to ensure success on that scale would be repeated and costly engine tests before launching. But there was no money to build a test stand for the thirty-engine cluster. The designer wouldn’t know if the engines worked until they were fired on launch day.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Yangel had gone to Khrushchev and proposed a moon rocket of his own. Although his R-16 had exploded in the Nedelin disaster, Yangel remained a prominent and respected engineer. Without a focused moon-landing program, like Apollo, Khrushchev wasn’t motivated to concentrate all funding on a single rocket project. Instead, he also awarded money to Yangel—robbing Korolev of funds he desperately needed for the N-1.
It must have frustrated Korolev to watch von Braun’s adopted country unite behind his glittering Apollo moon-landing project. For Korolev, the fight to build a comparable program in the USSR was like trying to construct a house of cards in a hurricane. The force of gravity was easier for him to overcome than the politics involved in securing enough money for his work.
Chapter 32
Behind the Wall
As Korolev and von Braun raced to the moon, the political and philosophical differences between democracy in the United States and communism in the Soviet Union were about to divide a country and create a new battlefront in the Cold War.
On August 13, 1961, Peter Guba, an eighteen-year-old police officer in East Berlin, was watching television at his mother’s house. A news report announced that a barbed-wire fence was being erected around West Berlin to isolate it not only from Soviet-controlled East Berlin but also from the surrounding East Germany. Travel between the two parts of the city was forbidden. Before the construction of the wall, East Germans had been free to travel between East and West German-held territories. Gradually, millions of young and educated East Germans fled to the west. With the loss of its workforce, East Germany faced financial collapse. The Berlin Wall would stop defections, trap East Germans behind it, and eliminate the influence of democratic ideas. It would also cruelly separate East and West German families and friends for decades.
As the barbed wire was rolled into the streets, Guba’s job as a police officer expanded overnight. He became a border guard, expected to defend East Berlin by deadly force if necessary. His orders included stopping anyone who tried to escape or illegally cross the hastily constructed barrier that was eventually reinforced with concrete. The area between the divided cities, known as “the death strip,” became a no-man’s land riddled with more than a million land mines. Armed guards like Guba were stationed along the perimeter in one of the wall’s 302 guard towers and ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to cross. “We felt like wild animals trapped in a cage,” he remembered decades later, “like evil creatures that were just waiting to pounce.”
The Berlin Wall did benefit one person, albeit accidentally. Both the Mittelwerk and the former Peenemünde rocket factories were located in what became communist-held East Germany. Defended by armed East German guards like Peter Guba, the concrete-and-barbed-wire barricade further isolated von Braun’s Nazi past from his new life in America.
In the Soviet Union, Korolev felt the walls closing around him as he followed events in America with growing concern. He watched Alan Shepard’s historic flight. He heard Kennedy’s announcement about Project Apollo, which would land a man on the moon within the decade. And then, on February 20, 1962, he saw John Glenn become the first American astronaut to successfully orbit the Earth thirty times in the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule. It was a turning point. The Americans were catching up because they had more money and a strategic plan to reach the moon. The Soviet Union lacked both. President Kennedy had put the full weight of the White House behind the American moon shot. When it came to the Soviet space program, however, Khrushchev valued high-profile space spectaculars more than advancing the science of spaceflight. Korolev was expected to accomplish both goals and always without enough funding.
The enormous stress of Korolev’s daily life compromised his health. His body had never fully recovered from years of torture in the Gulag, but he powered through discomfort, refusing to slow his exhausting pace. It was not uncommon for him to work eighteen-hour days for weeks at a time. He obsessed over the tiniest details, insisting on personally supervising every facet of his huge rocket organization. The chief designer had been relentless in his pursuit of spaceflight since Gagarin’s launch, with the flights of Vostok 2, 3, and 4. Inevitably, the relentless workload, combined with Korolev’s stubborn refusal to take better care of his health, caught up with him.
By August 1962, Korolev was admitted to the hospital with intestinal bleeding and unbearable pain. He was hospitalized for weeks under close observation. Doctors ordered him to take time off to rest. He agreed but continued to work from his bed because Khrushchev had asked Korolev for another Vostok launch. The Soviet leader wanted to respond to John Glenn’s Earth-orbiting mission with another defining “first” in spaceflight.
Korolev’s next mission would stun the world, because his newest cosmonaut . . . was a woman.
“She Is a Gagarin in a Skirt”
JUNE 16, 1963
BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN
“You’re working the communications excellently,” the chief designer said to his cosmonaut from ground control, “like a solid communicator with twenty years of experience. Do your work well, excellently, that’s what we need in space.”
“Everything is normal. I remember our arrangement,” the twenty-six-year-old cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, replied, adding, “I’m not a delicate lady.”
Korolev had recovered and was in ground control when Tereshkova prepared to lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Fellow cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky had been in orbit aboard his Vostok 5 capusle for two days. Tereshkova would launch and join Bykovsky in orbit aboard her Vostok 6, their separate spacecraft at times traveling within three miles of each other. If she succeeded, Tereshkova would become the first woman in space. Yet no one outside the Soviet space program knew she was there that day—not even her mother. Tereshkova’s family had no idea she had been training for over a year as a cosmonaut. She was sworn to secrecy.9
The first and youngest woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova.
Tereshkova was just eighteen years old when she strapped on a parachute and threw herself out of an airplane for the first time. It was a life-changing moment for a teenage farm girl from the Yaroslavl region of Russia who worked in a textile mill. She enjoyed jumping so much it became a hobby. After leaping from the plane, she waited “as long as possible before pulling the cord, just to feel the air” for forty to fifty breathtaking seconds of free fall as the ground raced toward her. Before long, the familiar weight of the chute was as natural to her as a pair of wings to a seabird. When it unfurled high above her head, she floated. The feeling, she said, “was marvelous.” Valentina Tereshkova wasn’t afraid to fall. She knew she was born to fly.