Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  Both men laughed, and the anxiety that Mary had been feeling began to ebb. There was a folksy manner to these rocket scientists that she suspected would make her working environment pleasant enough.

  “You'll be performing complex studies to determine specific impulse values of new propellants.” He held out his hand. “I'm sure you remember me—Tom Meyers, head of the department.”

  They shook hands.

  “So you needed someone with experience in thermochemistry, heat transfer, fluid flow dynamics, mixture ratios—that sort of thing.”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “That's exactly what we needed. Do we have that with you?”

  Mary looked at Carl. “I don't know about this guy, but you do have that with me.”

  Both men laughed again.

  “Carl will fill you in on your assignments. Good luck.” Then Tom moved on to some other 400-pound, gray-steel desk destination.

  “So I'm ready to work. What do we do first?”

  “Soon as Dick Mascolo and Ed Royce get back from break we'll have a sit-down and go over who does what.”

  “What kind of projects will we be working on?”

  “Our first priority is the NALAR.”

  “Nalar?”

  “North American Liquid Air Rocket. It's a new air-to-air attack missile we're working on. The Army Air Corps doesn't want to use solid propellants until they're more reliable. So we're working on a liquid-fuel version.”

  Mary glanced over at Carl's desk and noticed a copy of one of Alfred Sheinwold's bridge books.

  “You play bridge?” she asked.

  “A lot of the engineers play bridge. Every day, at lunch time.”

  “I'd like to get in a game. I'll need a partner.”

  “Sweetheart, you're the only girl in the engineering department. Trust me, you're not going to have any trouble finding a partner.”

  The faucet was dripping.

  Every eleven seconds, a turbid drop of selenium-laced water would force its way up the steel spout to the edge of its lip. It would hang there a moment, wiggle a bit as surface tension fought with gravity, then release itself at one g of acceleration, until it finally plopped into the cast-iron cooking pot thirty centimeters below.

  The relentless regularity of that rhythmic plopping was distracting the Russian scientist from his work. His name was Sergei Korolev, and he had a bedeviling heat-transfer problem with his rocket's regeneratively cooled engine. The latest static test of the R-1 engine had been a spectacular failure, having blown a hole clean through the combustion chamber, eviscerating the engine, and seriously damaging the test stand. The R-1 was rated for one-hundred-eighty seconds of nonstop operation, yet could never manage more than fifty.

  Plop.

  Korolev pulled his fur-lined coat tight around him and buttoned it. He exhaled, and a cloud of warm vapors steamed from his mouth. He looked down at the multitude of equations, notes, and chicken scratches that filled hundreds of papers, strewn haphazardly over every square centimeter of the termite-riddled table. Every few seconds, a cold Siberian wind would push against the shack, rattling the boards and penetrating their cracks. The bitter breeze would flutter and scatter the papers, incrementing the clutter and aggravating his temper. Sometimes Korolev would allow one of those papers to float aimlessly to the dirt floor, other times he would reach out and snatch it.

  Most of the engineers and technicians in Sergei's employ were less than enthusiastic about living in an environment as inhospitable as Tyuratam. But after spending six tortuous years in Kolyma, Kazan, and numerous other gulags and prison camps, Korolev had become inured to any climate that resulted in bottomed-out thermometers. In fact, he might have still been in those gulags were it not for the intercession of a number of his fellow engineers and colleagues who wrote letters and testified on his behalf. For this reason, Sergei Korolev was thankful—thankful to be free to perform the task he loved more than anything in the world: building big rockets.1

  The scientist took a momentary break to sip from his cup of tea. He used that moment of respite to scan his surroundings. His “office” at the newly constructed Tyuratam Rocket Base was less than spartan: the table, a small shelf unit, a forty-watt light bulb, a fireplace, a window, a sink. At least he had running water—a benefit owing to his station as chief designer. And thanks to a small gas generator, he also had a few amps to power his light bulb. Plumbing and electricity—they were benefits no one else at Tyuratam enjoyed.2

  Plop.

  Sergei stood up and approached the window. The temperature difference between him and the outdoors was slight, but still enough to fog up the glass. He used the soft wool of his coat's sleeve to brush away several wide streaks of moisture, allowing him a view of the flat, treeless greenery that surrounded the shack.

  The vast, open savannas of the Russian steppes were not unlike the sweeping grasslands of North Dakota. Endless, undulating plains of green, peppered here and there with the occasional tree or shrub, the steppes were too dry to support a forest, too wet to evolve into desert. In the steppes of southwestern Russia, Mary Sherman would have felt right at home (at least as far as climate and topography were concerned). Unlike North Dakota, however, the Great Steppe, as it was called, had for centuries been home to boisterous hopak-dancing Cossacks, horse-riding nomads, and brutal pirates.3 Stretching from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan, and on into Kazakhstan, the Russian steppes had cemented their reputation into Russian folklore. And folklore was where it ended, since very few Russians had the physical, mental, and emotional stamina required to survive on the stark, featureless grasslands. It was a three-thousand-mile expanse of unremarkable nothing—a haunting place with nary a trace of civilization. Those who did attempt to settle here rarely lasted more than a few months. Water was scarce, food had to be imported, and if you wanted a house, you had better know how to construct it yourself—but good luck finding building materials. Russian wives generally refused to live on the steppes, and if a man found himself transferred there as part of his employment, he might as well find a good divorce attorney.

  Korolev's own marriage could have been a case study in unions destined for self-immolation. In 1931, he was working full-time during the day as a technician maintaining hydroplanes.4 At night he would spend another six or more hours as an unpaid intern on a rocket-powered glider program.5 In the midst of this chaotic schedule, Korolev took one day off to marry his high-school sweetheart, a young medical student from Odessa named Ksenia Vincentini.6 After a few vodka toasts, Korolev put Ksenia on a train to resume her medical-school education in the Ukraine. Korolev then resumed his midnight-oil lifestyle. By 1946, the marriage would be over, the result of long, extended employment-related separations, dual super-star career success, a six-year sentence in numerous gulags and prisons for Korolev (for the crime of living under Stalin's rule), and an affair with a very young girl named Nina.

  Plop.

  Though life on the steppes was less than attractive, to the team of scientists looking for a place to launch the up-and-coming Russian missile program, the land held great promise. Unbroken for hundreds of miles by neither mountain range nor valley, the steppes held the advantage of allowing more reliable line-of-sight radio transmission and reception—an ideal asset for those dependent on rocket telemetry systems. And the paucity of human inhabitants would make rocket launches safer. Once Sergei's crew started launching, there would no doubt be a certain percentage of failures. It would be far better to rain down fifty tons of metal and toxic propellants onto vacant land than onto some poor Ukrainian village.

  The door opened and a teenage boy, Utigur, entered with an armload of firewood.

  “Chief Designer, sir. Here is the firewood you requested.”

  Sergei nodded toward the fireplace, and the boy carefully stacked the wood nearby. Though he enjoyed his newly exalted title, Sergei was not pleased that the army had instructed everyone to call him by it, even his closest associates. The name Sergei Korolev had been officially dec
lared a state secret by Premier Khrushchev himself, and everyone was on strict orders never to call Sergei by anything other than “Chief Designer.” The Soviet leader had made it clear that anyone responsible for leaking the Great Designer's identity would be executed.

  “Chief Designer, do you need anything else?”

  Sergei shook his head, and the boy left.

  Sergei stepped away from the table, crouched down, and threw a few small logs into the fire. He removed a cigarette from his coat pocket and used the flames to ignite it. The cigarette lit quickly, and he placed it between his chapped lips. A breath in, a breath out. He stood up and glanced at a photograph tacked above the fireplace. It was a black-and-white photo of Wernher von Braun standing at a podium, giving a pep talk to a room full of American Boy Scouts.

  Korolev owed a great deal to von Braun. The Russian army had requisitioned dozens of train-car loads of rocket components from the German scientist's rocket program. The defeated Germans had wanted to obliterate everything pertaining to their vaulted high-tech program, but in the end, the American and Russian armies had advanced too far too fast for them to complete the intended destruction.

  If hardware were silver, human expertise was gold.

  Far better than all the boxcar loads of V-2 components were the more than fifty German rocket scientists who had been captured and put to work for the Soviet rocket program. Many against their will, of course. Unfortunately for Sergei, the greatest assets of all—Wernher von Braun and his top echelon of engineers—had managed to elude Stalin's grasp. As a group, the best and brightest of von Braun's men had surrendered to the US Army just ahead of the Red Army's arrival. Sergei wondered if the Americans appreciated the value of their booty. He would give anything to have von Braun on his team. Or a dozen of his best engineers. Oh, the rockets they would build!

  The two men had much in common. Like von Braun, Korolev had been born with stars in his eyes, dreaming since boyhood of building a spaceship that could take him to the moon and beyond. And like his German/American counterpart, Korolev had to deal with the inevitable philosophical and dogmatic conflicts brought on by national politics. In both countries, those politics were powered by the presumptive need for greater and ever more menacing military hardware. The political superiors of both men were more interested in the weapons potential of rockets, rather than as instruments of science and peace. Each man had the same problem and, independent of each other, hatched the same secret plan. Korolev and von Braun had forged agreements with their superiors to design and build massive missile systems for each country's defense. As their leaders demanded, Korolev and von Braun would make their rockets powerful enough to carry nuclear warheads thousands of miles. But tacitly, they would also design those rockets in such a way that they could perform double duty. An intercontinental ballistic missile would be constructed so that, with minor alterations, it would also have the ability to place a satellite into low Earth orbit. These were men with vision—men who could see a future that others, blinded by fear and misunderstanding, could not. They knew the race for space was inevitable and that it was just a matter of time before human-built hardware (and humans themselves) would be sent aloft to circle the Earth. And yet this knowledge did them little good in 1950. Sergei and Wernher were up against the same problem: they needed funding, and the only sources of that funding were politicians suffering the paranoia and suspicions left over from the post–World War II world.

  Plop.

  Sergei took a last puff of his half-finished cigarette, then carefully snubbed it out on the fireplace bricks. He set it aside for the morning; in the remote Russian steppes where supply deliveries were highly unreliable, nothing was wasted. Not even half a cigarette.

  Sergei opened a military-surplus tool kit and removed a small, corroded pipe wrench.

  “True love is like a pair of socks: you gotta have two and they've gotta match.”

  —WIDELY ATTRIBUTED TO ERICH FROMM

  The dark green Chevy drove around the parking lot looking for a space. It finally found one at a far corner where two barbed-wire chain-link fences came together. The car maneuvered perfectly between the lines and its engine cut off. The driver's door opened, and a smartly dressed young man stepped out. He wore a conservative suit and tie, accented with a pair of flip-down sunglasses. The most striking aspect of his appearance was his hair. It was a bright red-orange color, a hirsute replication of youthful autumns spent in Vermont, and, like a beacon, could be clearly discerned from two hundred yards away. It was cut in a conservative, military crew-cut style, a World War II holdover that had become the new fashion chic for anyone working in any aspect of the aerospace business. At Caltech his fellow students, and pretty much everyone else, had called him “Red”—to such an extent that most of those students, and his professors, had long since forgotten his given name. He preferred his middle name over his first name, and always requested people use that instead: Richard. But the nickname Red just seemed to stick to him, like sidewalk gum on a hot Pasadena afternoon. Eventually Red got used to his signature sobriquet and gave up registering any objection. What he didn't suspect, however, was that his colorful appellation was about to follow him to this, his first post-university job.

  It was 7:30 a.m. and warming quickly. A native Southern Californian, Red was well accustomed to the bright morning sun that peered over the Hollywood Hills to the north. He took a glance at the buildings of North American Aviation two hundred parking slots away, then pushed the flip-up sunglasses into the down position.

  It was September 1950.

  Red opened the Chevy's trunk and pulled from it a medium-size cardboard box. It contained the tools of his new trade: a chemical reference book, books on metallurgy, heat transfer, and thermodynamics, two new cartons of yellow number-2 pencils, a pencil sharpener, a large eraser, a protractor and ruler, several slide rules, some graph paper, and an 8 × 10 framed photograph of the Caltech Beavers 1946 football team. He held the box with one hand and closed the trunk with the other.

  Red walked with a slight limp, the result of a knee injury suffered during a game against Occidental College two years before. His position was left tackle, and in the third quarter of the last game he took his position a little too seriously, jamming his knee hard into the helmet of a falling opponent. For Red, that would be the end of Caltech football (a few years later, Caltech football itself would disappear). Even so, he had made his mark at a school that would one day be named the world's top engineering university.1 That mark, however, would not be made in biology, chemistry, nuclear physics, or any field of academia. Rather, Red would have his name and memory forever etched into Caltech lore by breaking the law. It was during his freshman year that the Pasadena City police cited Red for carrying not one, not two, but seven passengers down Colorado Boulevard on his 45-cubic-inch, WWII-surplus Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

  He paid an eight-dollar fine and thereafter got invited to a lot more parties.

  As Red continued his walk toward the large complex of buildings, he noticed his shoes were acting tacky—as if there was something sticky on his soles. He looked down and realized the asphalt was freshly laid and had not yet lost its wet-slurry adhesive quality. He resumed his walk and soon arrived at what looked like an entrance. A guard shack and two security guards stood in his way. A dozen other employees were lined up, displaying their identity badges and awaiting permission to enter. The line moved fast, and in a minute Red found himself showing off his crisp new badge with his shiny, smiling portrait. The guards eyed the new recruit suspiciously (suspicion being the most important part of their job). The name on the badge did not read “Red,” of course—government and corporate secrecy regulations actually required legal birth names.

  “George Richard Morgan,” said the guard, reading the name tag. The guard checked the name on a list, then waved him through.

  Three years later, “Red” would become my father.

  By the end of 1950, chemistry had advanced to the point
that most of the viable fuel and oxidizer compounds had been theoretically calculated, and many of them had been synthesized. Each compound had its particular advantages and disadvantages—it was an axiom that there was no such thing as a “perfect” fuel or oxidizer. There were all sorts of plusses and minuses that had to be dealt with. Liquid oxygen (LOX), for example, was an excellent oxidizer, but to keep it in a liquid state it had to be kept chilled to just under −297° Fahrenheit, which presented numerous storage and handling challenges.2 Hydrazine makes an excellent fuel, and unlike LOX it is a liquid at room temperature, but hydrazine is highly toxic and extremely unstable (i.e., explosive).3

  Once all the best oxidizers and fuels had been theoretically invented, physically created, and materially tested, rocket-propellant experts moved on to a second phase of new propellant creation: the “cocktail.” A cocktail was a mixture of two or more rocket propellants for the express purpose of obtaining better results than each compound could provide individually. Like so many other innovations, the rocket-propellant cocktail had been invented by the Germans. In World War II, Wernher von Braun had used a fuel mixture of 75 percent ethyl alcohol and 25 percent water for the V-2.4 This decreased the rocket's performance but allowed the engine to run cooler, increasing its reliability. This “trade-off” concept, whereby you give up something you want in order to gain something you need, governed much of rocket-propellant science in the early days, and still does.

  On the day Richard Morgan walked into North American Aviation, Mary Sherman was working on just such a cocktail. It was a mixture of two oxidizers: oxygen and fluorine.5 Fluorine was nothing less than the very best oxidizer in the universe. Unfortunately, the characteristic that gave it that honor was also its drawback; it reacted with almost everything, making transport, storage, and handling extremely dangerous. Fluorine was utterly unforgiving—make a mistake, and people die. But its potential as a rocket propellant was so attractive that Mary decided to try to “tame” fluorine by mixing it with a lesser oxidizer. Since the two chemicals were miscible (they could mix in a single container without reacting with each other) a fluorine/oxygen cocktail offered some intriguing performance possibilities. She started calling it FLOX.