Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  “No,” Rudnev reassured him. “But your rocket will be put into the hands of other people.” He reminded Chertok that Korolev was not the only designer who had caught the Kremlin’s eye. There was the talented Vladimir Chelomey over at OKB-52, where the young Sergei Khrushchev was about to go to work. “He was a brilliant scientist, but alienated people,” Sergei recalled. At OKB-586, Mikhail Yangel had just landed a commission to build the 1,200-mile-range R-12 missiles that Khrushchev would later try to ship to Cuba. Yangel, especially, was viewed by many as the complete package: a gifted engineer, an astute manager, and an effective salesman. Korolev’s main strengths were his ability to sell Khrushchev on his ideas and his hard-driving, almost maniacal management style; he was not seen as technically brilliant. In fact, there were dark rumblings that the dozen additional mini-steering thrusters that he had grafted onto Glushko’s engines were actually causing some of the malfunctions. They were “worthless,” Glushko railed, and a clear demonstration that the arrogant Korolev had overstepped his “technical competence.”

  It wasn’t just Glushko’s increasingly vocal recriminations that the Chief Designer had to worry about. He also had powerful enemies in Moscow, including the ruthless Central Committee official Ivan “the Terrible” Serbin, who was jealous of his independence and status as Khrushchev’s pet designer. Many in the military were equally resentful and begrudged the vast sums Korolev’s missiles diverted from conventional forces. (One general had famously groused that if the alcohol wasted on rocket propellant were given to his soldiers instead, they could wipe out any target more effectively.) The Soviet brass was by no means enamored of rockets. “You can’t count on Malinovsky,” Rudnev warned Chertok, referring to the deputy defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky. “He only tolerates you because Khrushchev supports the rocket.”

  But how long would the support last? Already there were mutterings to stop wasting money on R-7 flight tests. “The rocket will fly,” Korolev stubbornly maintained. But others were starting to have their doubts. In Moscow a whispering campaign had begun that Khrushchev had backed the wrong horse, that once more his rash decisions were endangering the empire. Without the R-7 as a deterrent, the Soviet Union had horribly exposed itself by cutting conventional forces. What would stop the madman LeMay, and his huge armada of new B-52s, from laying waste to Russia now?

  If there was one consolation, one sliver of good news, it was that the American missile effort seemed to be faring even worse. There were encouraging reports of explosions and misfires plaguing the Thor and Atlas trials. Von Braun’s Jupiter program was on the verge of being canceled, and its first test launch had ended in a spectacular fireball. Most heartening of all was word that the American secretary of defense had just announced his intention to cut $200 million from rocket spending. Wilson was putting a freeze on all new missile proposals and had banned overtime on existing projects.

  Though it didn’t appear that the U.S. missile program was going to overtake the Soviets anytime soon, for some reason Korolev was fixated on the notion that von Braun was going to launch a satellite at any moment. The Americans are on the verge, he kept telling anyone who would listen, and he obsessively scoured Nina’s translations of Western publications for any hint that might betray America’s orbital intentions.

  The Chief Designer’s manic paranoia on the subject had begun to irk his exhausted colleagues at Tyura-Tam, where tempers were flaring and the blame game among the designers was reaching new heights. They had now had five failures, and everyone was pointing fingers.

  “And you and your rocket? Are they not to blame?” Glushko shouted at Korolev during a particularly heated exchange. “What about the draining [valves]? What if the feed line erupted?”

  “You should understand,” Korolev shot back. “There are no Korolev rockets. These are our rockets with your engines, with his radio guidance,” pointing to Nikolai Pilyugin from the NII-885 design bureau. “Your approach to this case has been flawed from the beginning,” he went on. “Yes, the rocket can fail because of his launch pad”—Korolev nodded toward Vladimir Barmin, the man behind the Tulip—“because of the failure of your engines, because of the failure of his equipment”—Korolev’s glare now fell on Viktor Kuznetsov, the inertial gyroscope expert—“or because of my drainage valves. But each time is a failure of our rocket. We all should be responsible.”

  Vasiliy Ryabikov, the chairman of the State Commission on the R-7, the Kremlin’s direct representative, wasn’t buying it. “You are a very cunning person, Sergei Pavlovich,” he said. “You spread so much stink on others while perfuming your own shit.”

  Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin also seemed to have lost confidence in the once-golden Korolev. The head of the Soviet Union’s strategic rocket forces now wanted testing stopped.

  “I agree with Mitrofan Ivanovich,” Glushko piled on, knowing that his opinion carried far more weight than all the other subcontractors. His bureau had a virtual monopoly on Soviet rocket engine manufacture, and he supplied all of Korolev’s competitors. Without his motors, there was no Soviet missile program or space program. “There’s no reason to continue these tests,” he huffed. “[Fifteen] of my excellent engines are destroyed, and if it goes on this way, my production line won’t be able to keep up.”

  “But Valentin Petrovich,” Konstantin Rudnev addressed Glushko, in Korolev’s defense, “if the rockets flew according to schedule your engines would be destroyed anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t begrudge the engines if they served their purpose,” Glushko retorted. “But why should I suffer from somebody else’s mistakes?”

  “This is not somebody’s fault,” Korolev exploded. “It is our fault.”

  Despite Korolev’s attempt to spread the bureaucratic blame, the message from Moscow was clear: it was his rocket and his responsibility, and the State Commission on the R-7 was getting ready to recommend pulling the plug. Korolev’s career, his dreams, his future—possibly even his freedom—hung by a thread. He was alone, literally sick and tired, stuck in the hellish Kazakh desert, and the vultures were circling. For the supremely self-confident Korolev, it was an unaccustomed and frightening predicament. “When things are going badly, I have fewer ‘friends,’” he wrote Nina with uncharacteristic humility. “My frame of mind is bad. I will not hide it, it is very difficult to get through our failures…. There is a state of alarm and worry. It is a hot 55 degrees [131 Fahrenheit] here.”

  • • •

  Sergei Pavlovich Korolev did not grow up dreaming of rockets or the stars. Space had never captivated the stocky, solitary youngster during the formative years he spent in lonely isolation at his grandparents’ estate in prerevolutionary Ukraine. “Sergei was about three when our family disintegrated,” his mother, Maria Balanina, recalled. A bitter divorce and prolonged custody battle had split the Korolevs in 1911, and Maria, an unusually headstrong woman, had left her only child with her parents while she completed her university degree. Few women of the era pursued higher education, and Maria, a dark-haired beauty with porcelain features, a wasp waist, and impressively plumed bonnets, juggled her dueling parental and academic responsibilities with a fiery determination she would pass on to her famously obstinate son.

  The two lived mostly apart. During the week Maria studied French and literature at the Ladies College in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, while nannies and tutors cared for Sergei. On weekends she made the two-hour trip home to Nezhin, a small town along the bustling trade route that linked the czarist and Hapsburg empires. Her parents were wealthy merchants; in a photograph, one of their two stores sits at the foot of a four-spire church, occupying a low, block-long structure that resembles a turn-of-the-century strip mall. As a side business, the family had a small but highly successful brine operation that had applied to receive the coveted imperial seal as the official purveyor of pickles to the court of Czar Nicholas II.

  Though young Sergei did not want materially, he lacked companionship and the freedom every child desires to roam
. “He didn’t have any friends of his own age, and never knew children’s games,” his tutor, Lidia Mavrikievna Grinfeld, recalled. “He was often completely alone at home and… would sit a long while on the upper cellar door and watch what was happening in the street.” Moreover, the gates to the family estate were always locked because Korolev’s grandparents worried that his estranged father, whom he was not permitted to see, would try to kidnap him. “I felt I needed to keep him at home,” Maria later explained. “He was so impressionable and thin-skinned and I had to teach him how to better cope with reality.”

  Locked away in his splendid isolation, Korolev built giant dollhouses and cried frequently. But the seclusion apparently instilled in him a self-reliance and vigorous imagination that would serve him well later in life. In the summer of 1913, when Korolev was six, an event occurred that would leave a lasting imprint on the melancholy child. “A poster appeared on the market square that announced that Pilot Utochkin would perform a flight for the public,” Maria recalled. No one in Nezhin had ever seen an airplane before; automobiles, at the time, were rare. “People were very excited. Some didn’t believe man could fly like a bird. The entire city turned out for the spectacle.”

  Perched on his granddad’s stout shoulders, little Sergei watched rapt as the small four-winged contraption careened down the dusty fields, bouncing fifty feet in the air before wobbling back to earth near a convent a few miles away. The sight of such a display of freedom stirred a powerful urge in the sheltered young boy, and he couldn’t stop “babbling” when he got home.

  “Mother, can you give me two new bed-sheets?”

  “What for?”

  “I will tie them to my arms and legs and climb to the top of the smokestack and fly.”

  “You’ll kill yourself.”

  “No, birds can fly.”

  “But birds have rigid wings.”

  Thus, according to family legend, was Korolev’s passion for flight ignited. His juvenile aspirations, though, were still relatively modest and did not yet soar beyond the clouds: he simply wanted to be a barnstorming pilot, a dashing daredevil with a white, flowing scarf. Perhaps it was the swagger, the star status, and the supreme self-confidence of early pilots like Utochkin that left such an indelible mark on a fatherless child desperately yearning for a male role model, the character traits that would form the bedrock of Korolev’s adult personality.

  In 1916 Sergei acquired both a father figure and the opportunity to nurture his growing obsession with aircraft. Maria remarried that year, to a kind and gentle railway engineer, and the family later relocated to Odessa, where Korolev’s new stepfather, Grigory Balanin, had been appointed to a senior position at the harbormaster’s office. Odessa was a rough-and-tumble port city of palm trees and prostitutes, smugglers and sailors. It had always enjoyed an exotically lawless reputation in czarist times as an entrepreneurial haven with an unusually cosmopolitan makeup; Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, and Ukrainians mingled easily with the resident representatives of virtually every Mediterranean seafaring culture. The city changed hands several times during the Bolshevik revolution, and a French detachment supporting the czar’s White Army was still stationed there when Maria, Sergei, and Balanin moved into a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the Black Sea. Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists began block-by-block battles for control of the ravaged town. Korolev’s school closed during the worst fighting, and food was in short supply. “Hunger, chaos, a city filled with refugees,” Maria recalled. “There were homeless children living in lobbies and courtyards, and the authorities changed frequently.”

  But there were also military aircraft, a squadron of plywood hydroplanes enticingly anchored within view of Sergei’s balcony, separated from the harbor traffic by a fence of barbed wire. For the young Korolev, the proximity was irresistible. He would swim out past the jetty, his mother wrote, and “hang onto the barbed wire for hours, as if mesmerized, watching with interest what was going on there. Once a mechanic shouted to him: ‘Well, what are you hanging around for? Why don’t you give me a hand? Can’t you see I’m having difficulty with this motor?’ That was all Sergei needed. He quickly crawled under the wire. Soon they got used to seeing him around in the detachment.”

  When the civil war finally ended in 1921 and classes resumed, Korolev found himself drawn to mathematics and drafting, a subject introduced by the new Soviet government. Still shy from the years of home schooling and the disruptions of war, Sergei did not socialize much. “He was not interested in small talk like the other kids,” according to his daughter, Natalia. Sports were never really interesting to him either; he joined the gymnastics team only because “he felt it was important to stay fit to become an aviator,” said his daughter.

  Discipline seemed to come easily to the fifteen-year-old future Chief Designer. “6:00AM Rise,” he recorded in his 1922 daily planner. “6:15: calisthenics; 6:30: Breakfast; 7-8:00AM Swim in the Sea; 8:30-1PM: School…” The morning swim, of course, was a euphemism for hanging out at the seaplane base, where by now he had become such a fixture that the pilots took him up regularly for rides. Prudently, he did not share this bit of potentially unsettling intelligence with his mother, though Maria suspected her son was up to something after he blurted out one day, “Oh Mother, if you could only see the clouds from the top.”

  It was in his senior year in 1924 that Sergei Korolev finally began to bloom. He joined an amateur aviation club, started to come out of his shell, and developed a belatedly healthy interest in girls. He was particularly smitten by a classmate of Italian ancestry, Ksenia Vincentini, a fiery brunette who would become a prominent surgeon and his first wife. Korolev also designed his first airplane as part of his drafting class graduation project, a glider that he ambitiously called the K-5, as in Korolev Five. The four earlier versions were presumably little more than doodles, but the design was good enough to be chosen by the Ukrainian Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation for construction. “That was the definitive moment for Sergei,” Maria proudly remembered, “when he chose his career.”

  Aeronautical engineering was still a relatively new field in 1925, and Korolev enrolled at the Polytechnical Institute of Kiev, which produced such graduates as Igor Sikorsky, the future helicopter designer. In Kiev, Korolev entered a small and obsessive community of aircraft builders, reveling in the heady, hands-on atmosphere, working late into the night and on weekends. He designed and built another glider, which he flew himself, and by his sophomore year his grades were good enough to transfer to the more prestigious Higher Technical School in Moscow, where his mother and stepfather had just moved from Odessa.

  In Moscow, Korolev studied under the great Andrei Tupolev, who was already emerging as Russia’s most prolific designer of large-frame aircraft. Under Tupolev, Korolev designed his first motorized cub plane as a graduation project in 1930. It was an ungainly snub-nosed craft with a squat twenty-two-foot fuselage and a top speed of one hundred miles per hour. He called it the SK-4 and proudly painted a dark racing stripe down the side of the prototype. Alas, the SK-4 crashed on its third flight. “To my dear friend Piotr Frolov,” Korolev inscribed a photo of the wreckage to a fellow student, “in memory of our joint collaboration on this unhappy machine.”

  The SK-4’s technical shortcomings showed Korolev’s limitations as a designer. He did not have the artistry, flair, or intuitive vision of others in his graduating class, and his first real job, working on hydroplanes, was not a particularly plum assignment. What Korolev did possess, however, was an uncanny knack for spotting talent, which he did during a chance encounter at a glider club outing in October 1931, when he met two rocket enthusiasts, Friedrich Tsander and Mikhail Tikhonravov. Tsander was a Latvian of German extraction, twenty years older than Korolev, and the founder of a rapidly growing volunteer rocket association called the Group for Studying Reaction Propulsion, or GIRD, whose branches would spread to ninety Soviet cities. Tsander had been a disciple of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and the au
thor of a popular tract on interplanetary travel. Eloquent and obsessed, sickly and impoverished, Tsander had a Rasputin-like hold on a legion of young Soviet scientists, who pooled funds to support his research.

  Tikhonravov, on the other hand, was shy and unassuming—his name fittingly translates as Quietman—and he was not blessed with the ephemeral qualities that make inspirational leaders. But he possessed acute faculties, a reputation for deep thoughts, and “the air of a man who had already sampled the mysteries of another planet,” in the words of the British historian Deborah Cadbury. Classically trained in French and Latin, Tikhonravov would coin the term cosmonaut, Latin for “space traveler,” leaving the United States to settle for the slightly less accurate astronaut, or “star traveler,” to distinguish its spacemen, though stars, of course, could not be traveled to.

  Tsander in 1931 had been working on a small rocket engine, and Korolev hit upon the idea of grafting it to a tailless, trapezoidal glider that he had used from time to time while training to qualify for his pilot’s license. The suggestion marked the first hint of where the future Chief Designer’s real talents lay: as an organizer, pulling together other people’s inventions. It was also his first spark of a dawning realization that rockets could have immediate and practical applications. Attached to wings, they could assist heavily loaded bombers to take off from short runways.

  Korolev threw himself into the project with his customary vigor, taking only a day off to marry Ksenia, his high school sweetheart from Odessa, in a rushed civil ceremony that set the low-priority tone for their unhappy union of competing careers. After a few hurried toasts, his bride boarded a train back to medical school in Ukraine, and Korolev returned to working on planes by day and rocket motors by night.

  Tsander died of typhus in 1933, but by then Korolev was hooked, spending all his spare time with Tikhonravov, who would become his lifelong collaborator. That same year, the pair launched Russia’s first liquid propellant rocket, the GIRD-09. It weighed forty-two pounds, flew 400 yards, and attracted the attention of the military. By the time of Natalia’s birth in 1935, Korolev’s hobby had become a profession. The Soviet authorities had created the Reaction Propulsion Institute, or RNII, to study the development of missiles, and Korolev was appointed senior engineer.