Starman
Page 7
The Soviets’ most famous launch station was built as close to the Equator as they could manage, so that the west–east rotation of the earth would impart extra energy to departing heavy rockets. On May 31, 1955, supervising engineer Vladimir Barmin and his men turned over the first clump of soil in one of the loneliest places on earth: a vast, utterly flat, barren steppe in the middle of the southern republic of Kazakhstan. The new complex was built around an old settlement called Tyura’tam, named by the nomad Kazakhs for the burial site of Genghis Khan’s beloved son Tyura, although another translation was ‘Arrow Burial Place’, which was not considered appropriate for a rocket-launching station. The Soviets swept aside the old name and called the place ‘Baikonur’, which was actually a small town 370 kilometres to the north-east. This was a bid to confuse the Western Intelligence agencies about the base’s location, although they discovered the truth as soon as the first R-7 ICBM prototype was successfully launched from Baikonur (after two failures) on August 3, 1957 and was monitored by radar stations in Turkey. Near the rocket base the Soviets founded a new city called Leninsk to house 100,000 Russian technicians, along with 30,000 soldiers to guard them.
Several metres of snow cover the steppe from October through to March, and blizzards are frequent. Only in April does the place become bearable, when the snow melts and the steppe comes into bloom for two or three weeks. As the flowers fade and the last of the meltwaters evaporate to leave shallow pools, the mosquitoes breed. Then, in the long summer, the earth hardens like brick, the heat is remorseless and sandstorms are a constant hazard for people and machines alike.
At first glance the engineers working on the Baikonur complex in 1955 could have been mistaken for political prisoners. They lived in tents, by turns freezing and sweltering, and their equipment was so inadequate that they had to start their work using just shovels and spades. Their first task was to run a triangular spur from the Moscow–Tashkent railway (which itself followed an ancient nomadic caravan route). While NASA supplied its launch centre in Florida with an endless succession of cargo planes, barges, helicopters and 16-wheel trucks cruising along smooth highways, the Soviets went into space by train. Only when the rail spur deep into the steppe was completed could proper construction machinery arrive at Baikonur.1
Within two years the construction workers completed an airport, a huge hangar bay where rockets could be assembled and checked under shelter, control blockhouses, and a support platform and flame trench for the base of the first launch tower. The 250-metre-long platform, supported on solid concrete pillars the height and size of apartment buildings, jutted out over the reinforced slope of an old mine working, like a giant balcony over a hillside. Rockets would be suspended by clamps with their engines pointing down through a large square hole in the platform, so that in the first moments of ignition the engines’ blazing exhaust products would shoot through the hole and down onto the slope, to be deflected harmlessly away from the pad.
Other launch pads soon followed, and over the next decade Baikonur’s various facilities sprawled across hundreds of square kilometres of the steppe. Until 1973 no American had ever seen this place, except as a vague pattern of rectangles, lines and shadows in high-altitude reconnaissance photos, taken at great risk by spy planes flying out of Turkey. In fact one of the worst embarrassments in the history of US reconnaissance occurred on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 aircraft was shot down over the Ural mountains. Its mission was to overfly Baikonur and photograph the launch pads. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and put on trial in Moscow, much to Khrushchev’s glee. The US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his last months of office, made empty protests about an unprovoked attack on ‘an American weather research aircraft flying from a base in Turkey’, which had ‘inadvertently strayed off-course’.2 Immediately Eisenhower banned any further U-2 overflights of Soviet territory.
In the wake of this humiliation, one of the most costly, secret and technologically sophisticated space efforts was born: the US spy-satellite programme, run largely by the CIA and the Department of Defense. Their projects came to be known as ‘black’, because nobody ever knew very much about them, despite budgets that matched, or even exceeded, the funds allocated to NASA’s more visible space exploration projects.3
No longer a secret, the first R-7 launch pads at Baikonur are still in operation today. Stars painted onto the metal gantries denote the number of launches – one star for every fifty launches. One gantry is decorated with six stars . . . This is the facility from which the world’s first manned space mission was launched. Today it despatches Soyuz crew-ferries to the orbiting Russian space station Mir.
Baikonur’s modern launch record is good, but the early years of the complex were dogged by failure. In particular, the six months prior to Vostok’s first manned launch were extremely discouraging. On October 10, 1960, Korolev’s robot probe Mars I reached a paltry 120 kilometres into the sky before falling back to earth like a damp squib. The base blocks of the R-7 booster fired according to plan, but the uppermost interplanetary stage, designed too hurriedly, failed to push the probe clear of the earth’s gravity. Four days later, a second probe fell back in the same way. At the time Nikita Khrushchev was attending a United Nations conference in New York. He had looked forward to boasting about the Mars project, but an urgent coded telegram from Moscow changed his mind. He was most upset.
In mid-October a new prototype rocket, the R-16, was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur. This was one of Mikhail Yangel’s military machines, designed as a replacement for Korolev’s R-7, which was proving somewhat frisky for space exploration and even worse as a strategic missile. If the Soviets were ever to deploy a truly credible force of ICBMs, they had to find a rocket capable of firing at much shorter notice. The R-7 was fine as it went, but it took at least five hours to fuel and prepare. The problem was its use of liquid oxygen, which was a highly efficient chemical when it was actually burning inside an engine, but would not keep for very long prior to launch. Inevitably, after a few hours it warmed up and turned from liquid to gas. The pressure in the tanks climbed towards bursting point and the accumulating gas had to be vented, then replaced with fresh supercold liquid. The longer an R-7 stood on the pad, the more the greedy creature needed replenishment.
The R-16 was designed to need far less preparation before launch, in keeping with the military’s need for a fast-response missile. It could be fuelled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because Yangel had disowned supercold liquid oxygen and kerosene in favour of nitric acid and hydrazine. These chemicals could be stored for long periods inside the rocket at normal pressures and temperatures, without venting or leakage. The R-16 could be kept on permanent standby in a secret silo, ready to strike the Americans at a moment’s notice. The only trouble was that its ‘storable’ fuels would not store. They were viciously corrosive and did just what they were not supposed to do – they leaked.
Thwarted by the Mars probe failures in October, Nikita Khrushchev remained quite determined to come up with a bold gesture for the United Nations conference, so he focused on Soviet military superiority. ‘We’re turning out missiles like sausages from a machine!’ he crowed. On his return to Moscow he pressured his Chief of Missile Deployment, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, to come up with a tangible demonstration of strength. Khrushchev wanted no damp squibs this time. Nedelin flew to Baikonur straight away to supervise the début launch of Yangel’s R-16 on October 23.
As zero-hour approached, the missile began to drip nitric acid from its base. What does a cosmodrome commander do when a fully fuelled rocket springs a leak? He drains its fuel away carefully and then pumps non-flammable nitrogen through the tanks to get rid of any lingering vapours. Next day he might send in a couple of brave technicians in heavy fire-suits to ‘safe’ the rocket, so that it can be taken down and checked. Instead, Nedelin sent dozens of ground staff to the pad straight away, to see if they could tighten up some valves, stop the
leaks, and get the R-16 up in the air. His instructions seemed so insane that the crews were at a loss how to proceed. In the firing blockhouse, the proper thing to do was to reset all the electronic sequencers and disarm them, before they could send any further ignition signals to the rocket. Nedelin ordered the firing sequences to be revised and delayed, but not cancelled. Somehow, a wrong command was transmitted to the R-16’s upper stage. Its engine fired, straight away burning a hole in the top of the stage beneath it. This lower stage exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage then crashed to the ground, spilling fuel and flame. The new tarmac aprons and roadways around the gantry melted in the heat, then caught fire. Ground staff fleeing for their lives were trapped in the viscous tar as it burned all around them. The conflagration spread for thousands of metres, a wave of fire engulfing everything and everyone in its path. More than 190 people were killed, including Nedelin, perched on his chair near the gantry, as a wall of blazing chemicals swept towards him.4
For thirty years the West knew little of this, although it was apparent from various Intelligence reports that something had gone awry. In particular, an American Discoverer spy satellite photographed Baikonur the day before and the CIA noted with interest the stacking of a new missile. On October 24, the Discoverer in its predetermined orbit overflew the site once again and recorded no gantry and no rocket, just a very large dark smudge despoiling the landscape. The rocket had exploded, but so what? American rockets also blew up from time to time. One had to expect the occasional bad day. The scale of the disaster was not immediately apparent because all news of it was suppressed. All of Soviet Russia was saddened to hear (eventually) that Marshal Nedelin and several other senior missile officers had been killed in an ‘aircraft accident’. Of course the absence of many familiar faces became obvious to thousands of space workers beyond Baikonur, but such unpleasant and difficult matters could be discussed only in private. The sudden disappearance of dozens of young military technicians from Yangel’s squad – most of them just nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old – was not so immediately apparent, except to their mothers.
Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts were told that a prototype missile – not one of Sergei Pavlovich’s ‘Little Sevens’ – had blown up and several technicians had been injured. No doubt they knew better, but for the time being they remained closeted from the worst of the horror in their training compound at Star City. In fact the explosion did not greatly delay preparations for Vostok. Surviving ground crews at Baikonur were able to continue their work. The pads, fuelling pipes and blockhouses assigned to the manned mission were not damaged, and few of Korolev’s most important technicians had been actively involved with the R-16.
Then, less than three weeks before the first manned flight, one of the cosmonauts was killed. Valentin Bondarenko was the baby of the group, a fresh-faced lad of twenty-four years. When his turn came to go into the isolation chamber, he handled his assignment very well. His was a fairly long session (fifteen days), to see how he made out. On March 23 he prepared to exit the chamber. They were running a ‘high-altitude’ regime, and the chamber had to be brought up to normal pressure very slowly, or Bondarenko would suffer from the ‘bends’. There was another half-hour to go before the supervising technicians could equalize the pressures and open the hatch. Bondarenko stretched, climbed out of his itchy woollen outer garment and peeled the medical sensor pads from his torso and upper arms with evident relief. He cleaned his irritated skin with pads of cotton daubed in alcohol. Perhaps he tossed the pads aside a little carelessly. One of them landed on the hotplate of the little cooking stove and caught alight. In the confined, oxygen-rich environment of the chamber, the fire spread with terrifying rapidity.
They pulled him out, covered in burns and in great pain. ‘It’s my fault! I’m so sorry!’ he cried. The doctors struggled for eight hours to save him, but his injuries were too extreme. The circumstances of his death were not made public until 1986.5
There was one aspect of space flight for which the cosmonauts at Star City had no practical means of preparing themselves in advance: weightlessness. Korolev and his advisors were not keen to allow their first manned spacecraft to drift in space for longer than a single orbit, because no one was sure that its passenger could survive an entire day without the normal sensation of gravity.
Weightlessness presented a tremendous psychological barrier for the early Soviet space programme. The only earth-bound opportunity to taste the sensation was in the 28-storey lift shaft at Moscow State University, one of the city’s tallest buildings. There was a special cage that fell freely down the shaft and slammed into compressed-air buffers at the bottom of its drop. The cosmonauts might float freely of the cage’s floor for two or three seconds at best. Korolev’s guidance specialist Yuri Mazzhorin explains, ‘It was our first dive into an ocean of uncertainty. We were afraid of everything. That’s why Sergei Pavlovich was in favour of a gradual approach. For the first human space mission, one circle. The next flight, twenty-four hours. The next, three days, to see how a person would survive.’
American astronauts at NASA flew long parabolic arcs aboard Boeing 707 jet planes. These craft were essentially cargo-carrying airliners, but with all the seats and storage crates stripped out, so that the interior cabin was a capacious free space. The astronauts could float free of the walls for perhaps two minutes at a time – more than enough to eliminate the sinister mystique of weightlessness. The Russians never thought to use their cargo planes in this way, at least not in the early 1960s. Trainee cosmonauts experienced thirty seconds or so of near-weightlessness while jerking about in the back seat of a MiG-15 fighter aircraft flying a similar parabolic arc, but it was barely more useful than plunging down the lift shaft at Moscow State University. Titov recalls the MiG experience being uncomfortable and unsatisfactory, and so short that it was not much more than he was used to on ordinary combat training missions. ‘When you’re performing an advanced manoeuvre and not doing it well, you might get something similar, and all the dirt and dust on the cockpit’s floor flies into your face. These short bursts aren’t weightlessness as such. It’s very different [in space] when you have to live in a weightless environment for long periods.’ What’s more, the MiG cockpits were so cramped that there was little chance to float about in any meaningful way.
The Soviets’ dread of weightlessness remained unconquered, at least for now. Calculations were made to fire Vostok’s braking rockets well within its first orbit, which would keep the period of weightlessness to a minimum. However, there was the remote possibility that the craft might be stuck in orbit for several more circuits, because of a failure in the retro-rockets. Andy Aldrin neatly sums up the risk faced by the world’s first space traveller: ‘In an orbital trajectory what happens is you go up and around the earth, and then the rocket that got you up there has to work again to slow you down and bring you back in. If that doesn’t work, you end up with a man orbiting the earth for ever and essentially dying . . . Korolev’s designers suggested a safer sub-orbital trajectory for the first manned attempt, but he made it clear he didn’t want to beat the Americans by such a little margin. He wanted to beat them by a lot.’
Vostok’s air supply (sixteen spherical gas tanks, alternating nitrogen and oxygen reservoirs wrapped in a ‘necklace’ around the join between the ball and the equipment module) would last for a maximum of ten days. The ship’s orbit was deliberately designed to skim the outermost layers of the earth’s atmosphere so that, in the event of a serious problem, natural atmospheric friction would slow the craft down within a few days. It was a gamble whether or not this would happen before the cosmonaut ran out of air, water and food.
With help from Academician Keldysh and his computers in Moscow, Mazzhorin calculated that Vostok’s re-entry ball could be recovered safely at the end of its first orbit, so long as the braking rockets in the rear equipment module functioned without incident. But even if these rockets were in g
ood shape, there was a chance that the braking manoeuvre might have to be delayed while Vostok’s orientation was fine-tuned. In theory the retro-systems could be fired at any time, but there was no guarantee that they would bring the capsule down anywhere within Soviet-held territory.
Vostok’s orbit was inclined to the Equator by sixty-five degrees. Each orbit, west to east, took ninety minutes. Meanwhile the earth rotated at its own steady pace beneath the ship, once every twenty-four hours. As a consequence the craft did not fly the same path over the ground each time. The mathematics of the situation were clear. The best opportunities for a good homecoming occurred one hour into the first orbit, or else a whole day later, halfway through orbit seventeen. Firing the retro-rockets during any other orbit would risk bringing the craft down into the sea, or on foreigners’ land; in which case, the embarrassment could be severe. Secrets of technology might be revealed; corrupt capitalists might claim the glory for ‘rescuing’ a cosmonaut within their own borders.
Eventually the solutions to these potential propaganda problems were sealed within three envelopes, addressed to the official news agency TASS in Moscow. The various enclosed documents were prepared by Mazzhorin, doubling not just as a guidance mapper but also as a propaganda officer. He had such a detailed understanding of how and where the ball might come down, at the end of its flight, that it seemed appropriate for him to work out what measures should be taken if it actually did descend onto foreign soil. If this calamity occurred, then TASS would be instructed to tear open the appropriate envelope and broadcast its contents. Mazzhorin was also instructed to prepare for the very worst-case scenarios. If the capsule blew up in space, or the ball sprang a leak, then the press statements would have to be tailored accordingly to make the best of the situation. It seemed wise to consider all possibilities and prepare the various announcements in advance. ‘We prepared three envelopes for TASS, with different announcements,’ says Mazzhorin. ‘Envelope number one in case of a full success. Number two for a forced landing over foreign territory. Number three for a catastrophe. People in the television and radio stations were waiting. When we saw the cosmonaut had made it into orbit, and we had data, altitude, inclination and orbital period, the Kremlin could order TASS to open envelope number one.’