Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  In a sense, the TKS was part spacecraft and part logistics module. Once it was docked with the Almaz at an aft port on the space station (behind the main solar arrays), the resulting spacecraft would have about two-thirds more useable internal volume than the original Almaz, and the TKS would become an integral part of the complex. Its fuel supplies would be used for orbital reboosting, and its solar arrays would augment the original Almaz ones, as solar cells gradually lose their electrical generation capability over time. In the cargo area, updated equipment could be sent up for refits of the station. Film was provided for the Agat camera, while food, water, and other consumables would replenish the cosmonauts’ vital supplies.

  The TKS could also be launched unmanned, which meant that mission planners could use the vehicle to extend a mission if it were proceeding well with the original crew. The second return capsule could then be used to send developed pictures, recording cassettes, or other experiment packages home for more thorough analysis on the ground by Soviet intelligence agencies. As an added bonus, the FGB section of a TKS could remain operational while docked with Almaz, even after the VA capsule had returned home. With support from a TKS ferry, an Almaz station could potentially remain in orbit for a lot longer than thirty days, and multiple TKS launches could potentially allow Almaz missions to last over a year.

  Two Major Shake-ups

  In late 1964, things were going well for OKB-52. The bureau had produced cruise missiles for the Soviet navy, continued development work on the UR-100 and UR-200 ICBMs, and had just been granted approval to build the UR-500 and Almaz. But things were transpiring behind the scenes to shake up the Soviet space industry as a whole and affect the direction the country would take in response to American plans for spaceflight.

  The first event occurred on 14 October 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power as the Soviet premier and First Secretary by members of the Presidium and Central Committee in a move led by Leonid Brezhnev. The reasons given for the change were “policy failures” during Khrushchev’s tenure, but the main trigger for the ouster was the Cuban Missile Crisis two years earlier. At the end of the crisis, Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for the United States reciprocating from its missile bases in Turkey and Italy.

  Khrushchev had developed many political enemies during his time in office, since military leaders were affronted by his planned cutbacks for the military (many of which had already taken place) and since political leaders did not like his compromises with Western nations. Khrushchev’s advanced age and behaviors were also of concern to other Communist Party officials. While the premier was still sharp mentally, physically he began to tire more easily. Indeed, Khrushchev seemed to know his days were numbered and did nothing to impede the process of his ouster. Instead, he lamented that for the future of the Soviet Union, it was good that he should go quietly like this, rather than be carted off and summarily executed as Beria had been or perhaps poisoned as Stalin was rumored to have been, instead of dying from a stroke as official sources had stated.

  In Khrushchev’s place, Alexei Kosygin assumed the role of Soviet premier, while Brezhnev became First Secretary of the Central Committee in the collective leadership roles. The reason for the joint leadership was that a plenum of the Soviet Central Committee forbade any member after Khrushchev holding both positions, as they did not want one individual to have that much power again.

  Khrushchev’s dramatic removal from power affected Chelomei’s ambitions, as it meant that the designer had lost his greatest political ally and was now unsure how the new leaders would accept him. By the middle part of 1964, it had been decided that Yangel’s R-36 ICBM would become the new rocket in the strategic Soviet arsenal. While continued development work on the UR-200 was suspended, enough of them had been built that OKB-52 was allowed to use them in trial launches. Chelomei used this as a means of testing the waters, believing there was always a chance that such a decision favoring the R-36 might be reversed and potentially the UR-200 could still gain approval for operational deployment.

  In previous years, Chelomei had been able to call Khrushchev directly to report the results of his test launches, and the premier accepted the news happily. Now, though, he had no idea how the new leadership might respond. After a successful launch of the UR-200 a little over a week after Khrushchev was removed from office, a nervous Chelomei placed a call to Kosygin. He hadn’t bothered to phone Brezhnev, as Ustinov was a friend of the new First Secretary; Kosygin’s official role as the chairman of the Council of Ministers still held sway in matters of national defense. Kosygin accepted Chelomei’s report and told him that in the future he should only report to his own minister, Sergey Afanasyev, the newly appointed head of the Ministry of General Machine Building (MOM), and not call again. Chelomei reportedly held on to the phone receiver for a few moments after Kosygin had hung up, listening to the static.

  In early 1966 another event took place. OKB-1 was considered to be somewhat overcommitted in the projects they had taken on, as work on both the N1 and the Soyuz spacecraft were falling behind schedule. However, there was still some optimism that chief designer Sergei Korolev would help see things through to a successful conclusion and that the Soviets would beat America to the moon. It was not to be, though. On 16 January 1966, only two days after his sixtieth birthday, Korolev underwent surgery to remove a polyp from his colon. The polyp turned out to be a cancerous tumor, and its removal led to heavy blood loss. Korolev’s heart, already weakened as a result of his imprisonment in the gulags three decades earlier, had experienced at least one heart attack in 1960, and his workaholic lifestyle wasn’t helping matters. Given the stress associated with major blood loss, his heart stopped beating completely, and the attending surgeons were barely able to get it restarted. Then they were unable to insert an airway into Korolev’s lungs due to an improperly healed broken jaw, a byproduct of his harsh treatment at the hands of the NKVD. Korolev never regained consciousness and died a few hours later. The only consolation coming from his death was that the Soviet leadership subsequently revealed his name and achievements to the Soviet people and the rest of the world. In death, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev finally received belated official and public recognition for the incredible successes of Soviet spaceflight for which he was mostly responsible—an overdue acclaim that he was denied in life.

  Following the death of Korolev, his deputy, Vasily Mishin, was placed in charge of OKB-1. While Mishin was a competent designer, his management style was quite different, lacking the sheer will and determination of Korolev. It was up to Mishin to manage the efforts of OKB-1’s Soyuz spacecraft and the N1 booster, while at the same time overseeing how subcontracted elements from other bureaus would integrate properly into OKB-1’s designs. Mishin tended to take a far more cautious approach to design and testing than his predecessor; many individuals, including several cosmonauts, feel this is how the Soviet Union lost the moon race.

  In March 1965, at the direction of the MOM, OKB-1 was renamed, becoming the Central Design Bureau of General Machine Building (TsKBEM). At the same time, OKB-52 became the Central Design Bureau of Machine Building (TsKBM). No doubt the name changes were brought about to help confuse Western intelligence agencies. At the same time, Dmitry Ustinov became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, responsible for management of defense and space issues.

  Looking at the size of both design bureaus, TsKBEM had six hundred thousand engineers and workers at its disposal, while TsKBM had only eight thousand. That Chelomei’s group would have any hope of being able to secure development work for future space projects, with Khrushchev no longer in charge and Ustinov’s role in government management, seemed almost like a David-versus-Goliath task. But Chelomei’s success in military circles continued to gain some allies. Sergey Afanasyev, the newly appointed minister in charge of the MOM, also seemed to hold the technical capabilities of Chelomei and his design bureau in high regard. Through government decrees,
work continued on both the UR-500 Proton and the Almaz station, mainly because of continued U.S. efforts on the MOL project.

  Changes were in store for Almaz. During early work to refine the Almaz design, it gained so much weight that it could not be launched with a manned VA capsule attached. As a consequence, the design was altered, allowing the crew to be delivered on a TKS spacecraft once the station had achieved orbit. However, given the work needed to develop the TKS with TsKBM’s relative inexperience in designing manned systems, they rapidly fell behind schedule. A solution was found in pairing Almaz with a ferry version of the Soyuz spacecraft. TsKBEM had been working on a military space station based on the Soyuz design, since early 1964, only a few months after the United States announced the MOL project. The Soyuz-based station wouldn’t have been as large as the Almaz, mainly because it was only intended to be launched by the R-7 booster. In order to man the station, a ferry version of the Soyuz was needed to take cosmonauts to it.

  A ferry version of a craft can be very different from one designed to take an active part in a mission from beginning to end. To begin with, the vehicle has to be able to survive in a powered-down state for a lengthy period of time and potentially handle extreme temperatures with no active thermal control capability. Secondly, the longevity of the systems aboard the craft also have to be taken into account; if a vehicle remains in orbit longer than its certified design life, the risk of a critical systems failure increases. With the TKS spacecraft, the intent was for the FGB node of the craft to become an active part of the space station with its power-generation capabilities and systems operating the entire time. With the exception of its solar arrays being used to augment the power-generating capabilities of the station, a Soyuz ferry needed to remain in hibernation, not becoming active until the time came to return home.

  Plans were therefore drawn up for an interim configuration of the Almaz, redesigned to dock with the Soyuz ferry. This would allow the Almaz to potentially be launched before the TKS spacecraft was even ready to fly. But there was some risk involved in that decision as it also meant that the Almaz program was now tied directly with the Soyuz program and would be affected by delays encountered during development of the Soyuz. It also meant that the first Almaz stations could not be resupplied and have their systems augmented by those of the more capable TKS spacecraft. It would be nearly impossible to resupply a large quantity of film for the Agat camera or keep the station’s power-generation requirements in check with the smaller solar arrays found on the Soyuz. Essentially, the early Almaz stations would become single-mission vehicles, much like the MOL vehicles they had been designed to counter.

  On the lunar-program side, additional changes were in store for both design bureaus. While TsKBEM continued work on the N1 and associated hardware for a planned lunar landing, they were tasked with using Chelomei’s Proton booster to launch a stripped-down version of Soyuz that would conduct a manned flyby of the moon. This entailed a single loop around the moon with no attempt to enter lunar orbit, and the craft would head back to Earth on a free-return trajectory. This craft eventually became known to the West as the Zond (Russian for “Probe”) spacecraft. Chelomei had already been given approval to develop his LOK spacecraft for a similar mission when Khrushchev was in power, but the LOK was ultimately canceled in favor of the Soyuz-based design. Again, it meant that the potential success of yet another program was tied directly with development of the Soyuz.

  11. Almaz was altered to allow Soyuz spacecraft to dock with it. Courtesy of the author.

  In November 1966 the first unmanned Soyuz test craft was launched as Cosmos 133. The vehicle achieved orbit as planned, but its control system malfunctioned, leading to a rapid loss of the craft’s attitude-control fuel. Attempts were made over a two-day period to deorbit the craft. Finally, the ground controllers were successful, but when it was determined that the Soyuz would land in China, the order was given to destroy the craft using a self-destruct system.

  A little over two weeks later, attempts were made to launch a second Soyuz spacecraft on an unmanned test flight. The countdown went flawlessly until the moment of ignition, when the engines shut down. As puzzled technicians arrived at the pad and the gantries were moved back into place, the escape rockets from the Soyuz launch abort system suddenly fired, carrying the spacecraft away from the booster to a perfect landing under parachutes. Flames belching from the escape rocket ignited the still-fueled third stage and set it on fire. Engineers and technicians, including Mishin, ran for cover before the rocket exploded about two minutes later. Thankfully, unlike the Nedelin launchpad disaster in which an exploding Soviet booster killed dozens of pad workers in the fall of 1960, there was only one fatality from this incident, although several others received seriously injuries. Since the Soyuz craft never made it into orbit, it was never assigned a Cosmos mission number, and the failure was never publicly acknowledged.

  Results were more encouraging in February 1967 with the launch of Cosmos 140. The craft encountered attitude-control problems, but it remained in control without a complete loss of fuel. When the time came for retrofire, though, the craft reentered the atmosphere in a ballistic trajectory, and the resulting g-forces would have killed any crewmembers on board. The descent module survived the fiery extremes of reentry, and the parachutes deployed as planned. But then it smashed through an ice layer covering the Aral Sea, sinking down ten meters into water hundreds of kilometers off target. Divers were able to recover the craft for later study by engineers. The flight was considered to be of sufficient success that approval was given for a manned test flight. On 23 April 1967 Soyuz 1 launched into orbit with cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov at the start of a particularly ambitious flight plan. One day later, Soyuz 2 was to have been launched with a three-man crew of Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov, and Aleksei Yeliseyev to rendezvous and dock with its sister ship. Once docked, it was intended that Khrunov and Yeliseyev would conduct a transfer EVA over to Soyuz 1, enter the craft, and return to Earth with Komarov, leaving Bykovsky to return home alone aboard Soyuz 2. In this flight, the Soviets had planned to duplicate many of the mission goals NASA’s now-completed Gemini program had already achieved. The space walk was of critical importance, as the planned lunar landing required one cosmonaut to conduct an EVA to transfer from a Soyuz craft to the lunar lander, since the early Soyuz docking system had no pressurized tunnel to allow for an internal crew transfer.

  Komarov immediately ran into problems once Soyuz 1 reached orbit when one of the two solar arrays jammed during deployment. As these arrays were the only electrical power generation for the Soyuz, it led to other problems. On the ground, the Soyuz 2 crew were making preparations to fly with an added goal of trying to repair the stuck solar array on Soyuz 1, in addition to their other tasks. That night, thunderstorms near the Baikonur launchpad caused lightning strikes that affected the R-7 rocket’s electrical systems. Plans to launch the next morning were scrubbed.

  Meanwhile, for Komarov, things had gone from bad to worse. By the thirteenth orbit, the automatic stabilization control system was completely dead, and the manual backup system was only partially effective. Orientation detectors on the craft were also malfunctioning due to the power-generation problems, making it hard to determine the correct attitude of the spacecraft. Plans were made to terminate the mission, and Komarov executed a manual retrofire on the eighteenth orbit. After the successful reentry, a drogue chute jettisoned and slowed the craft, but the main parachute did not deploy. Komarov manually fired the reserve chute, but it became tangled in the drogue chute. Soyuz 1 crashed back to Earth at around ninety miles per hour, killing Komarov on impact. Retro-rockets, intended to cushion the shock of touchdown, were triggered on impact, starting a small blaze. By the time rescue helicopters arrived at the scene, little remained of Soyuz 1 apart from some smoldering wreckage.

  As it turned out, if Soyuz 2 had flown, there would likely have been four fatalities, not just one. A postcrash investigation revealed that there was
a serious defect in the application of the ablative-material coating in that craft’s descent module. Normally the coating was applied with a set of covers installed over the descent module’s parachute compartments. On Soyuz 1 and 2 the covers were apparently left off, and some material was applied inside the openings for the parachutes. This material restricted the size of the openings, so when the main parachutes were packed inside, they were a much tighter fit than intended. This made it extremely difficult for them to deploy and open under normal operation.

  The loss of Soyuz 1 meant that there was a lengthy delay to all projects dependent on the Soyuz vehicle, including the Almaz. Work continued on the Zond craft, and it completed several unmanned flights in 1968, with a couple of successful flybys of the moon. Despite these successes, the Zond still was far from perfect, and Mishin was reluctant to risk a cosmonaut crew. The manned lunar-flyby mission was quietly canceled a few months after Apollo 8 and its three-man crew flew to the moon, orbited ten times, and returned home in December 1968.

  As for the N1 booster, Chelomei’s predictions about it proved to be correct. Due to the slipping schedule and in order to keep costs down, the N1 was never static tested on the ground as the Saturn boosters had been. This meant that flight-testing was absolutely critical. The first N1 booster was stacked at the launchpad in May 1968, but cracks were found in the first stage structure, and the booster was rolled back to its preparation facility at Baikonur for repairs. History records that it didn’t roll back quickly enough, as an American surveillance satellite shot photographs of it, revealing to the West what plans the Soviets had for the moon. The revelation of that first N1 booster was allegedly a major part of NASA’s decision to send Apollo 8 to the moon at the end of 1968.