by Jay Chladek
Two unmanned launches of the N1 were attempted in 1969. The first launch went well early on as the vehicle cleared the tower. The first stage engines were commanded to throttle down during the period of maximum dynamic pressure (max q) at the twenty-five-second mark. At sixty-five seconds, they were commanded to throttle up again. But the result was too sudden, and unanticipated vibrations ruptured LOX pipes near a gas generator. A fire broke out, and all engines were shut down within five seconds. The launch abort system on top of the rocket successfully pulled the unmanned Soyuz craft away to safety, but the N1 continued on a ballistic path and fell back to Earth about forty-five kilometers downrange from the launchpad.
The outcome was much worse on the second launch attempt. On 3 July 1969 the second N1 lifted off the launchpad, reaching an altitude of about two hundred feet before what was believed to be a loose bolt was ingested by a fuel pump. The onboard control system detected the problem, but instead of commanding just one or two engines associated with that pump to cease operating, it shut down twenty-nine of the thirty motors. As a result, the almost fully fueled N1 toppled and came crashing back down on the pad. The ensuing explosion almost completely destroyed the pad and heavily damaged an adjacent pad where another N1 was stacked—presumably for a manned attempt if the flight had been successful. The massive damage set the Soviet lunar program back by about two years.
A little over a week after the second N1 launch ended in failure, Apollo 11 successfully made it to the moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first humans from planet Earth to set foot on the lunar soil. While the Soviets had yet to give up entirely on the goal of landing a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon, they now began to look for alternative ways to achieve another space first.
One of the alternatives under consideration was a manned civilian space station. For that to happen, however, it would take a high degree of cooperation between two design bureaus that were considered rivals. Such cooperation would also be against the wishes of both Vasily Mishin and Vladimir Chelomei. Nevertheless, a plan was being formulated by some middle-level engineers and managers to try to do just that, in a way that was so un-Soviet-like that nobody could have expected or predicted it.
3
Salyut
In 1969 the Soviet space program was at a crossroads. On the manned-spacecraft side, the Soyuz spacecraft had chalked up a success as Soyuz 3 flew with Georgi Beregovoy at the controls on 26 October 1968. It was intended to rendezvous and dock with an unmanned Soyuz 2, although it only succeeded with the rendezvous. Still, Soyuz 3 managed to return to Earth successfully after a four-day mission, showing that the flaws that had contributed to Komarov’s death had been properly addressed.
On 16 January 1969 Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 succeeded in completing the tasks that were first intended for Komarov’s flight: docking and EVA transfer of two crewmembers. Yevgeny Khrunov and Aleksei Yeliseyev left their crewmember Boris Volynov in Soyuz 5 and spacewalked across to Soyuz 4. The two men then entered Soyuz 4 and returned home with its commander, Vladimir Shatalov.
Soyuz 4’s return went well, but the same could not be said for Soyuz 5. After retrofire, the service module did not cleanly separate from the descent module, and Soyuz 5 with cosmonaut Volynov on board began a front-first reentry. Volynov revealed in interviews conducted nearly three decades after the incident that he was hanging in the harness of his craft watching the front of the Soyuz cabin distort from the heat when the remaining struts holding the two modules together finally tore away. The descent module then righted itself and came through the rest of reentry just fine. Volynov was not out of danger, though. The main parachute initially didn’t open fully, although it eventually did. The craft also hit the ground at a higher-than-normal speed since the braking rockets didn’t fire. Volynov’s seat harness broke at impact, and he broke some teeth as his face was smashed against the instrument panel. But he survived to fly in space again.
With rendezvous and docking still a big part of the planned lunar-landing mission (once the N1 rocket’s problems were solved), the Soviets needed all the experience they could get. So they attempted to set more records on their next mission. Georgi Shonin and Valery Kubasov would fly Soyuz 6 and attempt to observe and film the docking between Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8. Soyuz 7 would be crewed with Anatoly Filipchenko, Vladislav Volkov, and research cosmonaut Viktor Gorbatko. Soyuz 8 would include Soyuz 4 veteran pilot Vladimir Shatalov and EVA veteran Aleksei Yeliseyev. The plan again was for cosmonauts to spacewalk from one craft to the other after docking.
All three craft launched normally, but the Igla rendezvous system was unable to achieve a lock between Soyuz 7 and 8. Two attempts were made at manual docking. But without the Igla, Shatalov (flying the actively docking spacecraft) could not use the main engines to close the distance quickly and had to rely on thrusters only. It was very hard to judge distances manually due to sun glare out the portholes, so the two craft were never able to dock. Soyuz 6 was able to get close enough to see Soyuz 8 at one point, but it was not equipped with a docking probe or an Igla rendezvous system and could not make a close approach safely. It was a costly effort for what was ultimately reported in Soviet papers as a successful attempt to set records for the largest number of spacecraft and people flown simultaneously in space by one country.
Soyuz 6 had one secondary objective to achieve, the first testing of on-orbit welding techniques. The size and weight of the welding equipment in the orbital module was the main reason why Soyuz 6 was not equipped with a docking capability. Early plans called for an engineer from the Electrical Welding Institute in Kiev to accompany the experiment in orbit, since they designed the equipment. But when the weight of the passenger and the equipment became too heavy to fly both, the task of its operation fell to Kubasov.
After the hatches were sealed and the OM (orbital module) was depressurized to conduct the tests, Kubasov activated the experiment. The Vulkan welding experiment tested out three types of arc and electron-beam welding over various types of metals from aluminum to stainless steel. The cosmonauts monitored the progress while the ground received the data. When done, the OM was repressurized, and Kubasov went in to inspect the work. A stray arc from the experiment almost ended up burning a hole in the OM, which could have vented the atmosphere into space. Upon seeing the damage, the crew immediately sealed the hatch again in case a breach was imminent. But after a few minutes of monitoring with no sign of a loss in cabin pressure, Kubasov went back and retrieved the samples. Soyuz 6 safely returned to Earth later that day.
The lack of a successful docking put a dark cloud over the whole mission. Fingers were pointed back and forth between Gen. Nikolai Kamanin, who was in charge of the cosmonaut corps at Star City, and Mishin, the head of TsKBEM, while trying to determine whether the rendezvous failure was due to poor equipment design or poor training. No answer was found to the other’s satisfaction, and this feud of sorts would continue for quite some time.
Meanwhile at Chelomei’s TsKBM bureau, design and construction of the first Almaz station cores were progressing, albeit at a slower pace than what Afanasyev and Ustinov would have liked. When the dictate was made for the first Almaz stations to use the Soyuz ferry while design work continued on the TKS spacecraft, Chelomei resisted the idea. So when designs from TsKBEM came over showing what equipment was needed for incorporation of the Soyuz docking system, Chelomei would reduce the work down to a bare minimum. He did not want any unnecessary equipment from Mishin’s bureau to mess up his station.
If the relationship between Chelomei and Sergei Korolev was considered cordial when Korolev was alive, Chelomei and Mishin’s relationship was a much more contentious one, as both men seemed to despise one another. The problems did not go unnoticed by Ustinov. He commented that it seemed as if both designers were acting like children and using their bureaus as their own personal “principalities.” Yet in order to fly Almaz at the soonest possible time, the two men needed to work together . . . or did they? Even if Chelomei�
�s station were to fly successfully, there was another problem. Almaz was still a classified military project.
The Birth of Salyut
At this point, serious looks were made at NASA’s plans for the space station, which would ultimately become known as Skylab. The Americans were making preparations to convert the S-IVB stage of their Saturn boosters into an orbital space habitat. After launching it into orbit, astronauts would use it to set endurance records of one to three months in space while conducting various experiments.
A small group of engineers at TsKBEM led by Boris Raushenbakh looked at whether or not a similar station conversion might be possible with an R-7 rocket, using it to beat the Americans and score yet another space first. But with the mass of such a station and the long-term nature of equipment required for record-setting missions, there were concerns that TsKBEM’s engineers would not be able to come up with the larger on-orbit engines required for reboosting of such a heavy structure when its orbit began to decay.
Enter designer and deputy chief Boris Chertok into the mix. A senior man at the bureau since the earliest days of OKB-1, he was responsible for control and guidance issues for rockets and spacecraft. Chertok was also the number-four man in charge at TsKBEM behind Mishin, Sergei Okhapkin, and Konstantin Bushuyev. Chertok knew that engines designed for Soyuz weren’t powerful enough for a station. But his friend Aleksei Isayev, chief designer of OKB-2 (renamed Himmash in 1966), might be able to provide what was needed.
Boris Chertok and Aleksei Isayev’s friendship went back to just before the Second World War. Back then, Isayev was working on a rocket-powered aircraft design for use in attempts to break several speed and altitude records. Chertok was brought on somewhat early in the project to provide additional input. A few days after the design was formally submitted, Germany invaded Russia, and priority was given to building weapons of war instead of setting records. The design was adapted to become a rocket-powered fighter plane; although it underwent extensive flight-testing, it did not make it into operational use.
Even without an operational fighter to his credit, Isayev learned valuable lessons about designing rocket engines and fuel tanks. At the end of the war, Isayev and Chertok both accompanied Sergei Korolev to Germany to help recover useable materials from the V2 rocket program. Both men later took part in Korolev’s early postwar rocketry work.
When asked by Chertok about a new engine design, Isayev replied that his bureau had already designed larger engines for Chelomei’s Almaz space station. This revelation spawned another idea. To this small group of engineers, the idea seemed like a logical one—take the unfinished Almaz and adapt the proven systems of the Soyuz spacecraft to it, resulting in a space station that could potentially fly before the American Skylab.
As the proposal moved forward, Konstantin Feoktistov was brought into the mix. Feoktistov was the design head on the Soyuz spacecraft. Before Soyuz, he was involved in modifying the Vostok spacecraft so that three men could fly it into orbit as the Voskhod. He was also one of the three cosmonauts who flew on the first Voskhod flight. Therefore, he was one of the few spacecraft engineers out there with both design and spaceflight experience.
12. Konstantin Feoktistov risked his career to get a civilian space station program approved for development.
With Feoktistov’s involvement, his immediate boss and the number-three man at TsKBEM, Konstantin Bushuyev, was made aware of this “conspiracy” as it were. Bushuyev was not in favor of approaching Mishin about the project, as he knew Mishin would reject it outright. Chelomei would also resist any attempts to appropriate his Almaz for use by a rival design bureau, and MOM minister Sergey Afanasyev would likely reject the idea as well, since it might mean a delay in getting Almaz ready for flight.
While Chertok, Bushuyev, and Feoktistov were enthusiastic about getting backing for their proposal, they were at a loss for who would give the approval to proceed. Outside the hierarchy of TsKBEM, there was one man who could give their plan the proper endorsement, and that was Dmitry Ustinov. It was highly irregular for anyone under the level of a chief designer to have direct contact with Ustinov, unless they had been given prior approval to do so.
While the group wanted to schedule a meeting with Ustinov, there was reluctance to make the call due to potential political backlash if the project was rejected. Feoktistov decided to arrange the meeting himself, since he was already considered to be outspoken and something of a maverick anyway. Feoktistov was not a member of the Communist Party either, meaning his effort carried an even greater risk. Still, he made the phone call and, surprisingly, was successful in being granted a meeting with Ustinov to propose the idea.
In late 1969 the meeting with Ustinov took place. All the engineers involved in the space station design study were present, as was Sergei Okhapkin, who was responsible for development work on the N1 rocket for Mishin’s bureau. All the senior leadership from TsKBEM were present except for Mishin himself. Mishin was on vacation at the time, so he was conveniently not invited. Chelomei was in the hospital for a medical condition and similarly unavailable as well. Afanasyev was present at the meeting, as were other high-ranking government members directly involved with Soviet space policy. Feoktistov himself reportedly made the formal pitch and laid out the benefits of the plan.
By using an Almaz station core along with the already-proven systems of the Soyuz spacecraft—such as the solar panels and the support and guidance systems—a new space station could potentially be ready for flight in about a year. Such a project would still involve a fair amount of work to integrate and test everything properly. But the engineering group was confident they could do it if given the approval.
Ustinov liked what he heard. While Almaz would be ready to fly by 1972, the schedule was tight, and program delays might cause the schedule to slip behind Skylab’s. Almaz was also a military project, so it couldn’t easily be unveiled to the world without potentially revealing its true purpose. Ustinov also liked the idea of being able to stick it to Chelomei as payback for Chelomei’s courting of leaders to get what he wanted in years past. While Ustinov had to accept Chelomei’s Almaz project, it didn’t mean he had to necessarily back it to the exclusion of all else.
Ustinov asked Sergei Okhapkin if this project might impact work on the N1. The answer was no, as a totally different team of engineers was working on the N1. Afanasyev voiced no objection either as Ustinov wanted only one design bureau (TsKBEM) to work on coordinating this “civilian” station project so there would be minimal impact on Almaz after the initial hardware transfer. The task would fall on a group from TsKBEM to oversee the work. All the team would need were some unfinished Almaz space station cores so they could get started and a Proton rocket to launch it into orbit. Cosmonauts to fly the missions were plentiful, as the ranks were flush with candidates training for the Zond and lunar-landing missions.
The relative ease by which this back-channel proposal gained endorsement and approval came as a pleasant surprise. It was almost a perfect storm of timing and luck. It was green-lighted almost immediately with an official decree signed early in 1970. The Soviets craved a new space success, as opposed to following in the footsteps of where the United States had gone before. General Secretary Brezhnev was also looking for something to downplay the successes of the United States and NASA on the moon. So this project had the potential of giving him yet another prestigious Soviet spaceflight first.
Naturally, the reactions from Chelomei and Mishin when they heard about the project were not exactly positive. They spoke with one voice in saying that they did not want to partner up in the creation of a long-duration space station. But the Kremlin’s decree was firm. Chelomei got assurances that the new station would not further delay work on the Almaz. At least Chelomei could get valuable test data from the flight. But the rival design bureau would be given credit for this project, and that did not sit well with him. Mishin, on the other hand, was very furious that his top engineers had gone behind his back to do this p
roject, and he threatened to send anyone else not already connected with the station project “to hell” if they occupied themselves with work in support of it.
At this point, the station became known as the DOS (a Russian acronym meaning “Long-Duration Orbital Station”). The small design team at TsKBEM now had a decree to do work and a plan, but they needed additional manpower to implement it. They found some from Chelomei’s TsKBM factory in the town of Fili. The Fili factory had once been part of Vladimir Myasishchev’s OKB-23 aircraft design bureau. The factory was forced to become part of Chelomei’s group by a state decree a decade earlier. So the Fili group wanted to show up Chelomei as well, and they were more than willing to take part in this project as a matter of pride.
TsKBM engineers from Fili in connection with a team from TsKBEM would do the primary design work of the station as they merged systems together. The stations themselves would be assembled at TsKBM’s Khrunichev Machine Building Plant alongside the Proton rockets also being assembled there. Other firms would contribute work on support systems and outfitting the scientific equipment on board.
The man placed in charge of the DOS station program for TsKBEM was Yuri Semyonov. He was an engineer and manager who to that point had been involved in work on the lunar-flyby program with the Zond spacecraft. Since cancellation of Zond was imminent, he was available. It has also been reported that Ustinov wanted Semyonov since he was the son-in-law of Andrei Kirilenko, fourth down in the Kremlin hierarchy. So Semyonov had high political connections and could likely get things done, should either Chelomei, Mishin, or anyone else try to place obstacles in the path of the DOS project. It wasn’t long before Semyonov was tested.
While Almaz was still about two or three years away from flight, around a dozen Almaz cores had already been assembled. The meeting between Chelomei and Semyonov to arrange for the transfer of some cores was a tense one as Chelomei accused the junior engineer that he was stealing his work. Although Semyonov had a decree from the Kremlin to take the cores, it took a direct phone call from Sergey Afanasyev before Chelomei would allow four of the cores to be transferred.