Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  Project Mercury was soon approved. It aimed to put a man into orbit around the earth and recover him safely. NASA’s Chief Administrator, Keith Glennan, was under no illusions as to the enormity of the task. He identified the key problems to a White House committee: dealing with re-entry and safe landing to return the astronaut to earth; increasing the reliability of the launching rocket; protecting the astronaut from high-energy radiation; and ensuring his psychological and physical ability to cope with the strange new environment. In 1958, $89 million was approved to help NASA tackle these problems, a budget that was to increase exponentially, reaching $740 million in four years. Quite apart from the rivalry he faced within the Soviet Union, Korolev now found himself a diminutive and untried David facing the legendary might of Goliath as he was ranged against America, the world’s industrial giant.

  Undeterred by the scale of the challenge he had set himself, Korolev, the ‘Iron King’, pushed himself tirelessly, frequently flying between Moscow and Baikonur at night to avoid losing any work time. That summer he was preparing to send his lunar probes to the moon. Reaching that remote lunar world was the vision that drove him on relentlessly, giving him no peace. Yet launching a rocket on a trajectory to the moon was a monumental task, requiring complex mathematical models to gain pinpoint accuracy, not to mention rockets in which nothing malfunctioned. Simply to crash a rocket into the moon – itself a rapidly moving target – required aiming the rocket at a point ahead of the moon such that the moon would cross that point at exactly the same time as the rocket. To achieve lunar orbit was even more complicated. As the rocket approached just ahead of the moon, a small rocket engine would have to fire at precisely the right second – no sooner, no later – to slow the rocket down so that the moon’s gravitational force would just balance the rocket’s momentum, ensuring that it entered lunar orbit and was not flung out into deep space.

  In September, Korolev’s attempt to send his first probe failed. To rub salt into the wound, that same month, at an exhibition of military hardware at Kapustin Yar, Khrushchev spent an hour inspecting Chelomei’s work and an insulting few minutes walking around Korolev’s rockets. Korolev tried again for a lunar launch in October and once again faced disaster. After two minutes the rocket exploded spectacularly. It was shattered into a thousand fiery pieces, raining down on the desert like a shower of meteorites. A team was sent to recover it, obliged to live like nomads for several months in freezing conditions as late autumn turned into winter. And Korolev still had no response to the document that he and Tikhonravov had set out for the Soviet leadership, proposing a coordinated Soviet space programme like NASA.

  Korolev confided in Nina: ‘It seems that nature jealously keeps its secrets and even here, where the mind of human beings is able to open it up – every step to something new and unexplored is achieved by a narrow margin with a high price to pay … We have such a short period of our life for creating something.’ She would write back with encouragement, asking him to take care of himself and reminding him to take the pills for his heart condition.

  In October 1958, NASA came into being and a core team preparing for manned space flight was soon established. Robert Gilruth, a brilliant engineer from the former National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Langley Research Center, Virginia, was put in charge of the Space Task Group to run the Mercury programme. He had been working on new experimental craft with test pilots and his role was pivotal in design improvement. Gilruth was passionate about engineering design and spent his spare time creating his own hydrofoil hulls which he sailed at the weekends, the perfect form of relaxation for life in the hectic space industry.

  The fledgling new space agency rapidly grew to incorporate numerous other research teams and laboratories across America such as the navy’s Vanguard programme and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Yet, unaccountably, the man who had done most to promote the reality of space travel in America was not part of it. Gilruth appointed his colleague Maxime Faget as Chief Engineer to run the Flight Systems Division, which would design the Mercury spacecraft. Other appointments soon followed. Despite his high profile, fears were growing in von Braun’s team that they would find themselves left to rot in some political wasteland, still considered more German than American.

  As usual, von Braun was at pains to reassure his team. He was in ‘no doubt’ that there would eventually be a ‘Moon landing project’ and that ‘our team would play a major role in that project’. In public, too, he continued to advance the significance of moving into space. ‘Man must establish the principles of freedom of space as he has done with freedom of the seas,’ he urged in Time magazine. ‘And like everything else this can only be done from a position of relative strength.’ In the world of long-range ballistic missiles and thermonuclear warheads, there might be no warning. ‘Either we will be ready at a moment’s notice, or historians may conclude over the ruins of our cities that we were “weighed and found wanting”.’ Yet the NASA project to launch and build a spacecraft was marching on swiftly without von Braun. For almost fifteen years, his team had lived on promises. This was no longer enough. His assurances that their role in the space industry would be important began to sound less convincing. Inevitably the team shrank as members left for the irresistible private sector.

  Von Braun, however, was assigned to improving the Jupiter still further. His remit was to produce a more powerful rocket capable of lifting heavier payloads. It would have a central core formed from the Jupiter’s fuel tank, with eight Redstone tanks clustered around it and eight Jupiter engines. Eventually it was renamed Saturn – von Braun’s suggestion, as Saturn followed Jupiter in the planetary system. Its upper stages would house powerful engines designed to use the new high-energy fuels. These new fuels, which combined liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, could sometimes prove problematic; liquid hydrogen in particular needed to be kept at extremely cold temperatures.

  Meanwhile, despite public denials that the US was racing the Soviet Union, the Americans were trying to beat them with an unmanned probe to the moon. The first attempt to reach a lunar orbit, in August 1958, proved an embarrassment when the air force’s Thor-Able rocket failed even to leave the pad. That autumn saw three further attempts to reach the moon. Although they also failed, Pioneer 1 set a new record, travelling more than 70,000 miles into space, and Pioneer 3 reached almost as far and identified a second belt of radiation. But 18 December was the moment for a particularly sweet US victory as Eisenhower’s disembodied voice, orbiting in space in an Atlas rocket, wished the world a ‘Happy Christmas’ – not a message that Khrushchev believed or necessarily wanted to hear. America seemed to be catching up. Anyone with a radio could hear the American President conveying ‘America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill towards men everywhere’.

  So sure were NASA officials that they would eventually achieve a manned space flight, that, in January 1959, the call went out for men who would be capable of handling a space vehicle. The search began for men with jet pilot training and a university degree between the ages of twenty-five and forty. Size and weight were important: no one could be taller that 5 foot 11 inches or weigh more than 180 pounds. There was a considerable response to NASA’s request but by February this was narrowed down to thirty-two men. Since it was not known exactly what the effects of travelling in space might be on the human body, NASA wanted men at the peak of health, with quick reactions and the ability to deal with and endure any hazardous situation. Experts could only speculate what lack of gravity, or increased gravity, might do to the human body. How would blood circulation be affected? Would the brain be suddenly drained of blood? Would the pilot, alone in space, looking down on the world, so completely divorced from human kind and human scale, lose his reason?

  The hopeful sky riders found themselves subjected to a battery of tests seemingly quite unrelated to flying a plane and applied with excruciating thoroughness. For these good-looking and fit young gladiators, dignity was abandoned. The
re were blood tests, urine tests, fertility tests, body fat tests, stool tests: they were wired up to machines capable of measuring almost anything measurable in the human body. And still the measuring and monitoring continued, with tests to observe the clutching of hands, or exactly how much the subject’s eyes fluttered and rolled when cold water was poured into ears. It was never explained why the white-coated technicians were so absorbed in the men’s stools and so persistent in administering enemas, or exactly what relevant information was gathered by the doctor’s rubber-gloved hand feeling through the rectum with a maddening interest in the bowel and the prostate. Worse still, did he really have to insert a balloon there and inflate it?

  To test their state of mind, they had to face hours in a dark and silent room, completely lacking in sensory stimulation. At other times they were subjected to volleys of quick-fire questions and expected to respond instantly, while, simultaneously, a soft and sultry voice insinuated the wrong answers, and control switches and buttons from some infernal machines demanded attention. They had to endure extremes of heat and cold, deathly silence or a cacophony of noise; the thrill of the treadmill until legs were worn down and the heart gave up; or the threat of being dropped in the desert with minimal survival gear and expected to return to the centre like a homing pigeon. At least the ‘one to one’ interviews with the psychologist provided the safety valve of ridiculous answers to stupid questions until the cost of such flippancy in the face of authority was registered. Then it was back to the comparative simplicity of being spun like a top at the end of the long arm of the centrifuge and various other well-thought-out exercises that made the individual horribly aware of human frailty and desperately determined not to let that show.

  At the end of it all, when mind and body were sufficiently pummelled, intrusive and embarrassing photographs were taken. No odd angles were spared – an exhaustive record of the candidate’s physical condition was to be used as a comparison with whatever state the traveller might be in on return from space. As the unendurable tests gradually began to reduce their numbers, seven men were chosen, emerging from the grisly process like Greek gods, ready to accept the unknown challenge without question and represent America. Their next ordeal was to be thrown to the press, which they decided was infinitely worse than the mission impossible from which they had just returned.

  While prospective candidates were being selected, the Mercury capsule was under development. Unlike the spherical Soviet design, Max Faget’s team in the Space Task Group at Langley judged that a cone with a blunt face would be the safest vehicle to cope with the great heat of re-entry – which was enough to melt metals. ‘You would think that that is a horrible way to enter, you really should have a nice point,’ admitted senior design engineer Caldwell Johnson. Their research, however, revealed the exact opposite. If the capsule was pointed, then it would have little drag and would accelerate into denser parts of the atmosphere creating ever more heat until it burned up. Counterintuitively, the blunt face of a bell-shaped Mercury, slamming into the atmosphere broad end first, created a tremendously compacted shock wave of air ahead of it. That ‘cushion’ helped insulate the actual skin of the craft from the heat of re-entry and also slowed the capsule down much faster than if it had a more streamlined needle shape. ‘It would get so hot that a shield of gas at the front part of the cone essentially insulated it,’ explained Caldwell Johnson, ‘re-radiating its heat back out.’ The heat shield was designed so that the outer layers would ablate or burn away under the intense heat of re-entry, dissipating much of the heat.

  Research was underway into how to fit retro rockets to the capsule for attitude control – to orientate the craft in space. It was vital that the craft be correctly positioned on its approach back through the earth’s atmosphere. The vehicle had to be aerodynamically stable, enabling it to stay balanced and not flip over as it sped through the atmosphere at 15,000 mph. At the apex of the cone, a cylinder housed the parachutes, which would slow the craft still further in the lower atmosphere in preparation for landing gently in the sea. To protect the astronaut in case of a serious malfunction of the rocket, Faget and his team also designed an escape tower – a girdered, lightweight tower strapped to the Mercury spacecraft at the top of which was a cluster of solid rockets. At the first sign of the imminent destruction of the main booster, the escape rockets would fire, which would pull the spacecraft off the stricken rocket to safety. Tests were also underway to determine the best means of regulating temperature, pressure and oxygen supply within the capsule. The decision was made that, rather than air, the astronaut would have a pure oxygen atmosphere. This was a decision that would prove to be fatal.

  Despite the developments in the American space programme, to his great frustration Korolev still could not win the backing from the Soviet leadership for a manned space flight programme. In November 1958, he did persuade the Council of Chief Designers to approve his designs both for the Vostok capsule and a reconnaissance satellite. But just to make sure that military needs took precedence, some wit coined the phrase ‘Reconnaissance satellite is more important for the Motherland’, which infiltrated the society at Baikonur like an unwelcome echo.

  New Year 1959 saw Korolev preoccupied with a fourth attempt to land an object on the moon. He was desperate for success, knowing that the Americans were trying to get there first. ‘I am nervous,’ Korolev wrote home, ‘but what can I do if all our work is a search for something new, and because of this we may have failures and misfortunes?” Korolev’s lunar craft carried scientific instruments which would determine whether the moon had a magnetic field as well as taking other measurements. The capsule held information of its country of origin – there was a heat-resistant banner spelling the letters ‘USSR’ and a small container designed to explode on impact and scatter seventy-two pieces of steel on the surface of the moon, bearing the launch date and the Soviet hammer and sickle. Korolev was sure he had the trajectory correctly calculated, but using radio to confirm the craft’s course would be difficult. He put a brain trust together to work out a solution – someone even suggested using a small nuclear bomb and measuring the time from the appearance of its flash. This was dismissed, however, as the moon had no atmosphere, and hence no dust cloud would form. Eventually, Korolev settled for a device that would create a glowing yellow cloud which astronomers could use to track the craft. To do this, a pack was devised in which napalm would ignite 2 pounds of sodium.

  On 2 January, the R-7 was launched successfully and Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to leave the gravitational pull of the earth entirely, marking this victory with a colourful flag of yellow vapour seven hundred miles high as it passed over the Indian Ocean. It had been meant to crash on the moon, leaving its Soviet signature. It came within 3700 miles of its target, and then, with a failure of the control system, it fell into orbit around the sun. Although the R-7 had failed to hit the moon and leave the symbols there which would have marked the phantom Soviet presence, for Korolev the little ‘moon ship’ was a wonder. He renamed his probe Mechta – the Dream.

  The mission was hailed by Khrushchev as a great accomplishment. Managing to ignore the ultimate failure of the enterprise, he could not resist boasting to the world of his Soviet ‘scientists, designers, engineers and workers who achieved a new exploit of world-wide importance, having successfully launched a multi-stage cosmic rocket in the direction of the moon … Even the enemies of Socialism have been forced … to admit that this is one of the greatest achievements of the cosmic era.’ Korolev, meanwhile, listened to Khrushchev’s self-glorying rant from his anonymous place in the shadows.

  A Soviet ‘moon’ was now shining on America. A Soviet ‘planet’ had the presumption to circle the sun. Von Braun’s frustration at the new Soviet additions to the planetary system was growing while his own hopes for an American achievement never lost their lustre. As for Korolev, he told Nina: ‘The best minds of humankind dreamt about it, but we are the ones who have the wonderful opportunity to lead the way
. It’s a great joy and incredible luck to be pioneers on this path.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘We really are in a great hurry’

  On 9 April 1959, NASA held a press conference to introduce their final selection of Mercury astronauts. When they appeared on stage at Dolley Madison House, NASA’s headquarters in Washington, the press were clearly moved at the sight of these unknown young men, and roared their approval as though the ‘significant seven’ had just saved the world; heroes already. This was an all-American story about small-town boys making good. Genuine admiration was displayed; applause continued until arms ached and the electricity engendered by so much emotion was in danger of lifting the roof. The seven were unaccustomed and unprepared for such a show of feeling. Unprepared, too, for the photographers, who were flashing a thousand brilliant lights as they fought to get the most telling, the most winning picture, no matter who was injured in the process.

  Eventually the press calmed down a couple of decibels and demanded to know what had gone into the making of these seven champions, who were looking back at them with such an easy charm. Clearly, these would-be warriors were from an original mould, made when the rules were first written. Had they not just competed with hundreds of their fellow men for the honour and the dubious reward of sitting astride a throbbing mountain of metal with all the gaseous fury of the fires of hell under it as it hurtled towards the unknown, at a speed faster than sight can comprehend? And when they were thrown out of the earth’s orbit into silence and emptiness, what strange or fearful odyssey might await them? Who would be there to rely on? What possible reassuring voice would come from that eternal blackness and say: ‘It’s OK, boys. I’ve been there, it’s easy’? They were on their own.