Korolev still had no comparable programme although his plans for the N-1 were now in development. Kuznetsov had formulated an ambitious design incorporating twenty-four NK-15 engines in the first stage of the N-1 alone, with eight NK-15V engines in the second stage and a further four NK-21 engines in the third stage. This would be a rocket that they hoped would eclipse even the Saturn V – but Korolev was held back by the lack of testing facilities for the engines, especially for firing all the engines simultaneously. He was suffering, too, from his estrangement from Glushko, the master engine designer. But money was the crucial factor. There was never enough of it. Korolev deplored the way he had to join the queue when money was handed out. Dispirited, he acknowledged that funds for his space programme were given in the spirit of the Soviet folk saying, ‘Give earrings to all the sisters’. In other words, give some to Yangel, give some to Chelomei and give what was left to Korolev.
He was forced to make the fateful decision to waive the ground testing of the first-stage rocket engines firing together. Under the impossible circumstances of a crippling lack of funds and continued indecision on a direct space objective, he had no alternative but drastically to reduce the testing of each stage of the rocket. This meant the first flight would itself be the test, with no previous separate engine testing from which to learn from defects and mistakes. This would save time and fuel, too, which was in short supply. Only desperation could have brought Korolev – the man who liked to test every fault until it was ground to dust – to such a decision. Instead of testing each stage, he would now rely on a new control system, called the ‘KORD system’, which could detect a faulty engine and shut it down.
Khrushchev continued to be more preoccupied with rockets that would threaten the enemy rather than land unproductively on the moon. Soviet agriculture was failing to feed the country. How much grain could be bought for the cost of a rocket was the question on the premier’s mind. There was one small positive step he could make, however: he could try and ‘right’ the schism between his top rocket men. In June 1963, Korolev and Glushko, with their wives, were invited to stay at Khrushchev’s holiday dacha.
It sounded generous: a holiday with the great man himself in a June of cobalt skies, wine-dark sea and pale blue mountains in the distance. The wives were delighted. Nina hoped that Korolev would be able to rest; and how wonderful it would be to dispose of the rancour and see the two men friends again. But the two men in question were far beyond repairing the relationship. Forced to be polite, they hid their deep-felt antagonism, eyes never meeting.
Korolev did not waste the opportunity, however. Striking drawings of the N-1 rocket were exhibited, which illustrated the possibility of actually landing a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon. Korolev held Khrushchev’s attention while he spun the possibility into reality outlining details of the spacecraft needed for a lunar landing – before the Americans. Khrushchev’s son was there and he watched his father ‘enthralled by Korolev’s idea. But he could not forget Earthly concerns. He enquired how much this project would cost … [Korolev’s] estimation was ten to twelve billion roubles. Father wavered.’
Within a few days, Korolev was back at Baikonur for his next amazing feat. This would be another ‘first’ ordered by Khrushchev himself: the first woman in space. Twenty-six-year-old Valentina Tereshkova was exactly the kind of woman Khrushchev approved of: an ordinary textile worker with no ‘class’ advantages whose father had worked on the land before he had died fighting the Germans. As before, the plan called for two cosmonauts to be in space simultaneously. Major Valentin Bykovsky circled the world for two days in his Vostok, then, on 15 June 1963, after a successful launch, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman, was in orbit showing the world what equality meant in the Soviet Union. Soviet news pushed the story of the glorious Soviet Union, the land where socialism gave women the same opportunity as men. Decorated and medalled, Tereshkova’s perfect Russian womanhood was paraded in a world tour. Her three-day mission was a significant propaganda coup and the world was suitably impressed.
In his office in the Marshall Space Flight Center in America, von Braun was unaware of the mysterious Chief Designer’s financial worries. However, he was a little nearer to discovering the identity of his enigmatic rival. In the Soviet Union, on 3 November at a wedding of unprecedented fanfare hosted by the state in Hollywood style, the world’s first woman cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, married Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev. The Soviet publicity machine made sure the wedding bells were heard throughout the world. Everyone who was anyone in the space programme was there – for once even Glushko and Korolev were allowed to attend this public event. A few days later the New York Times had ascertained:
Reports circulating in Moscow’s western community last week have mentioned two rocket pioneers as likely key figures in the Soviet Space programme. Although the identities of the top scientists in these jobs remain an official secret, a number of unofficial reports have pointed to academicians Valentin Glushko, combustion engineer, and Sergei P. Korolev, a mechanical engineer.
A door had opened a little crack and a name had appeared, but that was it. There was more information on the bride’s dress than on the mysterious figure who had appeared for an instant. Earlier Western intelligence had also identified the significance of the name ‘Sergei Korolev’. An article in 1961 by Dr Gregory Tokaty-Tokaev, a senior member of the Soviet military who had defected to the West, had singled out Korolev as ‘this leading rocket engineer of our times’. Tokaty-Tokaev saw Korolev as ‘an excellent organizer … and a highly imaginative and inventive engineer with tremendous concentration’. A few scant details of his background in GIRD in the 1930s and his role in developing the rockets for the Sputnik and Vostok programmes were mentioned. Glushko’s role as ‘one of the outstanding experts’ in the development of rocket motors was also highlighted, but there was not much more information about the key players and how they had achieved their successes.
Von Braun and Arthur Rudolph were still preoccupied with the Saturn engines which were proving unworkable and beginning to hold up the Apollo programme. The team responsible for solving the instability problem hampering the Saturn engines was making no progress. Placing the highly insulated 3-inch bombs inside a roaring engine was not a job for the faint-hearted. Eventually they put the bomb in the engine before ignition and using heavily protected detonating wires could explode a bomb on demand and watch the chamber pressure move from 1150 to 4000 pounds per square inch. Now that they could create instability, all they had to do was rectify it. They were sure they could solve the problem. It would just take time.
Von Braun noted that everything connected with the Apollo programme was taking too long. Criticism was now beginning to grow in the press. The lavish amount of money being poured into NASA was being questioned. The last orbital flight had been in May 1963 and it looked very ordinary compared to the Soviet double act. Estimates for the first lunar landing were as late as 1971. A series of congressional hearings questioned the value of a lunar programme. ‘Anybody spending $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts,’ declared Eisenhower. The New York Times echoed popular sentiment with the headline:
LUNAR PROGRAMME IN CRISIS.
To give NASA a chance of staying on budget and beating the President’s deadline, the new head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, George Mueller, came up with a radical solution: ‘all-up’ testing. This, when outlined to the usually cautious von Braun, was greeted with ‘shock and incredulity’. Instead of taking a step-by-step approach, testing each stage before moving on, all features would be tested simultaneously. Rudolph explained very carefully just what this would mean; there were huge uncertainties and risks in ‘all-up’ testing for a rocket as complex as the Saturn V. Mueller was unmoved. In the very first Saturn V flight every stage would be live, he insisted, and the first manned flight would be brought forward from the seventh to the third launch. Von Braun, mindful that his caution had stopped the Americans winning
an earlier stage of the race, reluctantly agreed to fly ‘all-up’ on the very first flight.
President Kennedy once again put in an appearance to help revive the flagging interest in space. At Cape Canaveral, astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper showed him the plans for the growing moon port from the vantage point of a helicopter. The Saturn V rocket would be over 363 feet long and would require equally gigantic service structures. Too large to be constructed horizontally then raised to a vertical position like the old V-2, it would have to be assembled in an upright position. The vehicle assembly building would rise a sheer 525 feet, its huge doors 456 feet high, opening on to the flat Cape Canaveral landscape. It was to be so vast when completed that it was rumoured clouds would form inside at ceiling height. To secure this enormous hangar against the fury of autumn hurricanes, more than four thousand piles would pin it to the Florida bedrock.
President Kennedy smiled in amazement as he heard about plans underway for the construction’s sites. The size of the vehicle assembly building would dwarf everything. Beneath them, workers were matchstick men, vehicles mere Dinky toys. It expressed so clearly American industry at its ebullient best. The date was 16 November 1963. Kennedy would never see the building finished.
He went on to Houston and then Dallas. To the wild, waving crowds he had the look of a young hero travelling in the open car. His wife, always a fashion plate, exquisitely dressed in a pink Givenchy suit and matching pillbox hat, sat beside him in the sun. The crowds were elated to see the Kennedys almost within touching distance. Then, in the time it takes to squeeze a trigger, the picture was changed forever. He was slumped, dying, against his wife. Her pink suit was red with his blood. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his Camelot court were assigned to the dusty pages of history. In deep shock America mourned. The lament echoed around the world.
With the assassination of President Kennedy, the space programme had lost its most powerful ally. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson, now President, was increasingly preoccupied with the perceived threat of the spread of communism: the Berlin Wall, the Cuban crisis and now the growing fear of the ‘red tide of Communism’ flowing into American-supported South Vietnam. Kennedy had already sent some 16,000 ‘military advisers’ to train the South Vietnamese to take on the Vietcong – the Vietnamese communists. The North Vietnamese were allied to China and the Soviet Union. With South Vietnam seen as ‘the cornerstone of the free world in south-east Asia’ it was a crisis that Johnson was determined to contain.
For Korolev underfunding was now becoming chronic and holding back his lunar programme ambitions. NASA was designing a new spacecraft, the Gemini, due to come on stream in 1964. Not only would this craft have the ability to manoeuvre, rendezvous and dock in earth’s orbit but it could also change orbit and carry two people for two weeks, exactly the time it would take for a spacecraft to go to the moon, perform a landing and then return. Korolev’s own spacecraft, the Soyuz, would not be available until 1965. Khrushchev realized that America, with its Gemini spacecraft, would soon put the Soviet Union into second place.
According to Korolev’s deputy, Vasily Mishin, Khrushchev was on the telephone in early February 1964 ordering Korolev to upstage the two-man Gemini and ‘launch three cosmonauts right away’. Kamanin confirmed that Korolev received orders to stop work on available Vostoks and use them to ‘prepare and accomplish a flight of a three-person crew in 1964’. He noted in his diary that ‘it was the first time I had seen Korolev in complete bewilderment. He was very distressed at the refusal to continue work on the Vostok and could not see a clear path on how to re-equip the ship for three in such a short time.’
Nevertheless, Korolev rose to the occasion. The Soyuz programme was put on hold while he was sidelined into this essentially unproductive mission to trick Americans into believing the Soviet space programme was more advanced than it was. Four Vostok flights planned for 1964 were also cancelled and the Vostoks duly cannibalized for the new Voskhod (‘sunrise’). Feoktistov, one of the original designers of the Vostok, was horrified at having to sardine three men into the cramped space. He argued that it would make more sense to wait for the Soyuz to come on stream. As further encouragement to the design team, Korolev let it be understood that if they could come up with a satisfactory design, there would be a place for an engineer on the trip.
Feoktistov responded to the bait with the drastic proposals of eliminating the protective space suits with their air-conditioning systems and the ejection systems. The space travellers would wear normal clothing and pray that there would be no need for an ejection seat. Landing would be tricky, as the three men would have no alternative but to land in the capsule. This would be slowed by extra retro rockets and parachutes that would bring the speed down to 3 feet per second at landing. ‘They would be cramped just sitting,’ Vasily Mishin observed later, ‘not to mention it was dangerous to fly.’
While work on the Voskhod was in progress, at his next meeting with Khrushchev, Korolev found that his plans for the N-1 and its possible career in space were listened to with a level of interest formerly missing. Khrushchev promised more money to the N-1 and its use in a future bid to land a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon. This, however, was not enough to ensure success. Army red tape was still causing delays. Korolev had a continual fight on his hands for funds. In fact that spring, the money ran out and work on the N-1 stopped entirely. The vast endeavour employing thousands ground to a halt as factories closed and offices emptied. Korolev bombarded senior military officials with letters spelling out the dire situation. On 25 May, he still had had no response, and drafted a strongly worded letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee for Defence Industries and Space, Leonid Brezhnev, pointing out that ‘precious time’ was ‘unwisely and aimlessly being wasted’:
Two and half years have gone by since the end of the draft stage of the N-1 project, but at the moment work is totally unsatisfactory … There are no firm deadlines, no essential organization, nor sufficient financial and material support. In brief, the initial sum of money set aside in 1964 for the building and launch of the N-1, which started as 11 million roubles, was unexpectedly reduced to 7 million roubles and then to 4 million roubles. Now finances are being refused altogether … By May of this year we will have used up all our resources and the construction of the launch complex of the N-1 will have to stop altogether within a few days … This completely unacceptable situation … is mostly due to an underestimation of the significance of the N-1 not only for Soviet science and technology, but also for the preservation of our government’s advantage in the realm of space, as the first socialist country in the world, the home of great revolutionary ideas, and the progressive nation which leads the world’s socialist system.
Korolev was keenly aware how much the Soviet Union was lagging behind the Americans in the race to the moon and suggested that the Americans might even have the means to ‘land people on its surface by 1967 – that is on the fiftieth anniversary of the first Soviet state on our planet!’ He assured Brezhnev that, with ‘due attention’, Soviet explorers could beat them to it – even though there were just three years left in which to do so.
The endless campaigning for support on top of his work was taking its toll. Tikhonravov remembers that he and Korolev were at an area branch party meeting when he noticed Korolev was looking ill. During the interval, Korolev asked Tikhonravov’s advice: ‘What do you think, comrade?’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I just want to get home and into bed. Would I be missed?’ Tikhonravov looked at him. His face was covered in sweat. It transpired that he was experiencing internal bleeding in the bowel as well as heart problems. Tikhonravov hugged him in concern and told him not to worry, that he would cover for him. When he recovered, a holiday was prescribed and he and Nina were flown to Czechoslovakia for three weeks in June.
On his return, Korolev was back in the thick of preparations for the Voskhod flight, which was set for August. The date passed, the month marked by a significant escalation of hostilitie
s in Vietnam. President Johnson ordered American planes to bomb North Vietnamese torpedo-boat bases in retaliation for alleged North Vietnamese firing on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Despite doubts about these reports, within days Congress had approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave Johnson freedom to proceed directly with ‘all necessary measures to repel armed attack’.
While the eyes of the world were focused on events in Vietnam, behind the scenes in Russia Khrushchev finally approved Korolev’s lunar landing programme using the N-1 – a project which became known as the L-3. Flight testing was to start as early as 1966 to beat the Americans – but Khrushchev was still ambivalent about providing the necessary funds. Korolev continued to use all his ‘battering abilities to try to raise money’, observed Sergei Kryukov, who was in charge of overseeing the design of the N-1. ‘It was constantly necessary to hurry, to persuade, to approve.’ Yet although Korolev’s team needed at least 45 million roubles for the project that year alone, they were only allocated half that sum. Kuznetsov fared even worse with his requests for funding for the engine development. He needed 50 million roubles, but was to receive less than 20 million. With funding for space still split between rival teams, Korolev continued to receive lacklustre support.
In September, Khrushchev was still reasonably confident that the space age was Russian. Surrounded by his political and military grandees, Brezhnev and Ustinov, he went to Baikonur to review the latest technology. Chelomei, Korolev and Yangel were demonstrating their current designs. Chelomei, with an air of the ‘winner’ about him, was exceedingly put out when the launch of his UR-200 failed and doubt was cast on his ability, especially by Ustinov. There existed a thinly veiled hostility between Chelomei and Ustinov, usually carefully hidden by both men from Khrushchev. The sheer disbelief that his work could attract criticism was assuaged somewhat when the assembled dignitaries examined the streamlined latent power of a full-size mock-up of the UR-500 and were suitably impressed. Then came the inspection of the enormous launch site. Chelomei continued to stun his audience into silence, producing plans for a colossus among rockets: the UR-700. He assured Khrushchev that this was the only rocket for a lunar launch, flagrantly criticizing Korolev and the N-1. Korolev, by contrast, ruefully noted how little time Khrushchev spent reviewing his work. ‘I passed these days as though I was in some kind of toxic furnace,’ he told Nina.
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