Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  Nina Ivanovna was now in a state of shock, fearing the worst, not knowing what that could be. Petrovsky came out to speak to her: ‘Be courageous,’ he said. And then she knew. Her husband was dead. The news was difficult to understand. She heard the surgeon saying: ‘I don’t know how he lived or walked with that heart.’

  The news struck like lightening. Korolev was dead. His friends and colleagues – Mishin, Chertok and so many who had worked with him for decades – heard the news and, like Nina Ivanovna, were dumbfounded. Suddenly a vacuum had been left by this man whose generous spirit had touched them all. Many could not adjust to the news. ‘It has been three days since he died and I still don’t want to believe that he is no longer amongst the living,’ wrote Kamanin in his diary. ‘He left us when his talent was in bloom.’ Only Glushko received the news without charity. He was at a meeting when the Kremlin telephoned. ‘Sergei Pavlovich is no longer with us,’ he informed his colleagues. ‘Now, where did we leave off …?’

  In the Kremlin, Brezhnev made a decision: to draw Korolev out of the shadows and bring him into the light. The Soviet Union had a hero. Mother Russia had produced a true son whose grandeur of vision must be known. It was time to reveal the Chief Designer’s name. It would live forever in Russian history.

  On 17 January, Russians learned the identity of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev and they took him to their hearts. They waited in the bitter cold to file past and steal a glimpse of this legend, lying so still, as though asleep among the massed flowers. All the chief designers and Korolev’s deputies acted as guards of honour as he lay in state in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions. So many people had volunteered for this honour that they could not all be accommodated. The whole of Russia, it seemed, had sent flowers: Korolev’s factory workers, delegations from Kapustin Yar and Baikonur, Politburo members, ministers, generals, marshals and admirals. The scent hung in the air as hundreds of thousands paid their respects. Finally people ‘had been shown a morsel of truth,’ wrote Chertok, and learned ‘to whom they had to pay respect for the greatest victory of mankind’. Everyone who filed passed his coffin felt they ‘touched his historic achievement in some way’. At 8 p.m. the doors were due to close, but the queue of people had no end.

  Everyone had seen Korolev’s picture in Pravda, a strong, smiling, yet unfamiliar face, proudly wearing his medals. And they had read that ‘he was warmly loved and respected by the many, many people who worked with him’; and that ‘S. P. Korolev had lived giving all of his creative energy to the concern of the people and to progress’. And as they looked at the coffin draped in red, with wreaths from the highest in the land at his feet, the great white marble columns in the hall beribboned in black in the dull light of the shaded chandeliers, they understood that this must indeed have been a noble fellow Russian, whose passing should be marked and honoured.

  The state funeral was on a massive scale: a huge drama with a cast of thousands laid out against the backdrop of the winter city under grey skies and falling snow. The serried ranks of sombre uniforms and crowds of people filled the scene. The urn with Korolev’s ashes was carried by Gagarin, Keldysh and other leading officials to Red Square. Speeches for the twentieth century’s practical visionary echoed across the square for the man who, since boyhood, had always gazed at the moon with wonder, dreaming of the stars.

  There was one aspect to the ceremony that did not impress Kamanin. ‘Korolev occupies a place in the Kremlin wall next to S. V. Kurashov [the Minister for Heath]. I was irritated by the fact that they were neighbours,’ he wrote:

  It unnecessarily reminded me of the great guilt of our medicine in the premature death of Sergei Pavlovich. All of the orators at the funeral gathering thought that Korolev was a great scientist, but not the Chief Director of space studies. This is not true … He was the Chief Designer of the spacecraft and not only in that post, but in essence as well. I will always place unlimited value on Korolev’s talent.

  Following her husband’s death, Nina Ivanovna was swept along on the tide of interest and concern. She was the great man’s wife and a certain dignity was expected. Private grieving would have to wait. Boris Chertok describes how she had to bear all the toasts and speeches teary eyed although she was ‘in such a bad state … she could hardly make it’. Then suddenly all the noise and fuss was over. The silence of separation descended. There was no familiar voice with a touch of bemused petulance to telephone and say, ‘why did you leave me all alone? When are you coming home?’ She had no reason now to be at home.

  His daughter, Natasha, was also trying to come to terms with her loss when Mishin came to see her with a small box which he had found in her father’s desk. She opened it to find her school exercise books, photographs and letters from years before, treasured tokens from her missed childhood that he had kept with him at all times.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘We’re burning up!’

  At the Marshall Space Flight Center, as he sat at his desk the strong features and intelligent eyes of Sergei Korolev looked von Braun squarely in the face from the pages of the American press. ‘Mr Korolev was reputed to be the mysterious “Chief Designer” of the space programme,’ stated the New York Times, revealing that ‘during his lifetime, Soviet reference works described him as merely working on the “problems of mechanics”’. For the Washington Post he was the ‘Soviet space scientist who designed almost everything Russia has put into orbit’. All the papers carried the same photograph – of a youthful Korolev in his early forties, his face relatively unlined, his eyes made more deep-set than they were in real life by the dark smudges of ink. For von Braun, the mystery figure behind the Soviet space programme was revealed too late. There would never be an exchange of views between them now.

  The Kremlin’s ‘deep grief’ at Korolev’s passing and his loss to world science was reported at length; his death was evidently a ‘heavy blow’ to the Soviet space programme. He had seemed immensely capable, a man to rely on. Von Braun realized this was the man whose unseen presence had so often discomfited America with his astonishing firsts in space; the man behind the might of Soviet rocketry. If Sergei Korolev, from his place in the shadows, had not shared the same vision of space as von Braun, and pursued that vision with such energy, would America be fighting to get to the moon at all costs now? It was hard to know where his own ambitions would be without this Russian who had lived and died in secret. Was it because of Korolev that the American space programme was at last gathering strength?

  Von Braun was especially pleased that the intensive testing of the Saturn engines had finally brought results. After many months, the day had arrived when the engine, even with a bomb placed in the combustion chamber, finally took the tumult in its stride and righted itself within a hundred milliseconds. They found that by changing the angle of the jets of fuel coming from the injector plate so that they met and united at a lower level in the combustion chamber, the bombs no longer caused a runaway instability, but one that was quickly rectified. They also implemented baffles – small, thin fence barriers – running from the ejector plate to the chamber, which ejected a smoother flow of fuel. No one was entirely certain why this produced results and there was no guarantee that it would always work. Consequently there was no actual day of celebration, just an increasing confidence that the engine was more reliable.

  The Gemini missions continued to give valuable insight into the problems of manoeuvring, rendezvous and space walking. The Gemini VIII mission was to break new ground with the first complete test of docking in space – a crucial manoeuvre for any moon mission. The command pilot for the mission, Neil Armstrong, was known for his quick thinking and fearlessness in the face of danger. He had already proved himself to be a man of cool courage when he was twice almost shot down when flying over North Korea, but managed to nurse his craft back to base. His reputation was legendary: he and his plane, it seemed, were as one. He was to be accompanied by David Scott as pilot. Their task was to dock Gemini VIII in orbit with an Age
na satellite and then David Scott would undertake a space walk. The Agena was launched first, on an Atlas rocket, at 10 a.m. on 16 March 1966. This was followed just over ninety minutes later by the astronauts in their Gemini capsule.

  Six hours into the flight, the two men began to track the Agena ahead on the radar. Then they saw it – a shiny craft ahead of them, looking like a ghost ship lost in space, hardly appearing to move. They were about ninety miles apart with the Gemini capsule in an orbit seventeen miles below the Agena. Once the Agena was angled about 10 degrees above them, Armstrong pitched the Gemini’s nose upwards and fired the aft thrusters, delicately manoeuvring the craft until they were at a distance of just over 100 feet. The Agena had a reputation for being unreliable. The one used on the last mission had exploded before it reached orbit. Armstrong took his time observing the target vehicle before moving in to a distance of about 3 feet.

  ‘Go ahead and dock,’ came the all-clear from mission control.

  Very gently, at a speed of 3 inches per second, Armstrong eased the Gemini nose cone into the Agena docking collar.

  ‘Flight, we are docked.’ Armstrong spoke with confident assurance to ground control.

  Everyone in mission control began to cheer, but their elation did not last long. They were about to face the worst American emergency in space yet.

  The Gemini controls were turned off to save fuel and the joint craft was flown using the Agena controls. At first the mission seemed to be going well. Armstrong and Scott could see the shape of Africa below them, spread out like a map with its yellows, ochres and greens, reminding them that they were 185 miles above the earth. They had just passed over Madagascar when Scott became aware that the Gemini capsule had unaccountably rolled over 30 degrees. It looked as though the Agena was living up to its name. They switched it off hoping to regain control. They were back on the Gemini controls. All should now be well.

  But it wasn’t. The craft was rolling more than ever. Armstrong was concentrating on the controls in the hope of bringing stability to the madly tumbling craft. Whatever he tried, nothing made any difference and, worse, they were losing fuel. They decided they had no option but to disengage from the Agena, even though in the process it was possible that the two vehicles might collide with disastrous results – since there were about 4000 pounds of fuel on board. The stress on the two interlocked vehicles was extreme. If they didn’t act quickly, there was a chance both craft would disintegrate.

  To their amazement when they disengaged from the Agena they immediately fell into an even worse spin. This was fast approaching a full revolution every few seconds. Evidently the trouble was with the Gemini capsule, not the Agena. Over the western Pacific they just had time to relay a message to the tracking ship Coastal Sentry Quebec:

  ‘We have a serious problem here … tumbling end over end,’ said Scott. ‘Disengaged from the Agena.’

  The message was relayed to mission control, but there was no time for a reply. They were on their own. The craft was now doing a complete spin every second. It was only a matter of time before they lost consciousness in the madly gyrating craft.

  There was one slim chance left. They could try to regain control of the craft by switching off the manoeuvring thrusters and using the re-entry attitude control thrusters instead. The controls were somewhere above Armstrong’s head on a panel of switches. Fighting the G forces, tunnel vision and the sickening strip of sunlight flashing every half-second through the windows with a burning brilliance, Armstrong concentrated on feeling for the right switch from memory. Agonizing seconds passed while he tried to make his fingers follow his brain’s instructions, still trying to control the craft with the hand controller. He found the switch and pushed it down. The craft slowed. Within half a minute the gyrations ceased.

  Once he had regained control, Armstrong coolly proceeded to test the thrusters in the orbital attitude and manoeuvre system to work out what was wrong. It soon became all too clear: thruster No. 8 had jammed in an on position, using up fuel and tumbling the craft. Although Armstrong and Scott were anxious to continue with their mission, they were ordered to return. With enormous relief, they heard all four retro rockets fire and miraculously, with no further adjustments, they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean five hundred miles east of Okinawa at 10.23 p.m.

  Although Scott had not been able to carry out his space walk, the mission had proved beyond a doubt that space docking was possible – paving the way for docking in lunar orbit. The failure had nothing to do with the docking procedure itself. It was the Gemini craft that had let them down. Commander Neil Armstrong’s clear thinking in the face of such a crisis was duly noted.

  Korolev’s death had left a huge void in the Soviet space programme. His second in command, Vasily Mishin, now found his name put forward by senior staff at OKB-1 as the new Chief Designer. Following in Korolev’s footsteps was a daunting prospect and some felt that no one man could really replace him. Although Mishin was a brilliant engineer, it was said he did not have Korolev’s overall grasp of the grand design or the political power to drive it through. And the sheer volume of work that Korolev had previously taken on was simply overwhelming.

  The N-1 needed extensive testing but there were still not enough funds for building stands to ground test the first stage of thirty engines. To neglect this testing for such a huge and complex rocket was to assume that ‘luck’ was essentially a Russian commodity, under Mishin’s personal control. But Mishin’s luck had quite often been due to Korolev and Korolev was not there to guide him now. Mishin was finding it hard to achieve N-1’s payload of 95 tons. Various techniques were used to lessen the weight of the rocket including reducing the initial earth orbit from 65 to 52 degrees, and cooling the propellants. Thrust was increased on all the engines by 2 per cent and a fourth stabilizer was added. The Soyuz capsule was still unfinished and the Soviets still had no experience at docking in space or transferring cosmonauts from one vehicle to another. Mishin also had to continue with the Voskhod programme. All eyes were on him as he took over Korolev’s enormous workload and the impossible goal to beat America to the moon.

  Yet the first foray into space, just over two weeks after Korolev’s death, came not from Mishin, but another chief designer, Georgi Babakin, of the Lavochkin design bureau near Moscow, who had been put in charge of Korolev’s robotic lunar programme. On 31 January he was ready to launch the lunar probe, Luna 9. When it was five thousand miles from the surface of the moon the attitude control thrusters aligned the vehicle and it began its descent. Sensors could detect when it was just 16 feet from the moon’s surface and the engine was switched off. The craft made a perfect landing on the moon. This was another first for the Soviets. The moon was not made of improbable icing-sugar mountains of dust, but was indisputably firm, just as Korolev had said, and a Soviet craft was informing the world of this fact.

  Mishin followed the lunar probe with a Voskhod flight, which took two dogs into orbit to carry out further tests on the life-support system over a prolonged period. They stayed in space a record twenty-two days and after the trip understandably lost some of their canine joie de vivre. The physicians noted that the animals were weak and dehydrated; normal blood flow did not return until five days after the flight. This convinced Mishin that further experiments with the Voskhods were too risky, and a planned multicrewed space launch originally meant to coincide with the Communist Party Congress in late March was cancelled. There would be no more manned flights until the Soyuz was ready. This freed up staff to focus on completing work on the Soyuz.

  On 10 July 1966, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov announced optimistically to the press during a trip to Japan that the Soviets were on target to beat the Americans by one year. ‘There is no need to hurry with a manned Moon trip; the important thing is to carry out everything safely,’ he declared. ‘But I can positively state that the Soviet Union will not be beaten by the United States in a race for a human being to go to the Moon.’ A few days later, his comments were reported i
n the New York Times.

  In August 1966, the first completed Apollo command module was delivered to NASA for testing prior to launch. Made of aluminium alloy to keep it light, the interior was spacious compared to the Mercury or Gemini capsules. Yet such was its complexity that during construction at least twenty thousand failures had slowed its progress. Gus Grissom was to be the captain for the first manned flight set for February 1967; Roger Chaffee and Ed White would accompany him. Grissom, however, was uneasy with the capsule design and initiated further changes. During the winter more than six hundred modifications were made, but that still didn’t satisfy him. There were thousands of systems embedded in the craft and littering the floor of the capsule; it looked like electrical spaghetti. The patience of the astronauts was wearing wafer thin as endless countdowns prior to the real launch were interrupted by small failures putting the launch date back even further. So many changes were made on the hoof that the simulator model was always behind. Grissom hung a lemon on it.

  The press had caught a whiff of trouble. What was wrong, they wanted to know. Grissom explained, ‘I’ve got misgivings. We’ve had problems before, but these have been coming in bushelfuls. Frankly, I think this mission has a pretty damn slim chance of flying its full fourteen days.’ Did this present a danger, the press wondered. Grissom replied: ‘If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the programme. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.’ He omitted to mention the pressure from the top for the team to ‘get off their asses’. In an election year, President Johnson needed a significant step forward to impress the voters.