Space Race

by Deborah Cadbury

  Although it looked as though the Soviet Union was out of the race, an indomitable refusal to accept this remained. So many years of endeavour had gone into the space effort. So much money, so many hopes and dreams: there was still time to send a rocket to the moon. Within days of his heart problems, Vasily Mishin was back at work monitoring Georgi Babakin’s next lunar attempt: the unmanned, robotic Luna 15. Once it reached lunar orbit, it was to descend to the moon’s surface and a drill would bore into the ground collecting soil samples.

  Three days before Apollo 11 was due to launch, a less powerful Proton rocket left the pad at Baikonur with its payload. There was still time to steal America’s thunder. The Soviet robotic mission would bring back the fabled pale lunar soil before Apollo 11 returned – if it returned. There was no guarantee that the American undertaking would be successful. There was plenty that could go wrong. The Soviet team might still carry a bouquet of stars back to earth. At six o’clock on the blue and gold morning of 13 July, the rocket soared on an exact trajectory to the moon, staunching the flow of endless failures and taking with it so many wistful Russian hopes for success.

  At Cape Kennedy, tension was mounting as last-minute preparations got underway. An argument erupted over the suitability of filming the moon landing. Chris Kraft and Max Faget argued vehemently in favour of filming and shouted all opposition down. The next concern at NASA came from the medical team who wanted to keep the astronauts protected from any chance of infection. When the astronauts met the press prior to the launch, elaborate safeguards ensured that a glass screen came between them and the offending, germ-laden journalists.

  Finally, on Wednesday 16 July at 9.30 a.m., the moment arrived. The three astronauts said their most important goodbyes and their minds were now wholly given over to the purpose of the mission. As von Braun watched the monitor, he could see the Saturn V lift off from Pad 39A. The ascent was a perfect, clean, upward sweep into the seamless blue; the long tail of white fire faded as the sound diminished. This was the fulfilment of his life’s ambition. The world was watching. The Soviets were watching. At the BBC in London, commentators speculated on where the Americans would land and whether the Russian robotic mission would be in the way.

  Four days out in space, with no worrying incidents so far, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin transferred from the command module to the lunar module, Eagle, which lay embryo-like above the Apollo third stage. This strange spidery craft with its fragile skin defied the normal rules of engineering. Now the time had come to prove it worked. The astronauts were due to try for their lunar descent on 20 July.

  At Baikonur, the Soviets were worried. Problems had delayed the landing of their robotic mission. The mountainous terrain of the lunar landscape had made it impossible. A new orbit was calculated but they could not be completely certain exactly where the craft would land. At NASA, the concern in everyone’s mind focused on whether the Soviet Luna 15 would cause problems for the American Apollo 11. The astronauts were informed of the situation. The world continued to watch with baited breath.

  In mission control on 20 July, Flight Director Gene Kranz and his team were preparing themselves for the lunar landing. This was the one day when nothing must go wrong. To help everything along, Kranz had turned himself into his own mascot, wearing a handsome silver and white waistcoat in the moon’s colours his wife had made for the occasion. On arrival, he had given his team a pep talk in language they understood:

  Hey gang, we’re really gonna go and land on the moon today. This is no bullshit; we’re going to go land on the moon. We’re about to do something that no one has ever done. Be aware that there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know about the environment … I trust you implicitly. But I’m also aware we’re all human … We’re working in an area of the unknown that has high risk. But we don’t even think of tying this game, we think only to win … We’re going to win … so let’s go have at it, gang …

  Kranz returned to his seat. He appeared calm, almost casual, like the rest of mission control, but the reality was they were all sitting on pins. When the lunar module came from behind the moon, the descent would begin. The lunar landing would present difficulties, maybe unsolvable problems. It would be up to Armstrong, the skilful champion of the ‘Flying Bedstead’, to find a safe landing spot. And if he couldn’t, then it would be his decision to abort the mission, fire the ascent process and, hopefully, return to Mike Collins, who was orbiting the moon in the Apollo craft.

  The Eagle was on course for the moon, descending backwards. The descent was timed to take advantage of sunlight. At 40,000 feet the landing radar began giving information to the computer on the altitude and speed of the Eagle. Suddenly, Aldrin heard the alarm buzzer. The code ‘1202’ showed on his display panel. He reported this to mission control. Was there a problem? Mission control was uncertain.

  The light was flashing. ‘1202. 1202,’ Aldrin repeated. Information kept cutting out on the panel in front of him. It was looking serious, but only Houston would have the answer. Kranz didn’t know if ‘1202’ meant abort. He referred to Steve Bales in the Flight Dynamics Division. All eyes in the room were on the computer whiz kids. The computer systems and electrical circuits in the Apollo mission were multitudinous. Sometimes an overload of information led to an emergency warning light. But suppose it was a real emergency? Steve Bales had seconds to weigh up the difference.

  ‘We’re … we’re go on that, Flight,’ twenty-six-year-old Bales stammered. He was sure it was computer overload.

  ‘We’re go on that alarm?’ Kranz queried.

  ‘If … if it does not recur, we’ll be go.’

  Aldrin had his answer. Ignore the alarm.

  At 7500 feet, the Eagle was descending at 50 mph. But a few tense moments later they heard Aldrin’s voice questioning:

  ‘1202 again?’

  The alarm was flicking on and off. It seemed an eternity before Kranz heard Bales reply, ‘Ignore,’ as he did several more times.

  At 3000 feet, Kranz informed Aldrin that it was ‘go’ for landing.

  ‘Understand, go for landing at 3000 feet,’ Aldrin replied. ‘1201 alarm.’

  ‘1201 alarm?’ Kranz repeated.

  Bales had little time to work out whether this new alarm was a life-threatening situation and they should abort the mission. Kranz wanted an answer.

  ‘Ignore,’ said Bales. ‘It’s the same type. We’re go, Flight.’

  The nearer the astronauts got to the lunar surface, the more worrying it looked. The designated landing area was pitted and strewn with boulders. At 1000 feet, Armstrong had no alternative but to override the computer and take over. He needed to find an area of level ground out of the zone of rocks they were in. Accelerating, he moved the craft forward, searching for an ideal spot. Mission control did not know when Armstrong had taken over, but were aware that his fuel was limited.

  At 300 feet, Armstrong thought he had a landing place but at 200 feet he changed his mind. Aldrin remembered Armstrong’s flights on the ‘Flying Bedstead’ and how often he had taken it to the wire. Mission control was nervous.

  ‘There ain’t no gas stations on the moon,’ a voice reminded them.

  Now Armstrong was over a crater. A warning light came on. In Houston, the technician responsible for the radar sensors that detected the moon’s surface fainted. No one noticed. There was only sixty seconds of fuel left. Twenty seconds of fuel was needed for takeoff if they couldn’t land and had to abort. The control room listened in horrified silence. For these last seconds, as time seemed to stretch, the mission was in Armstrong’s hands, reliant on his peculiar mastery of the gangling lunar craft.

  ‘Thirty seconds of fuel left,’ Houston warned.

  Armstrong detected a flat area ahead. This was essential as the awkward craft had to have its four spindly legs all planted equally firmly on level land or eventual takeoff would be in jeopardy. Moon dust was thrown up as he lowered the lunar module with caution. There were still far too many boulders. The at
tention of both men was focused only on the rocks and fissures in the crumbling greyish plaster of Paris soil beneath them. At last Armstrong found what he needed: that miracle of a small flat area. Moon dust made a snowstorm as they descended.

  ‘Contact light,’ Aldrin said with relief.

  They were down. Armstrong had handled the machine so skilfully there was no feeling of impact. They had twenty seconds of fuel left. It was 3.17 in the afternoon in Houston when they heard Armstrong’s voice:

  ‘Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed.’

  ‘Roger, Tranquillity. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.’

  The men in their strange lunar vehicle looked in wonder at the crystalline world outside the window stretching as far as the horizon six miles away, where a sky the colour of night revealed a gently curving horizon. Outside was a dead world. For time immeasurable no sound had rung out across the white waste to echo among the boulders. No living creature had left its mark. Already, the disturbed dust of their landing had settled to hide evidence of their arrival. Only the fall of meteorites had broken the silence down the centuries. But the two men were enraptured with what they saw. This historical moment could never be duplicated and the whole world was waiting to hear what was really out there beyond the small periphery of the safety of the craft.

  As Armstrong backed out of the hatch, automatic TV cameras on the lunar module switched on and six hundred million people watched the hazy figure on television. He stood in his strange white suit, his golden helmet meant to ward off the sun’s rays, its reflective visor obscuring his features, turning him into ‘Everyman’. His feet touched the moon dust and the world looked on while he tried a step in the new element. In the Soviet Union, the cosmonauts, crammed into a military reception centre with senior officials in Moscow, watched as he lived the moments they thought would be theirs. Then his voice narrowed the huge distance:

  ‘That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.’

  The Soviet viewing room erupted with applause as they stared at the grainy images of Armstrong, looking like a moon creature in his pale, puffed-up suit in the pale new world so blanched of colour. ‘Everyone forgot that we were all citizens of different countries on Earth,’ Alexei Leonov wrote. ‘That moment really united the human race.’ A few hours later, the Soviet probe, Luna 15, crashed at almost 300 mph into the suitably named ‘Sea of Crises’ on the moon’s surface.

  America was the winner. The red, white and blue Stars and Stripes on the flag planted nearby proclaimed that they had legitimately won the glory. The years of dedicated work, never deviating from the original dream, had led to this brilliant conclusion. But woven into the American endeavour were also the dreams of men like Korolev, whose spirit no doubt, given the ghost of a chance, would be standing unseen by Armstrong’s side. But the camera only registered one small anonymous figure standing on that bleak waste of cherished soil, waving at the blue earth, halfway to the stars.

  It was a moment to savour, a moment for which Korolev had lived and died, a moment that for von Braun concentrated the long journey from the dark days of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the V-2 to this momentous culmination of a youthful vision. As he looked at Armstrong’s figure on the TV monitor standing where he had dreamed he would stand, it was a timeless moment, rich with victory second to none in man’s short history, and it left him without words.

  EPILOGUE

  With President Kennedy’s mission accomplished and nine further Saturn Vs in production, it seemed there were now no limits for Wernher von Braun. An American flag marked the new frontier and the next step was to colonize it, just as he had always planned. A lunar base, a space shuttle, space station and even manned flights to Mars by 1983 were all under discussion. But for the American public, space had already begun to lose its lustre. ‘We have run out of Moons,’ admitted von Braun. He was transferred to Washington to crusade for further space missions, but the world had moved on. NASA’s budget was slashed further and von Braun became deeply depressed. He left NASA in 1972 and was soon diagnosed with cancer. He died five years later.

  Two years after this, in 1979, a former inmate of Camp Dora, Jean Michel, published Dora, his account of the camp, in America. ‘I have been silent for a long time,’ Michel wrote, but now, as an old man, he strongly felt the need to ‘make the past speak to the future’. His book was a warning. People had to understand that there had been men ‘who dared, in the middle of the twentieth century, to turn men into slaves and re-establish hell on earth’, and that Dora, providing labour for V-2 production, was ‘the Hell of all concentration camps’. In his powerful account of his experiences there, Michel now specifically linked men ‘intimately involved’ with the creation of Dora with the US space programme. Men today ‘venerated and admired’ for the conquest of space, he claimed, had ‘drawn a veil’ over ‘an unspeakable sum of suffering, misery and death’.

  Von Braun and his colleagues from Peenemünde had always given the impression that the SS had ordered them to use concentration camp labour and that they themselves had taken no part in organizing it. Spurred on in part by Dora, von Braun’s charmed reputation would gradually change after his death, as a different view was to emerge.

  Under mounting public pressure, that same year the US government set up the Office of Special Investigations to pursue Nazi war criminals in America. Their research turned up evidence against Arthur Rudolph, veteran of the Saturn V programme, which highlighted his involvement in the V-2 plant at Mittelwerk. Witness reports were found buried in the National Archives, which dated back from the 1947 Dora–Nordhausen War Crimes trial. These alleged that Rudolph had been responsible for liaising with the SS to supply slave labour and that he had also had some control over the prisoners’ conditions including the pitiful food supply and levels of punishment. Seventy-five-year-old Rudolph was in retirement in California when investigators caught up with him in 1982. He found himself facing the prospect of a trial in the US. He denied the claims, renounced his US citizenship and returned to Germany.

  In 1984, von Braun’s own records, which had been classified during Project Paperclip after the war, were declassified by the American authorities. These also revealed telling new details. Quite apart from Wernher von Braun’s Nazi and SS membership, the records showed that von Braun was not only aware of this slave labour but also, on occasion, had apparently taken part in arranging for it. For example, the minutes of a meeting held at Mittelwerk on 6 May 1944 showed that a number of engineers, including Rudolph, Dornberger and von Braun himself, had been present with the SS to sort out a delay in the manufacture of certain components. The recommendation of the meeting was that 1800 skilled French workers were to be taken to Dora as prisoners and put to work producing the key machinery.

  Journalists and historians began to uncover some indisputable facts. Use of forced labour in the V-2 programme began as early as 1940, when around one thousand Polish prisoners of war had been sent to Peenemünde. Their numbers had grown steadily, with Russian, Polish and French prisoners systematically exploited, working eleven-hour days and six-day weeks. By the summer of 1943, 2500 concentration camp prisoners were allocated to the development of the V-2 at Peenemünde. While documents show that Dornberger and Rudolph were well aware of this and even had a hand in organizing it, eyewitness accounts also link von Braun. There is no evidence, either at Peenemünde or Mittelwerk, that von Braun and his colleagues opposed the use of slave labour or took steps to alleviate conditions for the prisoners.

  Michael Neufeld, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, came across further damning evidence. He found a letter dated 15 August 1944 from von Braun to Albin Sawatzki, the director of production at Mittelwerk. In this, von Braun specifically admitted he went ‘to Buchenwald … to seek out more qualified detainees. I have arranged their transfer to the Mittelwerk … as per your proposal’. Von Braun was, in effect, personally seeking out technically
qualified slave labourers to join the concentration camp labour building his V-2. This, argues science historian Dennis Piszkiewicz, ‘according to the principles established at Nuremberg, was a war crime’.

  It seems beyond doubt that von Braun knew of the terrible conditions in which slave labour worked on his rocket programmes during the war. His quest to conquer space perhaps made him blind to the moral consequences of his work. Yet how could a man tolerate a situation in which his ambitions were being realized by the brutal mistreatment of thousands of men and women imprisoned in camps in which many died of hunger and disease? Was he acting under orders or serving his own interests and satisfying his own ambitions? To defy the Nazis would have been a brave and dangerous thing to do – but some in Germany did just that. Von Braun was not one of them. As he grew older the legacy of his past haunted him: ‘Did we really do the right thing?,’ von Braun is alleged to have asked one of his friends as he lay dying. ‘Was it right what we were doing all those years?’

  As for von Braun’s American employers – they too were quite prepared to turn a blind eye to his past while he was useful to them, only to expose and betray him when he was not. Von Braun’s energy, brilliance and ambition were cynically exploited first by the Germans and then by the Americans to serve their overriding political and military needs. Ultimately, perhaps, von Braun can be seen as a man with a naive enthusiasm for space who became a pawn in a wider political conflict beyond his control.

  Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, Chief Designer Vasily Mishin struggled to cope with the responsibilities left to him after Korolev’s death. The N-1 was launched for a third time in June 1971 – for just fifty-one seconds. In November 1972, the fourth launch lasted 107 seconds before six engines failed and the rocket, once again, erupted in a fireball. The manned Soviet moon programme was in disarray and Mishin was blamed. Everything he attempted seemed to be in the shadow of the US Apollo programme as the Americans astronauts returned several times to claim the moon. Though there were successful Soyuz missions, these were eclipsed by the tragedy of Soyuz 11 in which three cosmonauts died, prompting a day of national grieving and finally drawing to a close any hope of restoring national pride. Mishin was fired in 1974 – and even then his troubles were not quite over. By chance in 1985 he was interviewed by a journalist, M. A. Suslov, who was later arrested, allegedly for passing on secrets to the West. Mishin too fell under suspicion and was even threatened with a full trial for acting as the journalist’s accomplice.