Reaching for the Moon
Reaching for the Moon
A Short History of the Space Race
Roger D. Launius
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2019 by Roger D. Launius.
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Contents
Prologue: U.S./USSR Early Postwar Rocketry
ONE
Sputnik Winter
TWO
The First Race to the Moon
THREE
Star Voyagers
FOUR
The Decisions to Go to the Moon
FIVE
The Game of One-Upmanship
SIX
Creating the Moon-Landing Capability
SEVEN
Realization
EIGHT
Revelations
Conclusion
For Further Review
Index
Reaching for the Moon
PROLOGUE
U.S./USSR Early Postwar Rocketry
Soviet rocket builders Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko had been rivals for years when they started working together at the end of World War II. Each had been excited by the prospects for rocketry early on. When he was a boy, Glushko had even corresponded with Russian spaceflight godfather Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Both Glushko and Korolev went on to play key roles in rocket experiments in the 1930s. Korolev became a leading light in the Moscow rocketry organization GIRD (Gruppa Isutcheniya Reaktivnovo Dvisheniya, or Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion) and its successor, RNII (Reaction Propulsion Scientific Research Institute). Glushko worked there as well, but Korolev’s ideas gained primacy, and he went on to build the RP-318, the Soviet Union’s first rocket-propelled aircraft. Glushko worked in Korolev’s shadow, his bullheadedness and egotism feeding his resentment at Korolev’s success.
However, in 1938, at the peak of Joseph Stalin’s purges, and before the RP-318 aircraft could make a rocket-propelled flight, Glushko and Korolev, along with other aerospace engineers, were imprisoned in the Gulag. Both had been denounced by two leaders of the RNII, Ivan Kleymenov and Georgy Langemak, for deliberately slowing the institute’s work, and for anti-Bolshevik sympathies. Glushko played a role in Korolev’s incarceration: in his testimony Glushko, probably under duress, turned on Korolev. Korolev did the same in his testimony. Both went to the Butyrka prison, and Korolev was forced to work for Glushko. Their mutual loathing escalated in that environment, as Stalin’s “Great Terror” took its toll. Both Glushko and Korolev suffered in the Gulag, but when World War II began, they were sent to work camps to develop new military weapons. In 1941 Glushko was placed in charge of a design bureau for liquid-fueled rocket engines. Working together in 1944, even as their mutual antipathy continued, Korolev and Glushko designed the RD-1 KhZ auxiliary rocket motor used on a Lavochkin La-7R interceptor.
Late in World War II, both Glushko and Korolev perceived the immense progress that Wernher von Braun’s team had made with the V-2 ballistic missile in Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1944, Germany used the V-2 to rain down some 3,172 warheads on Western Europe. The success of this missile led Glushko and Korolev to approach Stalin and champion the development of their own ballistic missiles. In 1945 Stalin sent both men—Glushko was the more trusted of the two—along with other technical experts from the work camp, to Soviet-occupied Germany to investigate Nazi ballistic missile efforts. At first Korolev was relegated to overseeing hardware salvage while Glushko led efforts to interview dozens of V-2 engineers and technicians who still remained in Germany, but soon Korolev began assisting with this as well. He quickly earned the trust of the minister of armaments, Dmitri Fedorovich Ustinov.
When Stalin signed the decree initiating development of Soviet ballistic missiles, on May 13, 1946, Ustinov appointed Korolev director of the newly established Scientific Research Institute NII-88 to conduct ballistic missile development. He also appointed Glushko chief designer of his own bureau, the OKB 456, which was charged with rocket engine development, a position he held until 1974. Glushko’s OKB 456 (later NPO Energomash) would later design the thirty-five–metric ton (340 kN)–thrust RD-101 engine that powered Korolev’s early rockets. Glushko also built the powerful RD-170/RD-180 family of liquid-propellant engines that have been used on many rockets around the world to the present day.
Figure 1. Sergei Korolev led the Soviet Union’s efforts into space until his death in January 1966.
The work of both Korolev and Glushko was central to the post–World War II ballistic missile race between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the space race to the Moon. Both played critical roles not only in making the dreams of spaceflight real but also in the nuclear terror made possible by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Korolev had two hundred German employees of the Mittelwerk V-2 factory rounded up on the night of October 22–23, 1946, and sent to relatively comfortable living quarters at Lake Seliger, between Moscow and Leningrad. The Germans had little direct contact with Korolev’s engineers; they assisted in launching a few V-2s from Kapustin Yar. Mainly they answered written questions and were finally returned to East Germany between 1950 and 1954. Korolev copied the V-2 design with Soviet components for his R-1 missile; these evolved during the 1950s into the successively more capable R-2 and R-5 missiles. Korolev received approval for development of the R-7 on May 20, 1954 (although preliminary ICBM development was approved while Stalin was alive, on February 13, 1953). Again, Glushko built the engines that powered this missile.
The Soviets successfully tested the R-7 on August 21, 1957, a two-stage ICBM with a maximum payload of 5.4 tons, sufficient to carry a Soviet atomic warhead thirty-five hundred miles. While it was the world’s first ICBM, the R-7 was an impractical weapon. It required enormous launch pads, complex assembly and launching procedures, cryogenic liquid-oxygen oxidizer, and radio-controlled terminal guidance. Moreover, its range was impressive but sufficient to reach only the far northern United States from a launch site in the Soviet Union. As a result, the Red Army deployed it as a weapon at only eight launch pads in Tyuratam and Plesetsk, in the northern USSR. Development of more practical successors, such as Korolev’s R-9, did not begin until May 13, 1959. The R-7 served well as an early space-exploration vehicle, however, and it launched both Sputnik 1 and 2 into orbit in 1957 and served as the first human space launcher for Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov in 1961. As much as anyone, Korolev led the Soviet effort to reach the Moon, with the sometime support of Glushko and the strong rivalry he provided. The death of Korolev in a botched medical procedure in early 1966 may have done more to retard the Soviet Moon program than any other single setback; it certai
nly left Glushko in a position to assume leadership in the Soviet space program.
An American counterpart to the “frenemy” relationship of Korolev/Glushko may be found in the careers of Robert R. Gilruth and Wernher von Braun. During the latter part of World War II leaders of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor to NASA, had become interested in the possibilities of high-speed guided missiles and the future of spaceflight. NACA officials created at the end of World War II the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) under the leadership of Gilruth, then a young and promising engineer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Tidewater Virginia.
Gilruth established Wallops Island near the Virginia shore as a test facility under the control of Langley on July 4, 1945. From this site the NACA launched between 1947 and 1949 more than three hundred rockets of all sizes and types, leading to the publication of its first technical report on rocketry, “Aerodynamic Problems of Guided Missiles,” in 1947. From this, Gilruth and PARD filled in the gaps in the knowledge of spaceflight. In 1952, for example, PARD started the development of multistage, hypersonic, solid-fuel rocket vehicles. These vehicles were initially used primarily in aerodynamic heating tests and were then directed toward a reentry physics research program. On October 14, 1954, PARD launched the first American four-stage rocket, and in August 1956 it launched a five-stage, solid-fuel rocket test vehicle, the world’s first, that reached a speed of Mach 15, fifteen times the speed of sound. These strides in the development of rocket technology positioned the NACA as a quintessential agency in the growing importance in the 1950s of the quest for space.
When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began operations in 1958, Gilruth accepted responsibility for its first signature program, Project Mercury, to place the first astronauts into orbit. Dottie Lee, the only woman engineer working in Gilruth’s Space Task Group, remembered him as “this beautiful, brilliant man.” “I worked in an office with perhaps seven men, and I’m in my little corner,” Lee recalled in an oral history in 1999. Gilruth “stops at the door, and I can see him. The men are discussing something, trying to solve a problem, and he listens. Then he asks a question, which turned their thinking around and headed them down the right path. And he turned around, with a smile on his face, and walked out. . . . He didn’t tell them how to do it; he just asked a question. . . . And I thought, ‘Why can’t everyone be like this man?’ ”
Gilruth went on to lead the Space Task Group for NASA that accomplished Project Mercury, then served as director of the Manned Spacecraft Center—renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973—which had suzerainty over Gemini and Apollo. His organization recruited, trained, and oversaw the astronauts and the human spaceflight program throughout the heroic age of spaceflight. Yet his name is much less well known than many others associated with these projects. He was a contemporary on a par with von Braun, the technical director of the Nazi V-2 ballistic missile program, the rocketeer who built the first launcher sending spacecraft into orbit for the United States.
Gilruth later built the NASA center in Houston as the home of the space exploration and became its first director. In this position he pushed hard to develop the human spaceflight program as a cohesive whole during the 1960s. His longtime associate, Chris Kraft, said of him at the time of his death in 2000: “He was the guy with the right thoughts in his mind, with the right kind of leadership, and had sense enough to get the right kind of people to do the right kind of job, and you can’t say anything better about a man than that.”
Gilruth was an example of the engineering entrepreneur, a developer and manager of complex technological and organizational systems, accomplishing remarkably difficult tasks through excellent oversight of the technical, fiscal, cultural, and social reins of the effort. Johnson Space Center director George W. S. Abbey offered this eulogy about Gilruth’s career on NASA’s behalf in 2000: “Robert Gilruth was a true pioneer in every sense of the word and the father of human space flight. His vision, energy and dedication helped define the American space program. His leadership turned the fledgling Manned Spacecraft Center into what it is today, the leader in humanity’s exploration of outer space.”
A counterpoint to the career of Robert Gilruth in the United States was the experience of the handsome German émigré Wernher von Braun, one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration during the period between the 1930s and the 1970s. Raised on the science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as the scientific writings of Hermann Oberth and others, von Braun joined the German rocket society Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) as a teenager in 1929. As a means of furthering his desire to build large and capable rockets, in 1932 he went to work for the German army to develop ballistic missiles, and he worked throughout World War II building the liquid-propelled V-2 missile. His program’s use of concentration camp labor from the Dora and Mittelwerk camps raised questions after the war of whether he might have engaged in war crimes.
Figure 2. Robert R. Gilruth, left, and Wernher von Braun, right, led the two most important NASA centers during the space race. Gilruth directed the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973), in Houston, while von Braun directed the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. Both played critical roles in enabling the American Moon landings.
At forty-six feet in length and weighing twenty-seven thousand pounds, the V-2 flew at speeds greater than thirty-five hundred miles per hour and delivered a twenty-two hundred–pound warhead to a target five hundred miles away. First flown in October 1942, it was used against targets in Europe beginning in September 1944. By the end of the war more than thirty-one hundred V-2s had been launched against Antwerp, London, and other continental targets. The guidance system for these missiles was imperfect, and many did not reach their targets; but they struck without warning, and there was no defense against them. As a result, the V-2 had a terror factor far beyond its capabilities.
By the beginning of 1945 it was obvious to von Braun that Germany would not achieve victory against the Allies, and he began planning for the postwar era. Before the Allied capture of the V-2 rocket complex, von Braun arranged the surrender of his best rocket engineers, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. Because of the intriguing nature of V-2 technology, von Braun and his chief assistants were brought to the United States as part of Project Paperclip. Installed at Fort Bliss, Texas, they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where it built the army’s Jupiter ballistic missile, a launcher capable of sending a small warhead a maximum of five hundred miles.
Von Braun also became one of the most prominent spokesmen of space exploration in the United States in the 1950s. In 1952 he gained note as a participant in an important symposium dedicated to the subject, and he burst on the nation’s stage in the fall of 1952 with a series of articles in Collier’s, a popular weekly periodical of the era. He also became a household name following his appearance on three Disney television shows dedicated to space exploration in the mid-1950s. He gained a greater status in the 1960s, however, when his rocket team at Huntsville, Alabama, transferred to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to build the mighty Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon.
Gilruth and von Braun, like Korolev and Glushko, worked together during the space race. Each needed the other to be successful, and their relationship was professional; they were sometimes in sync, but also often at odds. Dealings proved complex, rivalries ran deep, and achievements proved astounding. Neither of these leaders could have achieved the Moon landings without the other; a symbiotic relationship evolved as NASA undertook Project Apollo in 1961.
Couple this with the ballistic missile program taking place in the U.S. military services and the stage was set for the beginnings of the space age. Throughout the 1950s all the arme
d services worked toward the fielding of intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver warheads to targets half a world away. By the late 1950s, therefore, rocket technology had developed sufficiently for the creation of a viable ballistic missile capability. This was a revolutionary development that gave humanity for the first time in its history the ability to attack one continent from another. It effectively shrank the size of the globe, and the United States, which had been protected from outside attack by two massive oceans, could no longer rely on that natural boundary. Its own capability, additionally, signaled for the rest of the world that the United States could project military might anywhere in the world.
The ICBM program did something more: it helped in the maturation of technologies necessary for the space race. Robert Gilruth probably voiced the ultimate aim of all of these individuals during that period of ferment leading to the space race of the late 1950s through the 1960s. He commented in an oral history: “When you think about putting a man up there, that’s a different thing. There are a lot of things you can do with men up in orbit.” That goal prompted everything Korolev/Glushko/von Braun/Gilruth did from the 1950s on. It prompted a titanic race to the Moon in which either side might have been first, depending on how certain events turned out. These engineers undertook the building of rockets and other technology necessary to make space exploration a reality. Collectively, these individuals and thousands like them helped to make the dreams of spaceflight real.
ONE
Sputnik Winter
Few Americans considered the reception on Friday, October 4, 1957, at the Soviet Union’s embassy in Washington, D.C., to be anything out of the ordinary. It was the appropriate culmination of a weeklong set of international scientific meetings. It was also, in the cynical Cold War world of international intrigue between the United States and the Soviet Union, an opportunity to gather national security intelligence and engage in petty games of one-upmanship between the rivals. This reception, however, would prove far different. The one-upmanship continued, but it was far from petty. To a remarkable degree, the Soviet announcement that evening changed the course of the Cold War.
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