German spaceflight society members in 1930. Standing immediately to the right of the large rocket is Hermann Oberth. Wernher von Braun is on the far right of the picture.
REALIZING THE DREAM
In the 20th century it finally began to seem that Mankind’s long-held vision of traveling in space could become a reality. Yet despite the peaceful ambitions of the early pioneers of rocketry and space flight, the technology needed for such an event was developed initially to produce weapons of war.
First there were the dreamers, then came the practical men and women, and finally the voyagers themselves. The origin of the space programs of the 20th century can perhaps be traced back to the late 1800s and the ideas of a deaf, self-educated Russian school teacher called Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Born in 1857, his writings, frequently visionary if sometimes far-fetched, put substance to mankind’s nascent dreams of escaping from our planet and journeying into the cosmos. He wrote of multistage rocket boosters and space stations orbiting the Earth. It was Tsiolkovsky, along with the later generation of rocket pioneers, the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth, who prepared the way for what followed. But while all three dreamed of space travel, only Tsiolkovsky thought it would never come to pass.
Two men have become synonymous with the start of the Space Age. Both were fortunate to survive the Second World War. Separated by the Iron Curtain, they never met, but they dreamed the same dreams, were both victims and beneficiaries of politics and both achieved remarkable things.
The first of these great pioneers was Wernher von Braun, who was born in Germany just before the First World War. The von Braun family had been famous since 1245, when they defended Prussia from Mongol invasion. Wernher von Braun had showed an interest in rockets from an early age; when Hermann Oberth, Germany’s foremost rocket scientist, had written a book entitled Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space), in which he describes a rocket designed to go to the Moon. A young von Braun read it and was captivated.
German spaceflight society members in 1930. Standing immediately to the right of the large rocket is Hermann Oberth. Wernher von Braun is on the far right of the picture.
While the young von Braun dreamed, a Russian called Fredrikh Tsander would greet his fellow workers with the phrase: “To Mars! Onward to Mars!” Tsander was born in 1887 in Riga, Latvia. By his late twenties he had decided he wanted to make a journey into space. In 1924 he published his landmark work entitled Flight to Other Planets, in which he described the design of rocket engines and made calculations for interplanetary trajectories. But perhaps his most significant contribution was his untiring popularization of spaceflight through his lecturing on the topic across the Soviet Union. Small rocketry societies were formed in Moscow and Leningrad by enthusiasts who wanted to build short-range, liquid-fueled rockets. Among them was the other person whose story is synonymous with spaceflight: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
Korolev, who was born in 1906, in the town of Zhitomir in the Ukraine, did not go to school until he was 14. He dreamed of flight, voraciously reading the exploits of aviation pioneers, and at 17 he joined a glider club in Odessa. Two years later he enrolled in the Moscow Higher Technical School in the Department of Aerodynamics, where he came into contact with famous Soviet aeronautical designers such as Andrei Tupolev. Upon graduation, he was employed as an engineer to work on aircraft engine design at the Menzhinski Central Design Bureau. After a few months he was transferred to the prestigious Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute in Moscow.
It appears that Korolev would have had a sound career ahead of him designing aircraft. But then he met Fredrikh Tsander. Tsander had tried to secure government support for his rocketry experiments, but had met with no success. Almost in desperation he placed an advertisement in a Moscow newspaper inviting contact from anyone interested in “interplanetary communications.” Over 150 people responded. So it was that in July 1931 some of them formed the Bureau for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight, later changing its name to the Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight (GIRD). Korolev was a key member.
Sergei Korolev in 1954 with a dog that had been sent in a rocket to an altitude of 62 miles (100 km).
Under Tsander’s leadership, GIRD held public lectures and carried out small experiments in a wine cellar on Sadovo-Spasskiy Street in Moscow. Soon Korolev replaced the ailing Tsander as leader and, using his administrative flair, established four research groups to study different problems associated with rocketry. Money started to flow from the government, and by the late summer of 1933 they were able to launch the Soviet Union’s first liquid-fueled rocket powered by jellied petroleum burning in liquid oxygen. After two failures the third attempt soared to 400 meters (1,312 ft.). Korolev wrote:
From this moment Soviet rockets should start flying above the Union of Republics. Soviet rockets must conquer space!
Tsander did not live to see the triumph. Five months earlier, exhausted by overwork, he had contracted typhus and died.
The Soviet government was impressed by the rocket launch, and soon Korolev and his colleagues were working for it. The government was already funding another small research group investigating solid-fueled rockets for military use, led by a young engineer called Valentin Petrovich Glushko. He had been inspired by the works of Jules Verne, and at 15 he had written a letter to Tsiolkovsky. Just three years later in 1924, when still only 18, he had published an article in the popular press entitled Conquest of the Moon by the Earth. Glushko and Korolev became friends, but that was not to last. Their difficult relationship was to be at the heart of the Soviet space effort, becoming both its greatest strength and weakness.
In Hitler’s Germany a young Wernher von Braun showed his rocketry ideas to Colonel Karl Becker, chief of ballistics and ammunition of the Reichswehr (National Defense). Becker responded:
We are greatly interested in rocketry, but there are a number of defects in the manner in which your organization is going about development. For our purposes, there is too much showmanship. You would do better to concentrate on scientific data than to fire toy rockets.
Wernher von Braun was interested in using rockets for space flight, but Becker wanted a long-range missile. Von Braun nevertheless joined the army and worked under Captain Walter Dornberger on liquid-fueled rocket engines, saying later:
We needed money for our experiments, and since the army was willing to give us help, we didn’t worry overmuch about the consequences in the distant future. We were interested in one thing, the exploration of space.
Because the army was the only organization developing rockets in Germany, and also to advance his own career, von Braun joined first the Nazi Party and then the Waffen-SS. He told his fellow amateur rocket enthusiasts that he had been conscripted, and then started to lie to them about what he was really doing. In the meantime Dornberger decided that a quiet and isolated place was needed for the rocket tests, so the program was moved to a small fishing village called Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.
The promise and potential of the Soviet rocketry effort was cut short abruptly in 1937 when Joseph Stalin’s purges reached their inhuman climax. His plan—the complete terrorization of society—was put into effect by the hated People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police force responsible for political repression). An entire generation, and more, of Soviet society was murdered. No one was safe, and nor was there any defense. People simply disappeared, often picked up off the street for completely arbitrary reasons. Millions faced the threat of execution or being sent to labor camps. Terrified people became informants simply to survive—among them Valentin Glushko.
By the end of 1937 the NKVD had Korolev and Glushko in their sights. Glushko was arrested first. Inevitably, the NKVD denounced Korolev and he was thrown into the Lubyanka. Shortly afterward, following severe torture, he “confessed” and was fortunate not to be shot. Instead, he found himself in a cattle truck being taken to the Kolyma death camp in Siberia.
Two chance events saved his life. A close friend, the famous pilot Valentina Grizodubova, joined forces with another famous Soviet aviator, Mikhail Gromov, and with Korolev’s mother to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party requesting a review of his case. It reached the office of Nikolai Yezhov, chairman of the NKVD, and his successor, the tyrannical Lavrenti Beriya. Prosecutor Vasily Ulrikh also wrote to the NKVD to protest at Korolev’s sentence. Beriya thought he could use Korolev’s case to demonstrate his powers of leniency. So at a special meeting of the Plenum of the High Court the NKVD agreed to Ulrikh’s request and altered the charge from a “member of an anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary organization” to the less serious “saboteur of military technology,” and ordered a new trial.
For Korolev, working as a grave digger in a gold mine off the Kolyma river, it was almost too late. Among all the gulags Kolyma was the most brutal, claiming the lives of between two and three million people from overwork, famine, cruelty and the harsh Arctic climate. Eventually Korolev was found at Kolyma before his inevitable death and put on a train back to Moscow. Of the 600 individuals who had been at the camp when he had arrived, only 200 were still alive when he left. Soon after, under Beriya’s watchful eye, the NKVD undertook an investigation into Korolev’s case, which concluded that he would be deprived of his freedoms for the next eight years. Although the verdict saved him from a return trip to the death camps, it was another cruel blow.
Tupolev had also been imprisoned during the purges, but because of the impending war Stalin took an interest in those who had worked or studied under him, and he ordered Tupolev to prepare a list of those who could be useful for work in the aeronautical industries. On that list was Korolev. He was transferred to an aviation design bureau located in Stakhanov village near Moscow, where he was assigned to work under Tupolev. Korolev later said:
We were taken to the dining room, heads turned to our direction, sudden exclamations, people ran to us. There were so many well-known, friendly faces.
Glushko, meanwhile, had been sentenced to a far less arduous eight years in a prison near Moscow—part of a larger network that held the scientific intelligentsia. The inmates called such places sharashka, meaning something sinister and based on lies.
The Second World War was not going well for Stalin. In October 1942 German artillery units shelled Klushino, some 100 miles (160 km) to the west of Moscow, and soon columns of troops passed through the village. Gunfire echoed in the surrounding woodlands as partisans confronted the advancing soldiers. The German attacks were met first with resistance and then a retreat as they advanced deeper and deeper into Russian territory. Two young brothers crept through the woods outside Klushino after the battle. One of them later recalled:
We saw a Russian colonel, badly wounded but still breathing having been lying where he fell for two days. German officers went to where he was, in a bush, and he pretended to be blind. Some high-ranking officers tried to ask him questions but he said he couldn’t hear them very well and could they move closer. When they came closer and bent right over him he blew a grenade he’d hidden behind his back. No one survived.
The Nazis terrorized the locals, subjecting them to summary execution; if ammunition was short, they used bayonets. The brothers lived dangerously, scattering broken glass on the road to burst the tires of German trucks, and sometimes pouring dirt into their car batteries and gas tanks. On one occasion a German offered one of the brothers some chocolate. Then he took him and strung him up in an apple tree to hang him. Their mother came running to confront the German, who brandished a rifle at her. Fortunately, he was called away at that point and the mother rushed to the tree, praying it was not too late. She was just in time to save her son.
The family had been evicted from their home and were living in a hole in the ground. The boy’s limp body was dragged there while he slowly recovered. Frightened, cold and hungry they huddled in the dirt. There was Alexei the father, Anna the mother and four children. The eldest child was Valentin, who was 18, and the youngest was Boris, who was just six years old. It was Boris who had been saved from hanging. There was also a 15-year-old daughter called Zorya. Their other child was an eight-year-old boy called Yuri. The family’s name was Gagarin. Valentin remembers how Yuri had changed as a result of the war; he became serious, introverted and deep:
Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed during that time, during the war.
Meanwhile, at Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast, a rocket stood ready for launch. Slim and tall and with its tail adorned with fins, its metal sides became frosted as vapor danced around the chilled fuel tank. Suddenly a flame appeared at its base, and reddish-yellow smoke billowed in all directions. The retaining cables fell away as the rocket rose into the air. The flame became more intense and the rocket started to arc over the Baltic, effortlessly surpassing the speed of sound. After one minute, controllers on the ground sent a cut-off signal and engineers watched through binoculars as the flame died. The rocket was now over 20 miles (32 km) away. At this, Walter Dornberger wrote that his heart was beating wildly and that he wept with joy. Later he told the engineers that they had proved it would be possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft that could fly at supersonic speeds:
Our rocket today reached a height of nearly 60 miles. We have invaded space and shown that rocket propulsion is practical for space travel.
Dornberger thought of the possibilities of space travel, but this was a time of war and the rocket was a weapon—a wonder weapon for the Third Reich. Initially the Germans called it the A-4, but it was renamed the V-2.
The British Air Force pounded Peenemünde in August 1943, so production of the V-2 moved to an underground oil-storage depot in the Harz Mountains, near Nordhausen. The Nazis used slave labor working with pickaxes to enlarge the caverns. On September 8, 1944, two V-2s were launched from a site near the Hague in Holland, intended for a site about a mile (0.6 km) from Waterloo Station in London. It landed in Chiswick, killing two people. Von Braun told his staff:
Let’s not forget that this is the beginning of a new era, the era of rocket-powered flight. It seems that this is another demonstration of the sad fact that so often new developments get nowhere until they are first applied as weapons.
When they heard that the V-2 had hit London those responsible drank champagne, with von Braun saying: “Let’s be honest about it. We were at war, although we weren’t Nazis, we still had a fatherland to fight for.” He later commented on the rocket’s performance: “It behaved perfectly, but on the wrong planet.”
The West and the Soviets were both impressed with the V-2. As the war drew to a close it became a top priority to get their hands on the weapon, its technology and the engineers who built it. In a letter dated July 13, 1944, the British prime minister Winston Churchill requested Stalin’s cooperation in locating and retrieving V-2 components that the Germans were leaving behind in their retreat. Stalin ordered the formation of a secret group to collect any rocket remains.
At first they obtained some sparse but significant items, such as a combustion chamber and parts of propellant tanks. The pieces were sent back to Moscow where a group of engineers started to examine them. Among the group was Vasili Pavlovich Mishin, a specialist in control systems who, 20 years later, would lead the forlorn Soviet program to land a cosmonaut on the Moon. The German rocket was far in advance of any technology possessed by the Soviets, or indeed anyone else. But they failed to recognize its full implications. They would eventually pay the price for thinking that long-range aircraft would be a superior weapon to a missile. However, some early investigations into rockets were being carried out in the missile development project led by a 30-year-old mathematician named Vladimir Nikolayevich Chelomei, who was later to play a vital role in the space program.
In March 1945 the Pentagon sent a request to Colonel Holger Toftoy, Chief of Army Ordinance Technical Intelligence in Europe, for 100 operational V-2s. Toftoy sent Robert Staver to get the V-2’s blueprints and documents and to find its engineers.
Von Braun left the Harz complex just hours ahead of the Russians. “We feared the Russians, despised the French and didn’t think the British could afford us.” He planned to surrender to the Americans.
Stalin may have played a role in diverting troops toward Peenemünde rather than Berlin in the final months of the war. Just days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, an infantry unit led by Major Anatole Vavilov from the Second Belorussian front took control of Peenemünde. The place was deserted and almost empty. Stalin was furious, and was reported to have said:
This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated the Nazi armies, we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde: but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?
In June 1945 a group of Soviet engineers arrived at Peenemünde. Among them was a 33-year-old expert on guidance systems called Boris Chertok. He soon realized how far behind they had been in terms of technology. By the end of the war the most powerful operational Soviet rocket engine had a thrust of 1.7 tons, but the V-2 had a thrust of 30 tons. One official knew the reason:
In Germany we realized that there were no arrests. As a result of repressions in the army and the scientific community our development had stopped at powder rockets.
The point was amplified when Soviet soldiers dug out from the rubble at Peenemünde a German edition of a book by Tsiolkovsky. On almost every page there were notes and comments made by von Braun. The Soviets also found in the archives of the Nazi Air Ministry drawings of a missile designed by Soviet engineers in the late 1930s.
Chertok and others arrived at Nordhausen to try to salvage whatever they could. But they needed more rocket experts to make sense of what they found. Glushko and Korolev were recommended, and soon they were also on their way to Germany.
At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union may have had the most powerful land force in the world, but such forces suddenly became secondary following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons. Just 18 days after Potsdam and 14 days after Hiroshima, on August 20, 1945, a secret decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers called for the formation of the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb to direct and coordinate all efforts on the rapid development of operational nuclear weapons. It was also necessary to have missiles to deliver them. Colonel General Mitrofan Nedelin and People’s Commissar of Armaments Dimitri Ustinov were appointed by Stalin to lead the USSR’s rocketry development. Nedelin, then age 44, was a brilliant officer who had used solid-fueled Katyusha rockets during the war. Korolev was placed in charge of developing long-range missiles. His first task was to build a Soviet copy of the V-2 and then improve on it, but it was clear to him that creating a Soviet copy of the V-2 would only serve as an interim measure. They needed better rockets of their own, even though the task of getting them approved by the government was going to be difficult.
In early 1945, Mikhail Tikhonravov, who in 1933 had worked with Korolev on the development of the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket, brought together a group of engineers to work on a design for a high-altitude rocket to carry two passengers to 120 miles (193 km). Called the VR-190 proposal, it was the very first established project in the Soviet Union aimed at launching humans into space. The plan envisioned the use of a modified V-2 with a recoverable capsule for carrying two “stratonauts.” Tikhonravov tried to obtain interest from the top:
Dear Comrade Stalin! We have developed a plan for a high-altitude Soviet rocket for lifting two humans and scientific apparatus to an altitude of 190 kilometers. The plan is based on using equipment from the captured V-2 missile, and allows for realization in the shortest time.
Stalin was interested, at least initially, writing back: “The proposal is interesting. Please examine for its realization.” But Tikhonravov’s work stagnated. In 1947 it was renamed a “rocket probe” and a year later a preliminary plan was presented for approval. Further work was allowed with one change—the launch of humans was dropped in favor of using dogs. The following year, the project was canceled. Thus ended the first serious investigations in the Soviet Union of manned spaceflight. The issue would not reemerge for several years.
Korolev took his argument for a space program to Stalin himself. On April 14, 1947, he was escorted into the Kremlin to meet the Soviet leader in person for the first time. He later wrote of his frustration:
I had been given the assignment to report to Stalin about the development of the new rocket. He listened silently at first, hardly taking his pipe out of his mouth. Sometimes he interrupted me, asking terse questions. I can’t recount all the details. I could not tell whether he approved of what I was saying or not. He said “no” enough times that these “no’s” became the law. But where rockets were being studied dreams of flight into space were not far behind.
By early 1948 Tikhonravov was pushing forward with another idea—a satellite. He received little encouragement, but he was undeterred. That summer he read his report at the Academy of Artillery Sciences in the presence of a large group of prominent dignitaries from the military. Korolev was also there. The reaction of most was negative, but afterward Korolev approached his old friend: “We have some serious things to talk about.” Soon Korolev himself made plans to ask Stalin to fund the launch of an artificial satellite. The Soviets now had the R-3 missile project, a rocket with a thrust of 120 tons designed to send a 3-ton warhead a distance of 1900 miles (3,000 km). Could it be the basis of a satellite launcher, he wondered?
In 1950 Tikhonravov tried once again to get official interest in the first detailed Soviet analysis of the requirements for launching an artificial satellite with a proposal entitled “On the Possibility of Achieving First Cosmic Velocity and Creating an Artificial Satellite with the Aid of a Multistage Missile Using the Current Level of Technology.” It was presented at a special session of the Academy of Artillery Sciences. The reaction to this presentation was even worse than in 1948: some in the audience were hostile, others were sarcastic and many simply remained silent—Korolev was one of its few supporters.
In the summer of 1951 engineers led by Korolev converged on the isolated Kapustin Yar launch site in the Astrakhan Oblast for the first Soviet attempt at launching a living organism into space. Nine dogs were selected at first, from which Dezik and Tsygan were chosen. The launch, using the new R-4 missile, took place in the early morning so it would be illuminated by the sun during its ascent. The launch was successful and the dogs reached a maximum velocity of 2,600 miles per hour (4183 km per hour) and an altitude of 63 miles (101 km), officially entering space. The dogs also experienced four minutes of weightlessness.
After 188 seconds the payload section separated from the main booster and went into free fall until it reached an altitude of 3.7 miles (6 km), at which time the parachute deployed. Twenty minutes after liftoff the dogs were back on the ground barking and wagging their tails—the first living things recovered after a flight into space, and two months before the United States achieved a similar feat. Subsequent flights met with mixed results. Dezik and Lisa died when their parachute failed. After the second launch, it was decided that Tsygan, who had been Dezik’s partner on the first flight, should not fly again. Instead, in early September, engineer Anatoli Blagonravov took her back to Moscow. Russia’s first canine cosmonaut lived to a ripe old age, and Blagonravov and the dog would often be seen walking the streets of Moscow. In total, nine dogs were flown on six launches, three of them flying twice.
Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought about the first change of leadership in the Soviet Union in more than 30 years, but the direction of the rocketry program changed little. In early 1954 Premier Nikita Khrushchev instructed Minister Ustinov to dilute Korolev’s monopoly in rocket design and construction. Ustinov came up with a plan to create two independent groups. Korolev’s rival was to be the Experimental Design Bureau formed in the Ukraine and led by 43-year-old Mikhail Yangel.
Although rockets for space flight were important to the Soviet Union, what mattered more were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The first Soviet ballistic missile was the R-5. In February 1956, with a live atomic bomb in its nosecone, it was test launched from Kapustin Yar. Observers at the impact site of the 300-kiloton nuclear explosion in Kamchatka telephoned Korolev at the launch site informing him that: “We have observed detonation.” The R-5 went into service and stayed in operation for 11 years. However, work was already under way on a more powerful ICBM, the R-7. At last the various factors needed to put a satellite into orbit were coming together. A suitable launcher was on the horizon, and Korolev's supportive colleague Marshal Nedelin had become Deputy Minister of Defense for Special Armaments and Reactive Technology. If a satellite were to lift off from Soviet soil, it would be Nedelin who would permit the use of a missile for such a project.
The R-7 was unlike anything created before. At the launch site, four conical strap-on boosters, each just over 19 meters (62 ft.) in length, surrounded the central rocket core. It had a launch mass of 270 tons, of which about 247 tons was fuel. At liftoff, the total thrust was an impressive 398 tons. Korolev knew it could launch a satellite—he just needed permission from the authorities to allow him to do so.
TIMELINE
| 1903 | May First publication of Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s work The Exploration of the World Space with Jet Propulsion Instruments |
| 1909 | American Robert Goddard starts research in the field of rocket dynamics |
| 1917 | January 5 The Smithsonian Institution awards a $5,000 grant to Robert Goddard to conduct rocket research of the upper atmosphere |
| 1923 | In Germany, Hermann Oberth publishes The Rocket into Interplanetary Space |
| 1928 | June 11 The world’s first aircraft powered by a rocket engine completes a flight in Germany |
| 1930 | September 18 Russian Fredrikh Tsander conducts the first tests of liquid-fueled engines |
| 1932 | July 14 The Soviet government begins sponsoring Moscow-based Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight (GIRD) |
| 1933 | Soviet Union launches its first liquid-fueled rocket |
| 1934 | December Wernher von Braun launches two A-2 rockets from Borkum Island in the North Sea |
| 1936 | May 9 Sergei Korolev oversees the first test of “216” winged missile |
| 1944 | Soviet troops capture remnants of a German V-2 rocket |
| 1950 | April 26 Sergei Korolev becomes chief designer of OKB-1, the Soviet long-range ballistic missile program |
| 1951 | July 29 The first launch of the Russian “geophysical” rocket carrying live animals on board |
| 1957 | August First successful test flight of the Russian R-7 ICBM |
