There is a simple wooden house in the city of Kaluga, about 195 km southwest of Moscow, in which a deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher called Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky once lived. Born in 1857, his writings, although sometimes far-fetched, put substance to mankind’s nascent dreams of escaping our planet and journeying into space. His 1903 work, ‘Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines’ is regarded as the world’s first scientifically viable proposal to explore space with rockets. He imagined rockets fuelled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen – the same mix used on the Space Shuttle. He developed the equation, now named after him, that provides the relationship between the changing mass of a rocket as it consumes fuel, the velocity of the exhaust gases, and the rocket’s final speed. It is the foundation of astronautics. Years later he published an article on multi-stage rockets, which he said were needed to get into space. As each rocket stage used its fuel, it would break off. He predicted steering rockets, pumps to move fuel from tanks to the combustion chamber, and the need for pressurized spacesuits. Along with the later generation of rocket pioneers, the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth, he helped prepare the way for others, and while all three dreamed of space travel, only Tsiolkovsky never thought it would come to pass. ‘The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever,’ he wrote.
After the revolution, most were concerned with survival and there were initially few who dreamed of space travel. Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was one who did – though that was not his real name. He was born in Ukraine and while in his twenties he wrote pioneering works on rocketry such as ‘The Conquest of Interplanetary Space’, in which he improved on Tsiolkovsky’s concepts. One of his most remarkable ideas was a mission profile for a lunar landing using two separate vehicles: a mother ship in lunar orbit, and another for the descent to and from the surface. When Americans did land on the Moon in 1969 their mission took this form. But his contribution to spaceflight was cut short. In 1916, he was conscripted into the Army to fight in Turkey. After the Bolsheviks rose to power he decided to leave the Army, but on his journey home, he was forcibly conscripted by the rebel White Army to fight against the communists. He escaped but was found by the White Army again in Kiev, whereupon after a second spell with them he deserted once more. Having fought on both sides he was in a difficult position after the revolution: both sides wanted to execute him. To save his life, his stepmother sent him the identity documents of a man named Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, who was born in 1900 and died in 1921; he assumed his new identity and tried to lead an inconspicuous life. Terrified of being found out, he did not join the burgeoning amateur rocketry groups of the 1920s and 1930s. His ideas were lost, as were his remains when he perished defending Moscow against the Nazis.
For historians, two men have come to exemplify the race to the Moon: Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. They were rivals, though they never met, and von Braun knew little of Korolev except by his work. They learned, by trial and error, how to tame the explosive power of rocket fuel for a few minutes, forcing it to produce thrust. Although they lived very different lives they had many things in common: in particular a passion for spaceflight and a drive that overcame the almost overwhelming engineering and political problems they faced. They both learned to cope with failure, neglect and frustration and both in different ways carried the scars of war. Standing amid the ashes and debris of the Second World War, both looked to the Moon and felt that within their lifetimes it could be reached. But only one would live to see his dreams fulfilled.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born in 1906 not far from Kiev. He came from a fractured home and was bullied at school because he was seen as a teacher’s pet, due to his ability in maths. Under the care of grandparents, his family endured the many hardships that befell the people after the revolution. As a boy he was obsessed with aeroplanes and space travel, preferring his flying machines to people. When he was twenty he moved to Moscow, living in crowded squalor with his family, and attended the Bauman Higher Technical Institute where his talents came to the attention of the famed aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, who had been one of Tsiolkovsky’s pupils.
Seeking out others who shared his interests, he joined a rocket society known as GIRD – the Group for the Study of Rocket Propulsion Systems. It was led by the space visionary Friedrikh Tsander who shared with Korolev dreams of flying in space. ‘To Mars! Onward to Mars!’ was how Tsander used to greet his fellow workers.
Tsander was born in 1887 in Riga, Latvia, where there is now a street named after him, as well as a memorial. By his twenties he wanted to make a journey into space, and in 1924 he published his landmark work entitled Flight to Other Planets, in which he described the design of rocket engines and made calculations of interplanetary trajectories. He had tried without success to get government support. Almost in desperation, he placed an advertisement in a Moscow newspaper calling for anyone interested in ‘interplanetary communications’. Over 150 people responded. Under his leadership, GIRD held public lectures and carried out small experiments in a wine cellar on 19 Sadovo-Spasskaya Street in Moscow, less than a mile from the Kremlin.
Soon Korolev replaced the ailing Tsander as leader and, with an administrative flair for which he would later become famous, established four research groups to study different rocketry problems. Now the Soviet government was impressed and soon Korolev and his colleagues were working for them. The state was already funding another small research group into solid-fuelled rockets for military use led by a young engineer called Valentin Petrovitch Glushko. He had been inspired by the works of Jules Verne and at fifteen had written a letter to Tsiolkovsky. Just three years later, in 1924, still only eighteen, he had published an article in the popular press titled ‘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 its greatest weakness. By the late summer of 1933 they were able to launch the Soviet Union’s first liquid-fuelled rocket, powered by jellied petroleum burning in liquid oxygen. After two failures the third attempt soared to 400 metres. Korolev wrote: ‘From this moment Soviet rockets should start flying above the Union of Republics. Soviet rockets must conquer space!’ Tsander did not see the triumph. Five months earlier, exhausted by overwork, he had contracted typhus and died.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was born in Germany just before the First World War into a family that had been famous since 1245 when they defended Prussia from Mongol invasion. From an early age he showed an interest in rockets. Germany’s foremost rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, had written a book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (‘By Rocket into Planetary Space’), in which he describes a rocket equipped to go to the Moon. A young von Braun read it and was captivated. His mother gave him a telescope as a confirmation present. He made his own ‘spaceship’ by attaching toy rockets to a wagon and igniting them on Berlin’s Tiergarten Allee.
As a young man in Hitler’s Germany, von Braun took his ideas to Colonel Karl Heinrich Becker, chief of ballistics and ammunition of the Reichswehr. Becker knew von Braun’s father, who was minister for agriculture. He was impressed: ‘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.’ In other words, he was saying to von Braun, you don’t develop a weapon like this in public. Von Braun wanted to use rockets for space flight but Becker wanted a long-range missile for mass bombardment. Von Braun’s friends were against the relationship with ‘ignorant people who would only hinder the free development of our brainchild’. Von Braun, soon to graduate from the Berlin Institute of Technology, refused. Colonel Becker made a second offer, one that would allow von Braun to work for him and continue his studies. This time he accepted.
Barely twenty years old and now working in secret, von Braun joined the Army and worked under Captain Walter Dornberger on liquid-fuel 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.’ To advance his career, von Braun joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937 and then the Waffen-SS, where he gained the rank of Sturmbannführer (major), the decoration awarded by Himmler himself. He told his colleagues that he had been conscripted, and started to lie to them about what he was really doing. After the war von Braun said: ‘My refusal to join the Party would have meant I would have to abandon the work of my life.’ Dornberger needed a quieter and more isolated place for the rocket tests. Von Braun remembered that his grandfather used to hunt on a pine-forested island off the Baltic coast. The sea would provide a perfect test range, so they moved to a small fishing village called Peenemunde.
While the German effort was gaining momentum, the potential of Soviet rocketry was abruptly cut short when Stalin’s purges reached their inhuman climax. In the late spring of 1937 the secret police – the NKVD – arrested Marshal Tukhachevski, head of the group where Korolev was working. He was charged with having been part of an anti-Soviet, Trotskyite conspiracy. After a short trial he was executed along with his mother, sister, and two brothers.
Terrified people became informants simply to survive, among them Valentin Glushko. By the end of 1937, the secret police had Korolev and Glushko in their sights, considering them ‘wreckers’ of the rocket group. Glushko was arrested. Inevitably, Korolev was denounced, partly on Glushko’s testimony, and was thrown into the Lubyanka – the infamous state prison in Moscow. After severe torture, he ‘confessed’ and was lucky not to be shot. He found himself in a cattle truck being taken three and a half thousand miles across Siberia to the Kolyma death camp, where it was said they squeezed everything out of a prisoner in the first three months because after that they didn’t need him anymore.
Two chance events saved his life. A close friend, the famous pilot Valentina Grizodubova, joined with another famous Soviet aviator, Mikhail Gromov, and 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 secret police – who did nothing. However, his successor, the terrible Lavrenti Beriya, thought Korolev was a good example to display his leniency. The charge was altered to the less serious ‘saboteur of military technology’ and a new trial was ordered. Eventually the original verdict was thrown out. However, such was the corruption of the Soviet legal system that even though he was officially not guilty he still had to serve the remaining eight years of his sentence. He worked as a grave-digger in a gold mine off the Kolyma River.
Even by the standards of the Gulag Kolyma was brutal, claiming the lives of between 2 and 3 million people from overwork, famine, cruelty and the harsh Arctic climate. To the end of Korolev’s days his head would bear a scar, the result of a guard striking him with a shovel when he was working as a river-widener. He would return with a heart condition and none of his teeth.
Glushko had been sentenced to a far easier eight years in a prison near Moscow. Eventually, Korolev was found at Kolyma and put on a train back to Moscow. He was transferred to a newly formed aviation design bureau located in Stakhanov village near Moscow, working 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.’
The war was not going well for Stalin. In October 1942 German artillery units were shelling Klushino, some 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 Germans were unstoppable, the outcome inevitable. The Nazis terrorized the locals, subjecting them to summary execution. If ammunition was scarce they used bayonets.
Two terrified young boys, brothers, aged six and eight, crept through the woods outside Klushino. They lived dangerously, scattering broken glass on the road to burst the tires of German trucks, pouring dirt into their car batteries and petrol tanks. Once a German offered one of them some chocolate – but then strung him up on an apple tree to hang him. Their mother heard and came running to confront the rifle-brandishing German. Fortunately for her, he was called away and she rushed to the tree, praying it was not too late. Just in time, she saved her son.
The family had been evicted from their home and were living in a hole in the ground, to which she dragged the boy’s limp body. Slowly, he came back to life. Frightened, cold and hungry they huddled in the dirt. There was Alexei the father, Anna the mother, and four children: eighteen-year-old Valentin, fifteen-year-old Zorya, and the two young boys. The youngest of the boys – the one who had just been saved from hanging – was called Boris; his eight-year-old brother was Yuri. The family’s name was Gagarin. Valentin would remember how Yuri had changed as a result of the war: he became serious, introverted, withdrawn. ‘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,’ he said.
Meanwhile, at Peenemunde a rocket stood ready for launch. Slim and tall, it had a classic shape with fins fitted to its tail, its metal sides frosted with ice and vapour around its chilled fuel tank. Suddenly, a flame appeared at its base and reddish-yellow smoke billowed in all directions. The cables fell away, the flame became more intense and the rocket started to arc over the Baltic, effortlessly surpassing the speed of sound. After one minute a cut-off signal was sent and engineers watched through binoculars as the flame vanished. The rocket was over 30 km away. Walter Dornberger wrote that at this his heart was beating wildly and that he wept with joy. Later he told the engineers that they had proved that it would be possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft that could fly at supersonic speeds. ‘Our rocket today reached a height of nearly 95 km. 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. They called it the A4. Later it was renamed the V-2: V for vengeance.
The V-2 faced opposition, especially after the success of the V-1, essentially a pilotless aeroplane that ran out of fuel after about 150 miles, nose-diving to the ground with 1,800 pounds of explosives. Dornberger and von Braun were worried that money would be taken away from the V-2 in its favour. Gestapo chief Himmler, Reichsmarschall Göring and Grand Admiral Dönitz each toured Peenemunde as they tried to gain a good impression. The test prepared for Himmler spun out of control. Worried that support was ebbing, in July 1943 Dornberger and von Braun visited Hitler in his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in East Prussia. They carried with them scale models of rockets, drawings, diagrams, photos. Their plan worked: Hitler was supportive.
The following month, the British Air Force pounded Peenemunde with 596 heavy bombers. Many workers were killed, though only two from von Braun’s inner circle. To try to avoid future attacks, production of the V-2 moved to an underground oil storage depot in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen, leaving a relative few at Peenemunde, though it remained von Braun’s base. To construct the new facility the Nazis used slave labour without mercy: the underground caverns needed enlarging and prisoners set to work with pickaxes and bare hands. Most did not survive, dying from exhaustion, starvation or execution.
Over 3,000 V-2s were launched against Allied targets. The Allies were impressed with it and as the war drew to a close it became their top priority to get their hands on it: both its technology and the engineers who built it. In a letter dated 13 July 1944, Winston Churchill requested Stalin’s cooperation in locating and retrieving V-2 components that the Germans were leaving behind in their retreat. For his part, Stalin ordered the formation of a secret group to collect any rocket remains.
On 8 September 1944, two V-2s were launched from a site near The Hague in Holland intended for a site about a mile from Waterloo Station in London. One landed in Chiswick, killing three people, the youngest being three-year old Rosemary Clarke, asleep in the front bedroom of No. 1 Staveley Road. Von Braun said later: ‘it behaved perfectly, but on the wrong planet.’ But when he heard that the other V-2 had also hit London he drank champagne. ‘Let’s be honest about it,’ he said. ‘We were at war; although we weren’t Nazis, we still had a fatherland to fight for.’
By 1945 it was clear Germany would lose the war, barring some miracle weapon – which was how many saw the V-2. Behind Hitler’s back, Himmler was trying to bring all the rocket programs under his control. He tried to bribe von Braun but he was loyal to his colleagues and knew that he wouldn’t live long if he was allied to Himmler against Hitler. Shortly after his refusal, von Braun was arrested on charges that he cared more about his rockets than about winning the war and had made plans to desert. It took two weeks to get him released.
It is a common belief that the impact of the V-2 on the war was limited. But things could easily have been otherwise. Eisenhower concluded that if the V-2 had come into operation just six months before it did, the invasion of Europe might not have been possible. He said: ‘If they had made the Portsmouth–Southampton area one of their principal targets “Overlord” might have been written off.’
By the time von Braun was released, the Russian Army was approaching Peenemunde from the east. Von Braun later said: ‘I had ten orders on my desk. Five promised death by firing squad if we moved, and five said I’d be shot if we didn’t.’ In mid-January 1945 he called a meeting with the other top officials at Peenemunde. The rumour was that the path of escape might be blocked very soon. Von Braun prepared to evacuate thousands of engineers, scientists and their families to central Germany. Von Braun had seen the end coming and had already started preparing his documents and equipment so that they couldn’t be destroyed. He wrote on SS stationery about a fictional group he called V2BV; he said it was top secret and answerable only to Himmler. ‘V2BV’ was stencilled on crates of documents and equipment. General Hans Kammler ordered that he and 500 of the top scientists be separated from their families and moved to the village of Oberammergau. Von Braun feared they would be executed to deny their knowledge to the enemy. One day he pointed out to the head of the SS guard that the camp could easily be bombed by Allied aircraft. One attack could wipe out all of the Third Reich’s top rocket scientists. Any guard that allowed that to happen would surely be shot. The guard agreed to let the scientists out of the camp, and to let them dress in civilian clothing so American troops would not suspect that they were of any importance.
Everyone was after the German rocket engineers and the V-2. In March the Pentagon sent a request to Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Europe, for a hundred operational V-2s. Toftoy sent Robert Staver to get the V-2’s blueprints and documents and to find its engineers. Von Braun was top of Staver’s list.
Stalin may have played a role in diverting troops towards Peenemunde 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 Peenemunde. The place was deserted, with little in the way of retrievable intelligence. Stalin was furious and was reported as saying: ‘This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated the Nazi armies: we occupied Berlin and Peenemunde: but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?’
On 2 May von Braun fled from Oberammergau. His brother, Magnus, was with him, and when they saw an approaching soldier, Magnus approached the man on a bicycle, calling out: ‘My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender.’ The Americans were delighted. Operation Paperclip was the code name for the secret removal of scientists from Nazi Germany, undertaken not only for the direct benefit of the Americans but also to deny the USSR. Forty railway carriages containing the spoils – tons of documents, a hundred V-2s, test-firing rigs, a liquid oxygen plant and over 300 tons of other equipment – were dispatched to Antwerp and Navy cargo ships. Toftoy also smuggled out 118 members of the rocket team. When Churchill heard about it he was furious and complained to Eisenhower, who responded that it was too late to change things.
In June a group of Soviet engineers arrived at Peenemunde to see what they could salvage. Among them was Boris Chertok, 33, an expert on guidance systems, who immediately realized how far behind they had been. By the end of the war the most powerful operational Soviet rocket engine had a thrust of one and a half tons; the V-2 had a thrust of 27 tons. They obtained some sparse but significant items such as a combustion chamber and parts of propellant tanks, the pieces being sent back to Moscow to be examined by a group of engineers including Vasili Pavlovich Mishin, a specialist in control systems who, twenty years later, would lead the forlorn Soviet program to land a cosmonaut on the Moon.
The German rocket was far in advance of anything that the Russians, or anyone else, had. But they failed to see its full implications. They would eventually pay the price for thinking that long-range aircraft would be a superior weapon to the missile. At Peenemunde, Soviet soldiers dug out from the rubble a German edition of a book by Tsiolkovsky. On almost every page there were notes and comments made by von Braun. The Russians also found in the archives of the Nazi Air Ministry drawings of a missile designed by Soviet engineers in the late 1930s.
The Soviet Union needed rocket experts to make sense of what they were uncovering. Glushko and Korolev were recommended. Thus it was that in September Korolev, now a colonel in the Red Army, found himself in Germany. As he watched test flights of the reconstructed rocket it was clear to him that von Braun had gone further with rocket technology than anyone else – and that the Russians were going to need this technology. Korolev was never to meet von Braun; by the time he arrived in Germany, von Braun was already in America.
As the war in Europe drew to a close, Neil Armstrong was still dreaming of becoming an aircraft designer. He went to half a dozen schools as his family moved around Ohio. The war ended when he was fifteen and a year later he got his pilot’s licence at the youngest age possible. His first solo flight was over his home town of Wapakoneta, landing in a grass field. Soon he would enlist in the Holloway Plan, which mapped out a program of study, flight training and naval service over the next several years. Like so many young men of his generation, he had big plans.