Sergei Korolev

Chapter 1 · 1907 – 1922 The Child of Nezhin

On the Kremlin wall in Moscow, a stone plaque bears three lines: “KOROLEV, Sergei Pavlovich, 30.12.1906 – 14.01.1966.” The first date is given in the old Russian calendar. In ours, the man who put the first satellite into orbit and sent the first human into space was born on January 12, 1907. In his lifetime, his country never printed his name next to his rockets.

Zhitomir

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born in Zhitomir, a town in western Ukraine, then a province of the Russian Empire. His father, Pavel Yakovlevich Korolev, taught Russian language and literature. He came from Mogilev. His mother, Maria Nikolayevna, née Moskalenko, was the daughter of a merchant from Nezhin, a small town northeast of Kiev.

The marriage did not last. The historian Asif Siddiqi, who wrote for NASA the most complete history of the Soviet program, sums up the early years in two sentences: the parents separated when the child was three, and the boy was shuttled from town to town until his mother remarried.

His father died in 1929.

With His Grandparents

According to his Russian biographers, the child was placed after 1910 with his maternal grandparents in Nezhin. The grandfather, Nikolai Yakovlevich Moskalenko, was a well-off merchant. The grandmother was named Maria Matveyevna. The boy grew up in their house.

The same biographers report one fact from the year 1911. That year a famous aviator, Sergei Utochkin, came to give a demonstration in Nezhin. Little Korolev, who was four, is said to have been among the spectators. We know nothing of what he felt. We know only that aviation would be the passion of his youth, well before rockets.

The Stepfather

In 1916 his mother remarried. Her second husband, Grigory Mikhailovich Balanin, was an engineer. In 1917 he obtained a post with the railways in Odessa, the great port on the Black Sea, and the family settled there. Sergei was ten.

It was the year of the two revolutions. The civil war followed. Siddiqi notes that the boy attended no school before the age of fourteen: he studied at home, with tutors. The Russian biographers add that his stepfather, an engineer and a teacher, played a large part in that education.

His mother later took her second husband’s name. It was as Maria Balanina that she would write to Stalin, in 1938, to try to save her son.

What We Know, What We Do Not Know

Something must be said here about the sources. For the last forty years of his life, we have abundant and reliable documents: archives opened after 1991, the memoirs of his deputies, his own letters. For his childhood, we depend on encyclopedia entries that summarize the Russian biographies, in particular the book his daughter Natalia devoted to him. We have not been able to read them directly.

We therefore keep to the facts on which those entries agree: Zhitomir, the parents’ separation, Nezhin, the remarriage, Odessa. We will lend the boy neither dreams nor words. Those who knew him as an adult described a hard man, quick-tempered, secretive, capable of unexpected tenderness. It is tempting to look for the causes in a fatherless childhood. No document allows us to assert it.

Odessa, 1921

The civil war was ending. In Odessa, a squadron of seaplanes had set up in the port. According to his biographers, the fourteen-year-old made friends with the airmen.

In 1922 he entered a vocational school for the building trades. There he learned carpentry, which would soon serve him for something quite other than roof frames.

For what he wanted, at fifteen, was to fly.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (birth, parents’ separation, schooling at home) and ch. 11 (inscription on the Kremlin wall); B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 17 (places of his life, Natalia Koroleva’s book); for the names and dates of the parents and grandparents, Nezhin, Utochkin’s flight, the stepfather and Odessa: Wikipedia entries in Russian and English (tertiary sources).

Chapter 2 · 1923 – 1930 The Gliders

In February 1930, in Moscow, a twenty-three-year-old student received the title of “aeromechanical engineer.” His final project was not a paper. It was a full-size aircraft, which he had designed, built, and tested in flight himself. His project supervisor was named Andrei Tupolev. Sergei Korolev was not yet thinking about rockets. He wanted to be an aircraft designer.

The Odessa Club

At seventeen, writes the historian Asif Siddiqi, Korolev joined a gliding club in Odessa. He soon became one of its leaders. Since childhood, Siddiqi adds, the boy had read voraciously everything about the exploits of the pioneers of aviation.

His Russian biographers give the setting. In 1923 a Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and Crimea was created. Korolev was a member. In 1924 he designed a glider, the K-5. He was seventeen.

The glider was then, in the Soviet Union, the school of a whole generation. It cost almost nothing. It was built in a workshop, with plywood and fabric. And it forced one to understand, because a badly calculated glider does not forgive. Several of the men Korolev would meet again all his life began this way: Mikhail Tikhonravov, Pavel Tsybin, Pyotr Flerov.

Kiev

In 1924 he entered the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, in the aviation section. He stayed two years. According to one entry, he broke two ribs there in a glider workshop in 1925.

The great designers were in Moscow. In 1926 he obtained a transfer to the Moscow Higher Technical School, which the whole country knew by its initials, MVTU. He entered the department of aerodynamics.

Moscow

There, for the first time, he met the men who were making Soviet aviation. The most famous taught at the school: Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev, the builder of the country’s first large all-metal aircraft. He would supervise Korolev’s diploma project.

That meeting would have a sequel neither of them could foresee. Ten years later, both would be in prison. And it was because Tupolev remembered his former student, when drawing up a list of useful engineers, that Korolev would be pulled out of his cell.

For the moment, the student designed gliders. The Russian biographers name two: the “Koktebel,” after the village in Crimea where the gliding competitions were held each year, and the “Krasnaya Zvezda,” the “Red Star.”

It was in 1927, among the young glider pilots, that he met Mikhail Tikhonravov, seven years his senior, a glider pilot like himself. The two men would work together, on and off, for nearly forty years. Tikhonravov would design the first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket. He would also be the one who, in 1948, convinced Korolev that a satellite was possible.

The Diploma

For his diploma, Korolev presented a light aircraft and flew it. Siddiqi writes that he designed and built, as part of his thesis, a full-size glider which he then tested himself; the Russian biographers speak of a light airplane, the SK-4. The two accounts agree on the essential point: he was not content with paper. That trait would never leave him. All his life, he would judge an idea by what it became once built.

Around this time he also obtained his pilot’s license.

As soon as he left the school, he was offered a position as an engineer in a Moscow design bureau headed by the designer Dmitry Grigorovich. The work there was far more ambitious than his gliders. He then moved to the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, TsAGI, the temple of Soviet aeronautics.

Xenia

On August 6, 1931, according to one entry, he married Xenia Maximilianovna Vincentini. She would be a surgeon. Their daughter, Natalia, would be born in April 1935.

At twenty-four, then, Korolev had a diploma, a profession, a pilot’s license and a wife. He had before him a career as an aircraft designer in a country that was calling for them. Yet he was about to give his evenings to something else entirely, in a cellar.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (Odessa club, MVTU, Tupolev, diploma of February 1930, Grigorovich bureau) and ch. 2 (meeting with Tikhonravov in 1927); for the OAVUK society, the K-5, Kiev, the “Koktebel” and “Krasnaya Zvezda” gliders, the SK-4, the license, the marriage and Natalia’s birth: Wikipedia entries in Russian and English (tertiary sources). The two sets of sources differ on the year of the diploma (1929 or February 1930).

Chapter 3 · 1930 – 1932 “Onward to Mars!”

In December 1930, a Moscow evening newspaper published a small notice. A forty-three-year-old engineer, Fridrikh Tsander, invited all those interested in “interplanetary communications” to make themselves known. A hundred and fifty people replied. When Tsander met his companions, he greeted them with a phrase that became their watchword: “To Mars! Onward to Mars!” Sergei Korolev was one of those who heard it.

Tsander

Fridrikh Arturovich Tsander was born in Riga in 1887. Since his youth he had had a single aim: to acquire the knowledge needed to travel in space. In 1921 he presented to a conference of inventors a design for an interplanetary airplane. In 1924 he published an article titled “Flights to Other Planets.” He had two children, whom he named Merkury and Astra.

Tsander traveled the country giving lectures. He asked the government to fund his engine tests. He received no answer. He worked at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute.

Korolev, for his part, had been interested in space since the late 1920s. Exhibitions in Moscow had shown the public the work of the American Goddard, the German Oberth, the Russians Tsiolkovsky and Kondratyuk. But it was still only a curiosity. His passion remained the airplane. The historian Asif Siddiqi writes that he was “converted” only in 1930, through contact with a few engineers at the Institute, Tsander above all.

What decided him was not a dream of planets. It was a precise claim: Tsander said he could build a rocket engine. Korolev had an idea in mind. He wanted to mount such an engine on a glider and obtain a craft capable of flying very high.

GIRD

The meetings of early 1931 led, on July 18, to the creation of a bureau for the study of reactive engines. In September it took the name under which it has gone down in history: the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion, in Russian GIRD.

The group came under a large patriotic society, Osoaviakhim, which organized young people in gliding, parachuting and shooting. In other words, these were volunteers. They worked in the evening, after their day’s work. No one paid them. They sold family belongings to buy equipment.

A place was found for them: a wine cellar on Sadovo-Spasskaya Street. That is where Soviet astronautics was born.

Among the first members, two men would matter all through Korolev’s life. Mikhail Tikhonravov, thirty-one, his friend from the gliding competitions. And Yury Pobedonostsev, twenty-four. Similar groups soon sprang up in Leningrad, Kharkov, Baku and Tiflis.

A Leader

Tsander was the soul of the group. He was not its organizer. Leading men did not interest him. Siddiqi says it plainly: Korolev, on the contrary, became the natural center of the group. To his knowledge as an engineer he added a talent that now showed itself: for administering, dividing up the work, obtaining money.

On May 1, 1932, he replaced the ailing Tsander at the head of GIRD. He was twenty-five. The group was then divided into four brigades, led by Tsander, Tikhonravov, Pobedonostsev and Korolev himself. They worked mainly on small liquid-propellant engines for handmade rockets and gliders.

Three months later he had obtained what Tsander had asked for in vain. The Directorate of Military Inventions agreed to fund part of the work. The members of the group began to be paid. The tooling improved. Korolev demanded professional rigor from everyone. Outside the group, people began to speak of him as a brilliant engineer and an effective organizer.

Mars in a Cellar

There was much talk of Mars on Sadovo-Spasskaya Street. Siddiqi reports that from GIRD’s earliest days, discussions kept returning to sending rockets into space and landing people on the Red Planet.

The gap should be measured. These people had not yet flown a single rocket. And they greeted one another by shouting the name of a planet that lies, at its closest, more than fifty million kilometers away.

In Korolev, that cry would not fade. Thirty years later, as master of a bureau of fifteen thousand people, he would have a ship designed to carry three men around Mars, and another to land there. The giant rocket he would set in hand was sized, at the outset, for that mission.

Siddiqi has summed up what those two years made of him: by 1932 the idea of spaceflight had absorbed him completely. It was a dream, he writes, that he would never abandon.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (Tsander, notice of December 1930, creation of GIRD, cellar on Sadovo-Spasskaya Street, “To Mars!”, May 1, 1932, four brigades, military funding) and ch. 8 (“Onward to Mars!” and the Mars projects of the 1960s).

Chapter 4 · 1933 Four Hundred Meters

On August 17, 1933, at the Nakhabino range near Moscow, a rocket two meters twenty long slowly left its stand. It climbed to about four hundred meters and fell back. The flight lasted thirteen seconds. It was the first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket. Sergei Korolev, who led the group, wrote for his comrades’ bulletin: “Soviet rockets must conquer space!”

The Death of Tsander

The man who should have been there was not. Fridrikh Tsander had worn himself out with work. His companions had made him take a rest. On his way to a health resort, he caught typhus. He died on March 28, 1933, without regaining consciousness. He was forty-five.

The historian Asif Siddiqi sees in that death the end of an era: that of the amateurs. A few months later, Korolev and his people would be employees of the state.

The 09

The rocket of August 17 bore a simple number: 09. It had been designed by Mikhail Tikhonravov’s team. It burned liquid oxygen and a jellied gasoline. It was loaded onto a truck to be taken to the range.

A first attempt, on August 11, failed. A second, on the 13th, failed as well. The third was the right one. The liftoff, Siddiqi writes, was alarmingly slow. Then the rocket rose.

Four hundred meters is not much. The American Robert Goddard had flown a liquid-propellant rocket seven years earlier. But the men of GIRD had got there in two years, in the evenings, in a cellar.

The text Korolev wrote for the group’s bulletin conveys his state of mind. “The first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket has been launched. August 17 will undoubtedly be a memorable day in the life of GIRD, and from this moment Soviet rockets must fly over the Union of Republics.” And he ended with the sentence about conquering space.

He was twenty-six.

The Marshal

Since the previous year, the military had been taking an interest in the group. The man pushing in that direction was one of the most prominent leaders of the Red Army: Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, deputy people’s commissar for the army and navy. He believed in new weapons.

There was then, in Leningrad, another body working on rockets: the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, GDL. It came under the army. Powder projectiles were being developed there, and a young engineer, Valentin Glushko, was building liquid-propellant engines.

Tukhachevsky obtained the merger of the two teams. On September 21, 1933, a decree of the Revolutionary Military Council created the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, in Russian RNII. The amateurs of the cellar entered the service of the state.

The director came from Leningrad: Ivan Kleimenov, the former head of GDL. His deputy was Korolev.

The End of the Amateurs

On November 25, 1933, the Moscow group launched one more rocket, the GIRD-X, entirely liquid-fueled, which grew out of Tsander’s work. Then the cellar on Sadovo-Spasskaya Street emptied. The “evening engineers” now had a salary, workshops, a hierarchy, military orders.

They gained resources. They lost their freedom. The marshal wanted an institute that would prepare missiles for the artillery. The army chiefs, little interested, refused to let him keep it under his authority. A month after its creation, on October 31, the institute was attached to the commissariat of heavy industry.

Siddiqi points out the resemblance to what was happening at the same moment in Germany and the United States. Everywhere, societies of passionate amateurs were drawing the attention of their governments. In Berlin, the Society for Space Travel saw a student named Wernher von Braun leave for the army. But, the historian adds, only one of these three groups was to feel the full force of its own government’s assault on its own people.

Korolev could not know it. In the autumn of 1933 he was the number two of a state institute devoted to rockets. He had four years and nine months of freedom left.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (rocket 09, attempts of August 11, 13 and 17, 1933, Korolev’s text for the GIRD bulletin, Tsander’s death, decree no. 0113 of September 21, 1933, Kleimenov, transfer of October 31); for the GIRD-X of November 25, 1933: Wikipedia entry in English (tertiary source); for Goddard, see his biography on this site.

Chapter 5 · 1933 – 1938 The Institute

In December 1934, a slim volume appeared in Moscow under the title Rocket Flight in the Stratosphere. Its author, Sergei Korolev, examined for the first time the sending of men to very high altitude aboard a rocket. He admitted at once that, given the state of Soviet technology, the project was probably premature. By then he was no longer the number two of his institute. He had been demoted.

The Dispute

The director of the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, Ivan Kleimenov, was not a rocket specialist. He considered that the most urgent task was to make powder projectiles for the artillery. Korolev disagreed.

Kleimenov settled the matter as the man in charge. He removed Korolev from his post as deputy and made him simply head of the winged-vehicle section. In his place he put a man from Leningrad, Georgy Langemak, an established specialist in powder. Some of the projects Korolev cared most about, such as the rocket-powered airplane, were struck from the program.

It was a humiliation. The historian Asif Siddiqi adds a remark the man himself could not make: that change of post probably saved his life.

The Winged Vehicles

So from 1934 to 1938 Korolev worked on missiles fitted with wings. That was then his way of thinking about the rocket: not a shell that rises and falls, but an airplane without a propeller. He designed several vehicles of this type for the army. One of them, the 212, was a winged missile to be fired from the ground.

Out of this work came a project close to his heart: the RP-318, a glider fitted with a rocket engine. He designed it in July 1936. In late 1937 and early 1938, the engine was tested on the stand. Korolev expected to make the first flight himself.

The engines were the business of two other men. Mikhail Tikhonravov continued his research. And Valentin Glushko, who had come from Leningrad, developed dozens of small nitric-acid engines. Glushko was a year younger than Korolev. As a child in Odessa, he had written to Tsiolkovsky. The two men respected each other and worked together, and nothing yet foretold the quarrel that would part them.

The Stratosphere

Korolev did not give up altitude for all that. In March and April 1934, in Leningrad, he presented to a national conference on the study of the stratosphere a paper asking that scientific instruments be developed for high-altitude rockets. In 1935, with Glushko, Tikhonravov, Pobedonostsev and others, he took part in a Moscow conference devoted entirely to exploring the stratosphere with reactive vehicles.

His little book of 1934 belongs to that effort. In it he speaks of men on board. He does so as an engineer, with reservations. But he wrote it, twenty-seven years before doing it.

A School

Siddiqi has passed a balanced judgment on those years. The first aims of Korolev, Glushko and Tsander were set aside. But the work of the institute was productive. The young engineers learned processes, materials, test methods. They also learned, for the first time, to organize and to lead. That gain, he writes, would weigh heavily in the later successes.

At home, Korolev now had a daughter. Natalia was born on April 10, 1935. His wife, Xenia, was a surgeon.

1937

In June 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky and several other Red Army leaders were tried for treason and shot.

Everything the marshal had protected became suspect. The rocket institute was his creation. Kleimenov, its director, and Langemak, its deputy, owed him their posts. They were arrested in the autumn. They in turn would be shot, in early 1938.

The deputy’s post that Korolev had lost in 1934 had just cost the life of the man who took it.

At the end of 1937, the political police, the NKVD, held a statement denouncing two engineers of the institute as “wreckers”: Glushko and Korolev. Siddiqi thinks it likely that it was extracted from Kleimenov and Langemak before their execution.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (conflict with Kleimenov, demotion, Langemak, missile 212, RP-318, conferences of 1934 and 1935, book of December 1934, purges) and ch. 6 (Glushko writing to Tsiolkovsky); for Natalia’s date of birth: Wikipedia entry in English; for the trial of June 1937: general history of the Red Army purges.

Chapter 6 · 1938 June 27

On June 27, 1938, in Moscow, NKVD agents arrested Sergei Korolev and took him to the Lubyanka prison. He was thirty-one. He had only just left the hospital. Among the five charges brought against him was the deliberate destruction of a rocket plane, the RP-318. At that very moment the aircraft was sitting, intact, in his institute’s hangar.

Glushko First

The machine had been set in motion at the start of the year. On February 13, 1938, the institute’s scientific council held an enlarged session. On the agenda: the “denigration of the personality” of the engineer Glushko. He was accused of maintaining relations with “enemies of the people,” of divulging military secrets, of shirking social work.

A second session took place on February 20. All of Glushko’s colleagues but one denounced him. Korolev was not present that day. A resolution declared Glushko “unreliable.” On March 23 he was arrested.

Korolev then said publicly that he could not believe Glushko had sabotaged anything. The historian Asif Siddiqi notes the result: those words only drew suspicion onto him.

The Accident

He went on working. He directed the tests of the 212 winged missile. On May 29, 1938, during one of those tests, he was injured in the head. He remained in the hospital for several weeks.

The NKVD did not wait for him to recover. On June 20 he was officially denounced as a member of an anti-Soviet organization. The last item in the file was a letter signed by four engineers of the institute, accusing him of disruptive activities. The text of the denunciation asserted that Korolev and Glushko were “responsible for all the errors, omissions, faults and disturbances that have occurred at the test stands.”

One man played a particular role in this affair: Andrei Kostikov, an engineer at the institute. In July he himself sent the NKVD a letter on Korolev’s “anti-Soviet character.” At the end of 1939 he would be appointed director of the institute.

The Mother

By all accounts, Korolev sincerely believed at first that there had been a clerical error. His mother grasped at once how serious the situation was. Maria Nikolayevna Balanina wrote to Stalin. She sent him at least three letters. She pleaded her son’s innocence and spoke of her fear for his health.

Nothing suggests that those letters were read by the man they were addressed to.

The Interrogations

Korolev was interrogated twice. The first time, he denied everything. The second, Siddiqi writes, after severe torture and beatings, he “confessed” and signed a document admitting his guilt.

He never described those sessions. We know only, from what doctors said thirty years later, that they left their mark on him. According to several sources, his jaw was broken there. We shall meet that fact again, and the doubt surrounding it, on the last day of his life.

There is, on the other hand, a sentence of his about the procedure. “During the investigation of my case,” he wrote, “I was unable to prove or explain anything, because there was no investigation in the proper sense of the word. I was crudely accused of sabotaging research on a new technology. I could not imagine a more absurd and more incredible charge, for the development of that technology was the cause of my life and the work I loved.”

Ten Years

On September 27, 1938, three months to the day after his arrest, he appeared before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, presided over by Vasily Ulrikh. The sentence fell: ten years of “corrective labor camp,” five years’ loss of all his rights, confiscation of all his property.

To the “confession” had been added, in the file, the false accusations attributed to Kleimenov, to Langemak and to Glushko himself. Korolev knew it. He would write the following year, from his camp, that he had been “vilely slandered” by those three men. He did not know then that the first two had been shot.

Kleimenov and Langemak, for their part, had been sentenced to death. That is what leads Siddiqi to write that the demotion of 1934 probably saved Korolev’s life.

Novocherkassk

While awaiting transfer, he was held in the prison at Novocherkassk, in southern Russia. He did not resign himself. In February 1939 he wrote to Stalin to protest his innocence and ask for his trial to be reviewed.

Outside, two famous people were acting on his behalf. Valentina Grizodubova and Mikhail Gromov were aviators the whole country knew. Both were deputies to the Supreme Soviet. Grizodubova was a friend of Korolev’s. With his mother, they signed a letter to the Central Committee of the Party asking for the case to be reexamined.

That letter would have an effect. But it would come a few days too late.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (“The Purges”: sessions of February 13 and 20, 1938, Glushko’s arrest on March 23, injury of May 29, denunciation of June 20, arrest of June 27, Maria Balanina’s letters, interrogations, Kostikov’s letter, judgment of September 27, Korolev’s statement, letter of February 1939, Grizodubova and Gromov) and ch. 11 (aftereffects mentioned at the time of the 1966 operation). The European Space Agency’s page on Korolev gives “7 June 1938” for the arrest; we keep June 27, the date given by Siddiqi and the Russian entries.

Chapter 7 · 1939 – 1940 Kolyma

In August 1939, a convoy of prisoners arrived at the Maldyak gold mine, in the Kolyma basin, in the far northeast of Siberia. Among them was a thirty-two-year-old engineer sentenced to ten years. Sergei Korolev would be a laborer there, digging earth. In Moscow, two months earlier, a court had ordered that his trial be held again.

Twelve Days Too Late

The letter from the aviators Grizodubova and Gromov had reached the top of the political police. And the police had just changed chiefs. Nikolai Yezhov, the executor of the Great Terror, had been arrested. Lavrenty Beria succeeded him. The historian Asif Siddiqi explains the paradox: Beria would become one of the cruelest men of the regime, but in early 1939 he was trying to give himself the image of a fair and humane chief. The Korolev file, backed by two famous deputies, was a good example to show.

The president of the court himself, Ulrikh, then protested against his own sentence. On June 13, 1939, the plenum of the Supreme Court altered the charge. Korolev was no longer a “member of an anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary organization.” He became a “saboteur of military technology,” which was less serious. A new trial was ordered.

But the convict had left his prison on June 1. He was rolling east.

The Journey

He crossed Russia in a cattle car, in a packed train, by way of the Urals and Lake Baikal. At the end of the line, the prisoners were crammed into the hold of a ship, which crossed the Sea of Okhotsk.

Kolyma was not a camp. It was a region of camps, as big as a country, where gold was mined. Of all those of the Gulag, Siddiqi writes, they were already considered the most brutal at the time. People died there of exhaustion, hunger, the guards’ blows and the cold. The winter of 1939-1940 was one of the worst the region had known.

Maldyak

Korolev said almost nothing about those months. Personal details, Siddiqi notes, are lacking. What is known fits in a few lines.

He worked at the mine, digging earth. He was so harshly treated, from the first months, that he was left with a large scar on his head. Scurvy cost him half his teeth.

And he wrote. On October 15, 1939, he sent a letter to the Procurator General of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinsky, the prosecutor of the great Moscow trials. In it he asked for his immediate return to the capital. He named those who, in his view, had ruined him: “I was vilely slandered by the director of the institute, Kleimenov, by his deputy Langemak and by the engineer Glushko.”

Kleimenov and Langemak had been dead for nearly two years. Korolev would still not know it in July 1940.

Six Hundred, Two Hundred

Beria’s change of line had set the administration looking for him in the camps. In December 1939 Korolev was finally located. He was starving. He was put on a convoy for Moscow.

Siddiqi gives a figure that says what those five months were. When Korolev arrived at the camp, there were six hundred prisoners. When he left, two hundred were still alive.

At Khabarovsk, in the Far East, he received medical care for the first time. On March 2, 1940, he was in Moscow. He was locked up in the Butyrka prison, cell 66.

Eight Years

The NKVD resumed the investigation, under Beria’s eye. It was closed on May 28, 1940. The new sentence was pronounced on July 10: Korolev would be “deprived of liberty” for eight years.

He therefore escaped a return to the mines. But he was not free, and he was not cleared. He began writing again: to Stalin, to Beria, to the procurator. Those letters had no effect.

What Kolyma Left

A witness of his last years, the engineer Anatoly Abramov, described a scene in the canteen. Korolev, by then the chief designer, was lunching with his deputies at a large table. He ate very fast, more occupied with answering questions than with his meal. When he had finished, he wiped his plate with a piece of bread, which he put in his mouth. Then he gathered up the crumbs and ate them. His neighbors watched in astonishment, until someone explained that it was a habit from the years of prison and camp.

There is also what he said, or rather what he kept silent. One of those close to him reported that Korolev had persuaded himself that Kolyma, prison and all the rest had to be forgotten, wiped from memory and heart. Glushko, on the contrary, remembered everything and everyone, and had kept many documents.

He did not wipe it all away. That would be seen in 1961, on the day he felt threatened by a rival better placed at court than he was.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (Beria, plenum of June 13, 1939, departure of June 1, journey, Kolyma, scar and scurvy, letter of October 15 to Vyshinsky, six hundred and two hundred prisoners, Khabarovsk, Butyrka, sentence of July 10, 1940), ch. 3 (A. Abramov’s recollection), ch. 5 (Korolev’s and Glushko’s attitudes to the past) and ch. 8 (remark of July 1961 to G. Kisunko); for the name of the Maldyak mine and the date of arrival (August 3, 1939): Siddiqi and the Russian Wikipedia entry.

Chapter 8 · 1940 – 1945 The Sharashka

“We were taken to the dining hall… Heads turned toward us, there were exclamations, people came running. So many familiar, friendly faces. At the tables we see Tupolev, Petlyakov, Myasishchev, Neman, Korolev… the elite, the cream of Russian aeronautical engineering. It was impossible to conceive that they had all been arrested, that they were all prisoners: it meant a catastrophe for Soviet aviation!” The man describing his arrival in these words was an imprisoned engineer. The place was a design bureau. It was guarded by the political police.

Tupolev’s List

Andrei Tupolev, the country’s most famous aircraft designer, had been arrested in October 1937. Perhaps because war was approaching, Stalin had him asked for a list of the men who might be useful to the aircraft industry. Tupolev wrote down twenty-five names. One of them was that of a former student whose diploma he had supervised.

In September 1940, Korolev was transferred from the Butyrka to a design bureau set up near Moscow. Its official name was Central Design Bureau No. 29. The prisoners called it a “sharashka.” The word comes from Russian slang, where it means a shady enterprise built on bluff. It was a prison where people drew. The engineers lived in barracks, under permanent guard, and worked for the state that had condemned them.

One of his companions described Korolev on his arrival. “He looked terrible. He was emaciated and exhausted. Tupolev showed great concern for him, which we did not understand. Apparently he valued in Korolev qualities we did not notice then. He was hardworking, responsible, and interested in original solutions.”

“We Will All Vanish”

The bureau was working on a bomber, which would be called the Tu-2. Korolev did his part. But it was not what he wanted to do, and he asked several times to be assigned to rocket engines.

The testimonies about his state of mind contradict one another, and all must be given. An engineer who knew him there, Professor Georgy Ozerov, describes him as “a cynic and a pessimist, who saw the future in the darkest light.” One of Tupolev’s deputies reports his favorite phrase: “We will all vanish without a trace.” He despised the regime, it is said, and expected to be shot.

Others maintain that he never doubted Stalin’s “honesty and sense of justice.” His letters, written from Kolyma and the Butyrka, point that way. The historian Asif Siddiqi thinks he grasped Stalin’s personal responsibility only after Khrushchev’s report, in 1956.

Legend has it that the NKVD agents told him on his arrival: “Our country does not need your fireworks. Or are you perhaps making rockets to take the life of our leader?”

The Concerto

A woman prisoner, Esfir Rachevskaya, left a memory of another kind. One day the radio broadcast Aram Khachaturian’s violin concerto.

“I was homesick,” she recounts. “I wanted to be at home, in Moscow, with my family and friends. Tears were running down my cheeks. I turned around and saw Korolev standing near me, he too with tears in his eyes. Looking at him, I began to cry bitterly. He went back into the office, and when I returned, he was sitting at his desk, absorbed in his work.”

Kazan

The Tu-2 entered service in the autumn of 1942. The NKVD then granted Korolev’s requests. In November he was transferred to another sharashka, at Aircraft Plant No. 16 in Kazan, on the Volga.

The bureau to which he was assigned was developing auxiliary rocket engines to help propeller aircraft take off. It was headed by a prisoner: Valentin Glushko. The man Korolev had accused, three years earlier, of having “vilely slandered” him had become his chief.

In January 1943, Korolev was put in charge of a group responsible for reactive installations. Nearly five years after his arrest, he was working on rocket engines again. Nothing is known of what the two men said to each other. It is known that they worked together, then side by side, for another twenty years, before falling out for good.

“Released”

On July 27, 1944, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet signed the early release of thirty-five engineers, for their “contribution to the construction of jet boosters for aircraft.” Glushko and Korolev were among them. The measure took effect on August 10.

It was not a rehabilitation. The convictions were not annulled. In the eyes of the law, Korolev remained a guilty man who had been let go. He would remain so for thirteen years.

The Kazan bureau passed from the NKVD to the aircraft industry. Glushko became its chief designer. Korolev was his deputy. The roles of 1933 were reversed, and neither of them could be unaware of it.

Two Missiles on Paper

Two months after his release, on October 14, 1944, he sent a report to the first deputy commissar for the aircraft industry. In it he proposed two long-range powder missiles: the D-1, ballistic, and the D-2, winged and guided. Their ranges would be sixty and one hundred fifteen kilometers. And he suggested using the second for a “piloted flight.”

In December he set out his timetable and wrote this: “The tasks before us are immense, and the altitudes we want to reach are such that our predecessors and our teachers of the pioneering era could only dream of them.”

The aircraft industry was not interested in missiles. The report went nowhere. But a few weeks earlier, in Poland, a Soviet team had picked up, on an abandoned firing range at Debica, debris from the German A-4, the missile the world would call the V-2. The Germans had built theirs.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 1 (“Prisoners of War”: Tupolev’s list, TsKB-29, meaning of the word sharashka, prisoners’ testimonies, Ozerov, E. Rachevskaya’s anecdote, Kazan, release of July 27, 1944, OKB-SD, reports of October and December 1944, debris at Debica).

Chapter 9 · 1945 – 1946 Germany

On October 15, 1945, at Cuxhaven on the North Sea, the British fired a German A-4 missile, the one the world knows as the V-2, in front of their allies. Five Soviets had been invited. One of them, who wore the rank of lieutenant colonel, was refused access to the observation area by an American general. He protested, with broad gestures and loud cries. He was escorted out of the enclosure. Sergei Korolev watched his first big rocket leave from very far away.

A Second List

In the spring of 1945, the Red Army occupied some of the sites where Germany had built and tested its missiles. The Americans had been through the underground plant at Nordhausen before it and had carried off the essentials, along with Wernher von Braun and his principal engineers. There remained parts, workshops, drawings, and German engineers who had stayed behind. Moscow sent teams to understand what this weapon was.

The Party’s representative in the operation was an artillery general, Lev Gaidukov. He knew the history of prewar Soviet rocketry. He therefore knew that the country’s best specialists had been arrested in 1937 and 1938. At the end of the summer of 1945 he drew up a list of those he needed and handed it to Stalin himself. The gamble was risky. It succeeded. Two of the names were those of Korolev and Glushko.

It was the second time, after Tupolev, that a list changed Korolev’s life.

A Few Days in Moscow

In late August 1945 he left Glushko’s bureau. He returned to Moscow and was reunited with his wife, Xenia, and his daughter, Natalia, whom he had not seen since 1940. The little girl was three when he was arrested. She was ten. The historian Asif Siddiqi writes that it was his first real breath of freedom in more than seven years.

It was brief. In early September he was summoned to the commissariat of armaments. He was told what was being done in Germany. He was assigned there on the spot. So that the Allies would not be surprised to see civilians in the occupation zone, ranks were handed out: he was made a lieutenant colonel. On September 8 he flew to Berlin, by way of Warsaw.

The officer who received him, Georgy Tyulin, would remain tied to him all his life. Twenty years later, it was he who would chair the State Commissions for the last flights Korolev directed.

Bleicherode

After a few weeks in Berlin he was taken to Thuringia, to Bleicherode, where the Soviets had set up an institute to reconstitute the A-4. Dozens of engineers were already at work there. Among them, his old comrade from GIRD, Pobedonostsev. And men he did not yet know: Vasily Mishin, Nikolai Pilyugin, Mikhail Ryazansky, Boris Chertok, Leonid Voskresensky. Almost all the future chief designers of the Soviet space program met there, in Germany, between 1945 and 1946. Siddiqi notes that this fact has no equivalent in the history of the American program.

Korolev lost no time. Within days he created a special group, named “Vystrel,” “the Shot,” charged with studying everything concerning the preparation and launch of the missile. He placed Voskresensky in it. Glushko, for his part, left for Lehesten, where the engines were being tested.

The two men did not behave in the same way. Korolev, who spoke German fluently, cooperated easily with the German engineers who had stayed behind. Glushko, a perfectionist, wanted to control everything and had little regard for the work done at Peenemünde. Siddiqi draws the conclusion: by the end of 1945, of all the engineers on the commission, Korolev was the one to watch.

Cuxhaven

This is the setting for the scene in October. The British, who had reassembled a few A-4s, organized three demonstration firings. For the third, they invited the Soviets. The delegation numbered five men: a general, Tyulin, Pobedonostsev, Glushko and Korolev.

For a reason the sources do not give, it was Korolev whom the American General Cameron refused to let into the observation area. He had to follow the firing from much farther off. Later in the day he was also barred from the assembly area, despite his protests.

He nonetheless came back with an idea. Since the British had fired A-4s reassembled with the help of German specialists, the Soviets must do the same, at home. Out of his proposal would come the firing program of 1947.

The Chief Engineer

In February 1946 he was recalled to Moscow for a few days. He was promoted to colonel. He reported on the work to Georgy Malenkov, one of the men closest to Stalin. When he returned to Berlin in early March, those around him found him unusually cheerful. He had been told that his name was being considered to direct the design of Soviet missiles.

Shortly afterward, the various groups were brought together in a single body, the Nordhausen Institute. Gaidukov was its director. Korolev was its first deputy and chief engineer. The aim was to rebuild enough A-4s to test a few dozen.

In May a commission came from Moscow. At its head was the minister of armaments, Dmitry Ustinov. He was thirty-seven. Throughout the war he had run the production of guns and ammunition. He met Korolev for the first time, and he was very impressed. For twenty years this man would be his principal protector in the government.

A Summer in an Opel

Also in May 1946, Xenia and Natalia joined him in Germany. They stayed all summer. The accounts agree: Korolev was happy. Between two working days, he took the wheel of an Opel the administration had put at his disposal and drove his family along the country roads.

On August 9, 1946, Ustinov signed an order. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was appointed “chief designer” of long-range ballistic missiles. He was thirty-nine. Eight years earlier, he had been awaiting trial in the Lubyanka.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 2 (“In Germany”: Gaidukov’s list, return to Moscow in late August 1945, departure of September 8, Tyulin, Institute Rabe, Vystrel group, comparison between Korolev and Glushko, Cuxhaven on October 15, 1945, promotion of February 1946, Malenkov, Nordhausen Institute, Ustinov’s visit in May 1946, his family’s stay, order of August 9, 1946). Age at appointment: born in January 1907, he was thirty-nine in August 1946; Siddiqi writes “thirty-eight.”

Chapter 10 · 1946 – 1947 Chief Designer

On October 18, 1947, at 10:47 a.m. Moscow time, an A-4 missile rose above the steppe at Kapustin Yar, near the Volga. It was the first firing of a long-range ballistic vehicle from Soviet soil. It was announced that it had covered the full planned distance. The minister of armaments, Dmitry Ustinov, grabbed Sergei Korolev in a bear hug and swept him into a dance. Then Korolev and the German engineer Helmut Gröttrup embraced. No one yet knew that the missile had fallen thirty kilometers from its target.

A Contested Appointment

The order of August 9, 1946, appointed Korolev “chief designer of article no. 1” at Scientific Research Institute No. 88, NII-88. Article no. 1 was the future Soviet copy of the A-4, which would be called the R-1.

The appointment was not a matter of course. Korolev was a former Kolyma prisoner. His conviction had not been annulled: in law, he was still an enemy of the state. Many in the upper reaches of the Party refused to entrust a top-secret program to such a man. The first choice had in fact fallen on another engineer, Yevgeny Sinilshchikov. It was the impression made on Ustinov, and General Gaidukov’s recommendation, that carried the day.

The new chief designer’s first decision was to choose his first deputy. He took Vasily Mishin, who was twenty-nine. Mishin had at first refused to follow him. He would remain his second for twenty years, and would succeed him.

Podlipki

NII-88 was housed in a former artillery plant in Kaliningrad, a locality in Moscow’s northern suburbs that everyone still called Podlipki. That town today bears the name Korolev.

He was far from being the master there. The institute had a director, General Lev Gonor, and a chief engineer, who was none other than Pobedonostsev. Under them, a special design bureau had at least eight departments. Korolev headed the third. He had sixty engineers, fifty-five technicians and twenty-five workers. Out of that department of one hundred forty people came the enterprise that still builds the Soyuz spacecraft today.

The historian Asif Siddiqi stresses the difficulty. In Germany, Korolev had ended up coordinating everything. At Podlipki, he was buried under several layers of hierarchy.

The Germans, for their part, had been taken by force. On October 22 and 23, 1946, one hundred fifty-two specialists and their families, nearly five hundred people, were put on trains for the USSR. Korolev did not approve of the method. He is reported to have said: “We should have a bit more self-respect.” One detail gives the measure of the hierarchies of the moment: the German doctors of science were paid six thousand rubles a month. Korolev, the chief designer, was paid the same. Mishin, his first deputy, received two thousand five hundred.

The Council of Six

A missile is not the work of a single bureau. The engine came from Glushko, who was installed at Khimki. Autonomous guidance was Nikolai Pilyugin’s business. Radio was Mikhail Ryazansky’s. The gyroscopes were entrusted to Viktor Kuznetsov. The launch equipment, to Vladimir Barmin. Each came under a different ministry, with its own priorities.

These six men had met in Germany. From the end of 1946 they had fallen into the habit of meeting informally to align their work. Korolev made a system of it. In November 1947 he formed with them a Council of Chief Designers, which he chaired.

The council had no official existence. That was its strength. It brought around one table men whom the organization chart kept apart, and it let them settle matters among themselves, without going up through six ministries. Siddiqi sees in it the first mark of Korolev’s originality as an organizer. For nearly twenty years, this council would be the real center of technical decision-making in the Soviet space program.

“It Is Not a Copy”

Korolev returned from Germany for good in February 1947. The teams had brought back a thirteen-volume work on German technology. Their verdict was measured: the A-4 was a success, but its structure, its tanks and its warhead had flaws.

He was already thinking further ahead. Copying the A-4 seemed to him a waste of time. In January 1947 he had asked the government to start at once on a more powerful missile, the R-2. The answer was no: the copy first.

He then wrote a warning to the committee overseeing rockets. Creating the R-1, he said, “is not simply copying German technology while replacing their materials with ours.” A whole industry was needed. He asked for a timetable, and a firing range.

Kapustin Yar

A site on the shore of the Sea of Azov had first been considered. The first secretary of the Party in Ukraine, a certain Nikita Khrushchev, opposed it: too many inhabitants would have had to be moved. The choice fell on Kapustin Yar, in the steppe southeast of Stalingrad.

In the autumn of 1947 everyone gathered there: Soviet and German engineers, artillery officers, men of the secret police, envoys of the Party. They lived in railway cars and under tents. Korolev arrived in early October with his deputies. A temporary “State Commission” directed the tests. This would henceforth be the rule for every new rocket.

Eleven A-4s were fired. Some had been built in Germany, the others assembled at Podlipki. On November 2, one of them carried instruments of the physicist Sergei Vernov to measure cosmic rays. It climbed to eighty kilometers. That was the beginning of Soviet high-altitude research.

The following year, the Germans would no longer be invited to the range.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 2 (order no. 83-K of August 9, 1946, opposition to the appointment, Mishin, NII-88 and Department No. 3, transfer of the German specialists on October 22-23, 1946, salaries, Council of Chief Designers, report on German technology, letter on the R-1, choice of Kapustin Yar, firing of October 18, 1947, scientific firing of November 2).

Chapter 11 · 1947 – 1949 Before Stalin

“I had been given the assignment to report to Stalin on the development of the new rocket. At first he listened in silence, hardly taking his pipe from his mouth. Sometimes he interrupted me with brief questions. Stalin answered my greeting but did not offer me his hand. He was outwardly reserved. I could not tell whether he approved of what I was saying or not. He said ‘no’ enough times for those ‘no’s to be law.” Sergei Korolev gave this account to a journalist in 1963. It could not be published in full until 1996.

An Uncertain Date

Korolev was received at the Kremlin by Stalin. That is certain. The date is not. In the 1963 interview he placed it in 1947. His friend Tyulin put it in 1948. His Russian biographer, Yaroslav Golovanov, concluded for 1949. In a letter to his wife, written in 1953, Korolev gives a precise day, March 9, without stating the year.

That letter contains other details. He admits in it that he was very nervous. Other people were present at the meeting, including Minister Ustinov. Stalin paced his office and asked precise questions about the state of the program.

He asked Korolev to compare the rocket and the bomber as weapons of war. Korolev set out the advantages of the rocket. At the end, Stalin had him write a short note on the subject on the spot. On the point Korolev cared most about, the answer was negative. He wanted to move at once to a six-hundred-kilometer missile, the R-2. Stalin held to the copy of the German vehicle.

Korolev later summed it up, cautiously: the meeting played a positive role, because Stalin and his military advisers seemed to understand that the first experiments could lead far.

The R-1

On April 14, 1948, a decree of the Council of Ministers set the line. The R-1 would be built and tested. For the R-2, only “scientific and experimental work” was authorized. The same decree allowed the study of a vehicle of a wholly different class, the R-3, with a range of three thousand kilometers.

Manufacture of the first R-1s began in May 1948 at Podlipki. In the autumn everyone went back to Kapustin Yar. This time no German was invited. Korolev was the only engineer to sit on the State Commission. The five other chief designers were technical advisers to it.

The first two attempts, in mid-September, were scrubbed because of malfunctions. The third rocket lifted off on September 17. Almost at once it veered fifty-one degrees, flew nearly horizontally and fell ten kilometers away. The next one failed because of an oxygen valve.

On October 10, 1948, an R-1 finally covered the planned distance: two hundred eighty-eight kilometers. Of twelve firings, nine succeeded. A technician was killed while checking a gangway.

State security agents were present throughout. Siddiqi writes that their presence cast a general unease over the tests.

The Quarrel over the G-1

The German specialists had been settled on an island in Lake Seliger, at Gorodomlya. On June 4, 1947, their leader, Helmut Gröttrup, proposed a new missile, the G-1. It would have a range of six hundred kilometers, with a separable warhead and more accurate guidance. That was, near enough, the program of the R-2.

Korolev opposed it stubbornly. Boris Chertok, who was then his colleague and would become his deputy, gave an explanation of that opposition that is not technical. Korolev had suffered the humiliation of the purges. He had seen the Soviet effort collapse while the Germans were advancing in great strides toward the A-4. His hostility toward their projects came from there, and it also explains his lack of zeal for copying their missile.

This brought him serious friction with Ustinov. The minister and his deputies wanted to let the Germans work. For months, departments of the institute were placed at their disposal, at the expense of the R-2.

The matter was settled on December 18, 1948, by the institute’s scientific council. Gröttrup announced that his missile would now reach eight hundred ten kilometers. The session was long and at times sour. For the first time, people spoke openly of what employing German engineers meant politically. The G-1 was not approved. Korolev attended neither of the two decisive sessions: he had himself represented by his deputies.

None of the missiles designed by the Germans in the USSR would be built. Siddiqi judges that after 1947 they played only a marginal role: they proposed ideas, only some of which were taken up. He sees two causes, Korolev’s personal resistance and, weightier still, the regime’s distrust of any foreigner. On October 1, 1949, Korolev went to the island one last time, with the director of the institute, to hear the presentation of a last project. He would not return.

The R-2

His own rocket was advancing at the same time. In April 1947 he had “defended” it, as the Russian expression goes, before the institute’s council. It resembled the A-4, but it flew twice as far, for five hundred kilograms more in empty weight. Four innovations explain this. The alcohol tank itself served as the hull. The warhead separated from the body before reentry into the atmosphere. The guidance was improved. And Glushko had drawn thirty-five tons of thrust from the German engine.

In September 1949, a test version flew at Kapustin Yar. Three firings out of five succeeded. That was enough to bury the German project for good. The R-2 would be accepted by the army in November 1951.

In July 1949, Korolev was again summoned to the Kremlin, with the artillery chiefs and the physicist Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, which would explode for the first time a month later. He explained that the R-2 was almost ready. According to an account whose authenticity is not established, Stalin concluded by turning to Kurchatov, to Ustinov, then to him: “You must speed up.”

Korolev had prepared notes that day on another subject. He wanted to speak to Stalin about a “space rocket.” At the last moment, he took them out of his file.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 2 (“The Debate Over the R-2”: meeting with Stalin and discussion of its date, interview of November 30, 1963, with A. Romanov published in full in 1996, letter of 1953, decree of April 14, 1948, tests of the R-1 from September to November 1948, G-1, B. Chertok’s testimony, session of December 18, 1948) and ch. 3 (R-2E of September 1949, visit of October 1, 1949, to Gorodomlya, role of the Germans, Kremlin meeting of July 1949).

Chapter 12 · 1948 – 1951 “Serious Things to Talk About”

On July 14, 1948, in Moscow, before the Academy of Artillery Sciences, a forty-eight-year-old engineer explained to an audience of generals that it was technically possible to build rockets capable of reaching very great altitudes and very great speeds. He was heard in complete silence. Then a senior officer let drop: “Does the institute have nothing to do, that it goes in for fantasy?” After the session, one of the few favorable listeners came up to the speaker. Sergei Korolev said to Mikhail Tikhonravov: “We have serious things to talk about…”

Tikhonravov

The two men had known each other since 1927. It was Tikhonravov who designed GIRD’s 09 rocket. Since Korolev’s arrest, their paths had parted. Tikhonravov, spared by the purges for a reason that is not known, was now working in an institute of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, NII-4.

He was an unusual mind. He painted landscapes in oils, collected beetles and studied the flight of insects. Since the end of the war he had been pursuing an idea almost no one took seriously: putting an object into orbit around the Earth. In 1945 he had even studied a piloted vertical flight aboard a modified A-4. Korolev, consulted at the time, had not followed it up. The historian Asif Siddiqi explains it simply: a year out of prison, he was not going to throw himself into a somewhat fanciful adventure.

There was also a deeper reason. Since the 1930s Korolev had thought that the upper atmosphere would be reached with rocket planes. Only after the war, in the face of the A-4’s success, did his idea change: the road to space ran through the ballistic missile.

The “Packet”

Tikhonravov’s idea was this. No existing rocket goes fast enough to enter orbit. But if several rockets are fastened together, side by side, and all lit on the ground, the result is a far more powerful vehicle, with no need to invent a new engine. He called this a “packet.”

In July 1949 he invited Korolev to his institute, at Bolshevo. One of his associates, Igor Yatsunsky, had just completed the calculations for a launcher made of three R-3 missiles assembled in a packet. Korolev was impressed. He urged Tikhonravov to present a formal report.

That report was read on March 15, 1950. Its title says it all: “On the Possibility of Achieving First Cosmic Velocity and Creating an Artificial Satellite with the Aid of a Multistage Rocket Using the Current Level of Technology.” Korolev was in the hall, with Mishin and another of his deputies, Konstantin Bushuyev. At the end, Tikhonravov added that such a rocket could soon carry a man.

The reception was worse than in 1948. Some were hostile, others kept silent, many were ironic. Mishin himself had doubts. A joke went around after the session: Tikhonravov would soon fly off to the Moon, in the arms of a monkey. Korolev was one of the few to support him publicly and without reserve.

The Forced Silence

In the design bureaus, Korolev’s leaning toward space was known. It was tolerated as a quirk. In Germany already, in 1945, he had talked to the German engineers about going to the Moon together one day. Higher up, some suspected him of something else: his real aim was space travel, and missiles were for him only a Trojan horse.

Under Stalin, such a suspicion was dangerous. Whoever was not strengthening the country’s defense was sabotaging it: such was Beria’s logic. Korolev therefore kept his plans to himself and a few close associates.

In July 1949, on leaving the Kremlin, he nevertheless tried his luck with General Mitrofan Nedelin, who commanded the artillery directorate. He spoke to him of Tikhonravov’s work and the resistance it was meeting. Nedelin was not convinced. Korolev insisted, grew heated. The general ended the conversation with a warning: “There’s no need to get irritated… You probably don’t know it, but our most senior generals have demanded the dismissal of Blagonravov from the presidency of the Academy of Artillery Sciences. Your name was not forgotten either.”

Korolev, the account says, darkened at once.

The following year, the threat took shape. General Nesterenko, director of the institute where Tikhonravov worked, wrote to the Central Committee that missiles derived from the A-4 were a waste of time and money: the Germans had built some fifteen hundred of them without changing the outcome of the war. Ustinov managed to neutralize the letter. Korolev learned of its existence. He would never forgive Nesterenko.

The R-3

His official work, meanwhile, was changing scale. Since the end of 1947 he had been studying a missile with a range of three thousand kilometers. That was ten times more than the A-4, at a moment when the mere copy of the latter was not yet in service.

The draft plan for this R-3 was completed in June 1949. It ran to twenty volumes. Korolev wanted the first, “Principles and Methods of Designing a Missile of Great Range,” to be a true treatise: two hundred eighty-two typewritten pages, going well beyond the vehicle under study. In it he compared three ways of assembling stages. And he wrote that, for intercontinental range, the most promising was that of his friend Tikhonravov: the packet.

The R-3 itself was to be a single-stage vehicle, twenty-seven meters long and weighing seventy-one tons, burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. Its engine was to deliver one hundred twenty tons of thrust. On December 7, 1949, Korolev presented the project to the institute’s council, which approved it enthusiastically.

It would never fly. Glushko would not manage to make an engine of that size work. But the treatise would remain. The engineers who, four years later, designed the first intercontinental missile would find their method in it.

An Evening Course

From 1947 to 1949, Korolev taught at the Moscow Higher Technical School, the one where he had studied. Glushko, Tikhonravov and Pobedonostsev also lectured there. What they taught was surprisingly close to what they were doing: Korolev described, under disguised designations, the missiles he was working on.

The young people who followed these lessons then entered the design bureaus. Several joined Tikhonravov’s small group. It was they who would write, in 1954, the first Soviet satellite proposal.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 2 (“Stratonauts and Multistage Rockets”: VR-190 project, presentation of July 14, 1948, Korolev’s remark) and ch. 3 (“The R-3 Missile” and “Satellites”: portrait of Tikhonravov, visit of July 1949 to Bolshevo, report of March 15, 1950, and its reception, suspicions about Korolev, conversation with Nedelin, Nesterenko’s letter, draft plan of the R-3 and its first volume, session of December 7, 1949, courses at the Bauman school).

Chapter 13 · 1948 – 1951 Dezik and Tsygan

On July 22, 1951, in the early morning, a rocket rose from Kapustin Yar. In its nose, two dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, were traveling in a container. They climbed to one hundred one kilometers, floated weightless for four minutes, then fell back. Twenty minutes after liftoff, a white parachute appeared in the sky. Everyone at the range jumped into cars and raced across the steppe. The hatch was unscrewed. The two dogs were barking and wagging their tails.

A Telephone Call

The affair had begun three years earlier. As early as 1948, Sergei Korolev was thinking, without saying so officially, about how to send men into space. He knew the Americans were launching animals aboard captured A-4s. At the end of the year he spoke of it to his old teacher, Andrei Tupolev. Tupolev gave him a name: Vladimir Yazdovsky, a young physician at the Air Force’s Institute of Aviation Medicine.

In January 1949, Korolev telephoned him. He introduced himself as a designer of “special equipment”: it was forbidden to say the word missile on the telephone. He arranged to meet him in a park near the institute.

Yazdovsky reported the conversation. Korolev went straight to the point: “Andrei Nikolayevich suggested I ask you to head a biomedical program to prepare for future flights of spacecraft. I would like you to head it, because I do not know what is being done in this field today and what has already been done.”

The doctor, who was thirty-five, began by resisting. Korolev would not take no. “Come now, Volodya… What do you have to gain from all that aviation medicine? What I am offering you is far more exciting.” Learning that Yazdovsky had never seen a rocket leave, he added: “Well, if you see it once, it will stay with you for life.”

A few days later, Korolev had obtained from the minister that the doctor be relieved of his other work. Yazdovsky had a mandate to study how to put a man into space one day. They would begin with small animals.

The Dogs’ Rocket

On December 30, 1949, Korolev’s bureau began designing two versions of the R-1 intended for science, the R-1B and the R-1V. The deputy in charge of the project was Konstantin Bushuyev. In the nose was a five-hundred-ninety-kilogram container for two dogs. The whole payload separated in flight and came down by parachute.

Nine animals were selected. Their names have come down to us: Albina, Bobik, Dezik, Kozyavka, Lisa, Malyshka, Smelaya, Tsygan.

The flight of July 22, 1951, took place at dawn, so that the rocket would be lit by the sun during its ascent. The preparations went on, writes the historian Asif Siddiqi, in a mixture of excitement and anxiety no one tried to hide. Yazdovsky had asked everyone to stay at their posts until the landing. No one listened.

Dezik was in perfect condition. Tsygan had a scrape on his belly. They were the first living beings to return from a flight above one hundred kilometers. The Americans would obtain the same result only two months later.

Lisa, Smelaya, ZIB

A week later, on July 29, Dezik left again, with a dog named Lisa. Vibration had damaged the pressure sensor that commanded the opening of the parachute. Both dogs were killed on hitting the steppe. Korolev, Siddiqi reports, was much affected by it.

On the eve of the third firing, the dog Smelaya broke loose and ran away. Jackals prowled the area, and the worst was feared. She came back by herself the next morning. The firing took place on time, and both animals were recovered.

Before the sixth and last flight, a dog again disappeared during its walk. A doctor went and found, near the canteen, one of the dogs that hung around there, after checking its size and temperament. The animal had no papers. It was Korolev who found it a name: ZIB, the Russian initials for “substitute for the missing Bobik.” On September 3, almost without training, ZIB climbed to one hundred kilometers with another dog and came back unharmed.

A First Step

Other series would follow, from 1954 to 1956, with more powerful rockets. Korolev would draw up the balance in April 1956 before a conference of the Academy of Sciences: fifteen biological launches since 1951, three serious failures, and results that were “valuable and positive.” He would add, for the doctors’ benefit, that his rockets had had to meet requirements that were “numerous, very complex, and often vaguely formulated.”

These flights were not, for him, a separate line of research. Siddiqi insists on it: when he charged doctors, in 1949, with preparing launches of dogs, he saw in it only a stage toward the flight of man.

That same summer of 1951, at the same range, he conducted the second series of tests of the R-2. Twelve missiles out of thirteen reached their target. Korolev’s two lives now ran side by side, at the same range: weapons for the army, and dogs for the future.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 3 (“Dogs in Space”: conversation of 1948 with Tupolev, meeting of January 1949 with V. Yazdovsky and Korolev’s words, R-1B and R-1V, flights of July 22 and 29 and September 3, 1951, episodes of Smelaya and ZIB, tests of the R-2 from July 2 to 27, 1951) and ch. 5 (balance presented in April 1956).

Chapter 14 · 1950 – 1953 “The Chief Designer of the Whole System”

“Dmitry Fyodorovich, you and your deputies are trying to make me the designer of a mere missile. Not even a missile: a very big automatic shell, to be exact. Listen: if I work the way aircraft designers do, our whole business will collapse very quickly. You must understand: I have to be the chief designer of the whole system.” It was Sergei Korolev speaking, in the course of a stormy conversation, to his minister, Dmitry Ustinov. It would take him years to get it.

Two Men in One

At Kapustin Yar, Korolev was the technical director of the State Commissions. His word was law there. The historian Asif Siddiqi writes that deputy ministers and heads of directorates bowed before his personality.

Back at Podlipki, he became again the head of one department among others, on the third rung of a hierarchy. The other chief designers on his Council each ran their own bureau. He did not.

What he was demanding from Ustinov was not only a title. The rocket industry had been organized on the model of aviation: an institute did the research, a bureau drew, the army tested, then the army operated. Korolev thought a rocket could not be carved up that way. The man who designed it had to follow it from the drawing board to the launch pad.

A Night at the Restaurant

In 1950 the institute’s chief engineer, his old comrade Pobedonostsev, left. Korolev seized the opportunity. At his request, Ustinov agreed to discuss a reorganization. The meeting was held in a Moscow restaurant open all night. Present, among others, were the minister, Korolev, the director of the institute and Boris Chertok.

Out of it came, on April 26, 1950, Special Design Bureau No. 1 of NII-88, devoted solely to long-range ballistic missiles. It would be called OKB-1. Korolev was its head and chief designer. Mishin, thirty-three, known as a “generator of ideas,” was his first deputy.

The director of the institute, General Gonor, was relieved of his duties in June. He had clashed constantly with Korolev and Mishin. Siddiqi makes no excuses for his hero: with his unpredictable character and aggressive nature, it was Korolev, he writes, who bore the responsibility for most of those conflicts. He found it hard to be subordinate to anyone.

Ustinov, who knew him, took care not to give him everything he wanted. Rumor had it that Korolev would also become chief engineer of the whole institute. The minister appointed to that post Mikhail Ryazansky, the radio specialist, although he was a member of the Council that Korolev chaired. There he was, on paper, under the orders of one of his peers.

Yangel

A harsher trial followed. In April 1950, an engineer from aviation, Mikhail Yangel, had joined the institute. He was a man of ability and a member of the Party since the early 1930s. Within a year he became Korolev’s deputy. In May 1952, when the post of director of the institute fell vacant, he was the one chosen.

Korolev had to report to the man who had been his subordinate. Yangel’s Party card had clearly weighed in the choice: Korolev was not a member, and his conviction had not been erased. Both men had strong characters. They practically stopped speaking to each other and communicated through Mishin or Chertok.

The situation lasted seventeen months. In October 1953, Yangel was brought back down to the rank of chief engineer. The following year he left for Ukraine, where he was given an independent design bureau at Dnepropetrovsk. There he would build missiles of another type, which could be kept fueled for months. The army would prefer them. That day, Korolev lost his monopoly. He had proposed to Khrushchev that the design bureaus be kept in Moscow and only branches opened in the provinces. Khrushchev refused flatly.

The Card

Korolev was one of the few leading designers who was not a member of the Party. He had taken evening courses in Marxism-Leninism, completed with honors in 1950. But he hesitated. And the local officials hesitated too: one did not readily admit a man convicted as an “enemy of the people.”

In March 1952 he became a candidate. Pobedonostsev and a young engineer in his bureau, Dmitry Kozlov, vouched for him. In June 1953 he applied for full membership. Siddiqi underlines what was at stake: a refusal would have forced him to leave his post, and his career would have ended. The following month, in Kaliningrad, he was admitted.

On October 23, 1953, he and Glushko were elected corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences. They were the only two rocket engineers to receive that honor.

March 1953

On March 5, 1953, Korolev flew to Kapustin Yar, where the first firing of a new missile, the R-5, awaited him. On arrival, he learned of Stalin’s death.

One would expect relief from a former Kolyma prisoner. The letters he wrote to his wife in the following days say something else. He speaks in them of a personal loss and of a blow dealt to the whole country. Siddiqi places him among the very many who then sincerely mourned. He did not yet know, or would not believe, Stalin’s personal part in the terror.

The first two firings of the R-5, on March 15 and 18, failed. Korolev had caught cold. His fever rose. He was put on a train for Moscow. Ustinov, who visited him, found him haggard. He recovered and went back in time for the third firing, on April 2. This time the missile flew as planned, over one thousand two hundred kilometers.

In June, Beria was arrested. He would be shot. For the engineers, Siddiqi writes, the cloud of terror began to lift. Before the end of the year, Korolev would dare to propose his space plans to the government, in writing.

A Portrait

It was at the end of that year 1953 that he met the physicist Andrei Sakharov, one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Sakharov left these lines about him: “Korolev was a brilliant engineer and organizer, and a colorful personality. He dreamed of the cosmos, and he clung to that dream from his youth. He never believed, as so many did, that the pioneer Tsiolkovsky was a mere dreamer with no practical sense.” He adds that Korolev took great care of his subordinates, that he had a rather rough sense of humor, and that he was perhaps “a bit more cunning, ruthless and cynical” than his colleague Kurchatov.

His private life had changed as well. He had left Xenia. In May 1947 he married Nina Ivanovna Kotenkova, who had just joined the institute. His daughter Natalia was twelve. She took her mother’s side and long kept her distance from him. In 1953, the year she turned eighteen, he wrote to her: “My dear Natasha, I do not think you are being fair to me. Think about it, I beg you.” His deputies testified to the pain that coldness caused him.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 3 (words to Ustinov, creation of OKB-1 on April 26, 1950, Gonor’s departure, Ryazansky’s appointment, “Korolev and the Party”: Yangel, Party membership, election of October 23, 1953, Stalin’s death and letters to his wife, tests of the R-5, A. Sakharov’s testimony, marriage of May 1947) and ch. 4 (Dnepropetrovsk bureau, conversation with Khrushchev); B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 17 (separation from Xenia Vincentini, letter of 1953 to Natalia).

Chapter 15 · 1953 – 1956 “We Have Observed Baikal”

On February 2, 1956, at Kapustin Yar, four men waited in a command post six kilometers from the launch pad. Sergei Korolev was one of them. On the pad, an R-5M missile carried a real atomic bomb. It was the first time, in the Soviet Union, that a rocket carried a nuclear charge ready to explode. The missile left. Some time later, the telephone relayed the message from the observers posted at the impact point: “We have observed Baikal.”

The Atomic Scientists

Until 1953, the country’s two great secret programs, the bomb and the rocket, had advanced separately. After Stalin’s death they were brought together. On October 19, 1953, representatives of the ministry that managed nuclear weapons came to the institute to inquire about the R-5. Korolev, who was at Kapustin Yar, returned at once to Moscow.

He was asked to convert two of his missiles so that they could carry an atomic charge. The work was not about performance. It was about reliability. One does not put an atomic bomb on an unreliable vehicle.

The atomic scientists were then the kings of Soviet research. An engineer of the bureau reported the speech Korolev made to his project chiefs before starting. They had to be very careful with those people, he told them: glory had spoiled them, and since the bomb they thought themselves superior to everyone. At first, therefore, they would have to be handled gently. But with enough care that in the end it would have been proved to them “that we are the ones at the wheel, and they are only passengers.”

Seventeen Firings

The R-5M was an R-5 reworked from top to bottom. Korolev himself opened the test series, on January 20, 1955. By July, seventeen missiles had been fired. Only two strayed from their trajectory. They were destroyed in flight by a device that cut off the engine.

The historian Asif Siddiqi underlines what Korolev had at stake in this affair. It was not only the defense of the country. It was the credit of his bureau. If the R-5M succeeded, the military, who had looked at him with distrust for ten years, would trust him. If not, his satellite plans had no future.

For the live firing, special precautions were taken. A group of mathematicians, installed in a special post, was to say in real time whether the trajectory was normal or whether the vehicle had to be destroyed. The operation had a code name: Baikal.

The Day After

The missile flew faultlessly. The charge exploded at the planned point. For Korolev and his people, Siddiqi writes, it was a turning point: years of uncertainty and suspicion evaporated in euphoria.

The most satisfied was Marshal Nedelin, the very man who had warned Korolev in 1949. He was now deputy minister of defense, in charge of new armaments. If a satellite was to leave one day, it was he who would say whether the army would lend a rocket.

A few days after the firing, the institute received a visit that only the atomic scientists had had until then. The country’s principal leaders came to Podlipki: Khrushchev, Bulganin, Molotov, Kaganovich. We shall come back to it, for Korolev had prepared for that day something other than a missile.

On April 20, 1956, a decree awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the country’s highest civilian distinction, to the six members of the Council of Chief Designers, as well as to the engine designer Aleksei Isayev and to Vasily Mishin. Twenty engineers of the bureau received the Order of Lenin. On June 21 the R-5M entered service. It was the first Soviet nuclear-armed missile.

The Missile Korolev Did Not Like

During those same years, his bureau had built another. The army complained about liquid oxygen. That very cold liquid evaporates. A fueled rocket cannot wait long, and the troops spent their time emptying and refilling it.

Korolev had therefore opened the study of a small missile whose propellants keep at ordinary temperature: nitric acid and a kerosene derivative. The engine was the work of Aleksei Isayev, an engineer Korolev respected and with whom he would work to the end. This missile, the R-11, was accepted by the army in July 1955. Its derivatives would be sold to many countries, under a name the West would give them: Scud.

His biographer Yaroslav Golovanov described Korolev’s view of this vehicle: he regarded it “with reserved coolness.” The army needed it, and so did his bureau to secure its position, but nothing more. He would in fact hand over the whole line, including the submarine-launched version, to one of his young engineers, Viktor Makeyev, who would leave to head a bureau in the Urals.

That choice would have consequences. Storable propellants were what the army wanted. By leaving them to others, Korolev kept the path that led to satellites, but he gave up the one that led to military orders. In five years his rivals would be where he had not wanted to stay.

The Allies

Around him, the men were changing, and almost always to his advantage. Minister Malyshev, who had inherited the rockets after Stalin’s death, saw his space ideas as daydreaming. The two men had clashed more than once. According to an account whose accuracy is not guaranteed, Korolev one day answered him, in the middle of a meeting: “I refuse.” And Malyshev: “Really? He refuses? No one is irreplaceable. Others will be found.” Malyshev was removed in 1955.

In his place came Vasily Ryabikov, better disposed. Ustinov remained minister and continued to protect him. At Tikhonravov’s institute, a general favorable to space research took over as director.

Siddiqi sums up: these changes, with no apparent connection between them, each strengthened Korolev’s position. Without them, and without the success of the R-5M, the first Soviet satellite would not have left when it did. All that was missing now was the rocket capable of carrying it. It was already on the drawing boards.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 3 (theme N2, R-11, Isayev, Golovanov’s judgment, Makeyev, account of the altercation with Malyshev) and ch. 4 (“Operation Baykal”: visit of October 19, 1953, Korolev’s remarks on the atomic scientists, tests of the R-5M from January 20, 1955, firing of February 2, 1956, leaders’ visit, decree of April 20, 1956, entry into service on June 21, 1956, Nedelin, Malyshev, Ryabikov).

Chapter 16 · 1951 – 1956 The Semyorka

In October 1953, Minister Vyacheslav Malyshev arrived alone, without a single aide, at Sergei Korolev’s bureau. He was unusually cheerful, and the engineers were wary. He asked, as if in passing, how much the future intercontinental missile would be able to carry. “About three tons,” answered Sergei Kryukov, one of its designers. The minister replied firmly: it had to be six, five at the very least. Korolev tried to resist. Malyshev would hear none of it. Everything had to be redesigned.

Skipping a Step

The road leading to that scene began two years earlier. At the end of 1951 the R-3, the three-thousand-kilometer missile, was at a dead end. Glushko could not get his one-hundred-twenty-ton engine to run: it exploded on the stand.

Korolev fell back at first on a more modest vehicle, the R-5. Then his deputy Mishin put a bold idea to him: abandon the R-3 outright and go straight to the intercontinental missile. The army was counting on the R-3 to reach the whole of Europe. Giving it up seemed senseless.

Korolev hesitated. Mishin convinced him. Ustinov backed them. In 1952 the R-3 was abandoned. The historian Asif Siddiqi notes that this was not the usual Soviet way, made of cautious progress. It was a leap. Korolev would make others.

The Packet of Five

Since 1950, three teams had been studying the question of the intercontinental missile: Korolev’s bureau, Tikhonravov’s institute, and a small group of young mathematicians gathered by Academician Mstislav Keldysh. They were called “Keldysh’s boys.” The one who led them, Dmitry Okhotsimsky, was twenty-eight.

All reached the same conclusion: Tikhonravov’s “packet.” It remained to decide which one. Tikhonravov wanted an elaborate packet, in which the tanks communicated with one another. Korolev wanted a simple packet, in which the rockets were linked only by attachments. Tikhonravov cared so much that he refused to do the calculations for his friend’s solution. Korolev entrusted them to Keldysh’s mathematicians. They proved him right.

On February 13, 1953, less than a month before he died, Stalin signed the decree that officially launched the study of a ballistic missile with a range of seven to eight thousand kilometers.

The shape then settled. A central core, around which were hung not two but four boosters. With four, smaller engines would do, of a kind Glushko could make. The four boosters were conical, and the core flared toward the top to receive them. All five engines lit together on the ground. In flight, the four boosters dropped away and the core went on alone.

That silhouette has not changed since. The descendants of this rocket, Siddiqi recalls, were still carrying cosmonauts to the Mir station in the late 1990s.

Five and a Half Tons

Malyshev’s visit upset everything. The reason for his demand was the hydrogen bomb. The physicist Andrei Sakharov had just written for the minister, in haste, a note on a new-generation device. It was heavier than the bombs for which the missile had been calculated. By an irony Siddiqi points out, that bomb would never be built. But the rocket would have been designed for it.

Kryukov told Korolev that it was impossible with the rocket as it stood. Yet it had to be done. Rescue came from an idea tried by Aleksei Isayev: instead of one big engine with a single chamber, several smaller chambers. Glushko combined four of them, fed by the same pump. His new engines developed eighty-three tons of thrust for the side boosters, seventy-five for the core.

The rocket also had to be steered. Mishin proposed small swiveling engines. Korolev asked Glushko to build them. Glushko refused outright: he feared being diverted from his main engines, and he judged it “impossible” to control a rocket that way. Mishin then brought into the bureau a team of young engineers, led by Mikhail Melnikov, who built them in-house. At liftoff, thirty-two chambers would burn at the same time.

Glushko had already balked, in 1952, at making the engines for the intercontinental missile. This second refusal would not be the last.

Mishin’s Rocket

On May 20, 1954, a government decree ordered the missile built. It was called the R-7. Those who worked on it soon gave it an affectionate nickname: the Semyorka, “little seven.”

Two hundred institutes and design bureaus, under twenty-five ministries, took part. Apart from nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union had probably never undertaken so vast a military project.

All of Korolev’s deputies had a hand in it. But when a Soviet journalist later asked the veterans who, after Korolev, had counted most in its birth, most answered: “It was Mishin’s rocket, of course.” Korolev, by then, was no longer the man who drew. He was the one who chose, who decided, and who held two hundred organizations together.

The Tulip

It remained to find a way to launch such a vehicle. Three launch-pad designs, in which the rocket rested on a platform, were set aside: there were fears of damaging the missile at liftoff. It was again Mishin who brought the idea. The rocket would be assembled lying down, in a hangar. It would be raised upright on the pad and suspended at the waist between four large arms, which would swing apart at the moment of departure like petals. The designer of launch equipment, Vladimir Barmin, built the system. The engineers called it “the Tulip.” The arms are moved by no machine: counterweights make them tip.

A commission chaired by Academician Blagonravov found the idea good, but would have preferred hydraulic jacks. So did Korolev. Barmin did not give way: gravity, he said in substance, needs no backup system. Korolev finally yielded, adding: “If anything goes wrong, you will answer for it with your life.” The system was approved on September 22, 1955. It served without change of principle for more than forty years.

Before installing it in the steppe, it was erected whole in a Leningrad plant, over a pit nineteen meters across, and a test rocket filled with water was hung in it. Korolev sent two engineers of about thirty-five there, Anatoly Abramov and Yevgeny Shabarov. He demanded a report every day.

Abramov described what happened when the report signaled a mistake. Korolev, he writes, reacted with fury. He ground them to dust, called them imbeciles, promised to dismiss them. The two men, downcast at first, ended up laughing nervously: it was not the first time. His rages, Abramov says, were legendary. His eyes flashed. He would threaten to send you home on foot between the rails, or to send you to work in the boiler room. “But we all knew these were only words. No one was dismissed, and no one took offense. And although people admitted they were afraid of him, they respected him all the same.”

Tyuratam

Kapustin Yar was no longer enough, and it was too close to the American radars installed in Turkey. Another range was needed. A commission, on which Korolev, Barmin and Ryazansky sat, short-listed three sites. The final choice fell on a patch of arid steppe in Kazakhstan, on the railway line from Moscow to Tashkent, near a halt named Tyuratam. The decree was signed on February 12, 1955.

A month earlier, thirty workers had arrived there under the orders of a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant. The general who took command of the place described his arrival: a scorching wind, more than forty-five degrees Celsius, bare steppe, not a tree. A veteran described the construction site: a thin layer of clay that two passes of a truck were enough to turn to dust; deep ruts in which the trucks bogged down; a cloud that got into the nose, the eyes, the bread, the gasoline, and that could be seen twenty or thirty kilometers away. The following winter it was forty-two below.

That general was Aleksei Nesterenko, the author of the 1950 letter against Korolev’s missiles. Siddiqi sees in this, perhaps, a calculation by Marshal Nedelin: to place there a man who would not bend before him.

The world would later know the place by another name: Baikonur.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 3 (“Themes”: abandonment of the R-3, Mishin’s role, studies under theme N3, simple and complex packets, decree of February 13, 1953, five-block configuration) and ch. 4 (“The R-7 ICBM”: Malyshev’s visit, four-chamber engines, Glushko’s refusal of the steering engines, “Mishin’s rocket,” the Tulip system and Korolev’s words to Barmin, Leningrad tests and A. Abramov’s recollection, choice of Tyuratam, decree of February 12, 1955, Nesterenko).

Chapter 17 · 1953 – 1956 “If the Main Task Doesn’t Suffer”

On the morning of February 27, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev visited Sergei Korolev’s bureau for the first time. He was shown a full-size mock-up of the R-7 missile. The visitors were struck dumb. Korolev let a few seconds pass, then gave a brief presentation. The leaders grew weary; they wanted to leave. So he drew them toward a corner of the room, where the mock-up of a satellite stood. Khrushchev asked whether this would not harm the missile. Korolev answered that it would be enough to replace the bomb with the satellite. Khrushchev hesitated a moment: “If the main task doesn’t suffer, do it.”

A Sentence Struck Out

It had taken more than two years to get there. Until Stalin’s death, Korolev had never asked the government for anything touching on space. At the end of 1953, three things had changed. Stalin and Beria were gone, and one could propose an idea without fearing for one’s life. The intercontinental missile was taking shape: without it, no satellite. Finally, his friend Tikhonravov had obtained, on September 16, 1953, that his small group study satellites officially. It was the first research of the kind authorized in the Soviet Union.

In December 1953, Korolev was preparing the text of the decree on the R-7. He slipped a sentence into it. A department should be created at the institute, he wrote, to study flights above five hundred kilometers, as well as “the creation of an artificial satellite of the Earth and the study of interplanetary space.” In seven years at the head of his bureau, it was his first official request on a space subject.

While the draft decree was making its way to the top, someone struck out the mention of the satellite.

The Right Allies

Korolev understood that he could not advance alone. He needed the Academy of Sciences. On January 23, 1954, he spoke to Academician Keldysh. On February 7 he sounded out his minister, Ustinov, for the first time. Ustinov remained reserved, but promised to read whatever was sent to him. Korolev telephoned Tikhonravov at once: let him draft a formal proposal.

On March 16 a meeting was held at Keldysh’s office, in the presence of renowned scientists, among them the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa. On May 25 the Presidium of the Academy devoted three hours to it and approved everything. Tikhonravov noted in his journal: “Everything is signed… one may say the first stage is finished.”

On the army side, Korolev turned to his old friend from Germany, General Tyulin. Tyulin was not enthusiastic. Korolev insisted, applied pressure, and succeeded only in irritating him. Tikhonravov had more success: a marshal replied that he should call him “at any moment” in case of difficulty.

“I Await Your Decision”

On May 27, 1954, Korolev sent three copies of Tikhonravov’s report to Ustinov and two other officials. He attached translations of Western articles and a letter of his own. The R-7 missile had been approved seven days earlier.

The report was titled “A Report on an Artificial Satellite of the Earth.” Kept secret for thirty-seven years, it was published only in 1991. It first described the “simplest satellite,” an automatic craft. But it went much further. It envisaged sending a man on a vertical flight, then one or two men into orbit, then a station assembled in space. Finally it spoke of a one-and-a-half-ton craft capable of landing on the Moon and returning, with a six-hundred-fifty-ton rocket. It was the first time an official Soviet document mentioned the Moon. It even mentioned, after it, interplanetary flight.

Korolev’s letter was short. The development of the new rocket, he wrote, made it possible to envisage a satellite in the near future. By reducing the payload a little, the necessary velocity would be reached, eight thousand meters per second. He proposed creating a research department. He ended with four words: “I await your decision.”

The decision was lukewarm. In August 1954 the government authorized “theoretical” work. Nothing more.

Help Comes from America

The satellite could have dragged on for years. It was the Americans who saved it. Scientists around the world were preparing an International Geophysical Year, due to begin on July 1, 1957. On July 29, 1955, the White House announced that the United States would launch “small satellites” on that occasion.

Four days later, in Copenhagen, the Soviet academician Leonid Sedov gathered some fifty journalists at the embassy. He declared that in his opinion a satellite could be launched “within two years.” Sedov did not build rockets and had no connection with Korolev’s bureau. But the world’s press picked up both announcements. Korolev had his argument.

He had already sensed the wind. In June, rereading a study by Tikhonravov that asked for seventy to eighty people for the satellite, he had written in the margin: “Too many. 30-35 people.” And he had added that this craft would have “enormous political significance, as evidence of the high level of our country’s technology.”

August 30, 1955

That day he played two games. The first was held at the Special Committee overseeing missiles, before its chairman Vasily Ryabikov. Korolev spoke there about the satellite, and tried for more: he had had one of his engineers hastily prepare a study showing that a three-stage R-7 could send a four-hundred-kilogram probe to the Moon.

Colonel Aleksandr Mrykin, who represented the army, opposed it. He was a man known for his outbursts. There would be talk of a satellite, he said, when the missile had finished its tests. Keldysh backed Korolev. Ryabikov ruled: yes to a modest satellite, no to the Moon, judged extravagant.

The same day, Korolev went to the Academy of Sciences. Before the scientists he gave a timetable: “As for the booster rocket, we hope to begin the first launches in April-July 1957… before the start of the International Geophysical Year.” If the Americans launched during that year, the Soviets would launch just before. A commission was created. At his suggestion, Keldysh chaired it. Korolev and Tikhonravov were his deputies.

Object D

On January 30, 1956, a government decree approved the launch, in 1957, of a satellite called “Object D.” It would weigh between one thousand and one thousand four hundred kilograms, of which two to three hundred would be scientific instruments. The historian Asif Siddiqi dates the birth of the Soviet space program from that day.

Korolev was not in Moscow. He was at Kapustin Yar, preparing the nuclear firing of the R-5M. And he knew what a decree was worth: the Presidium examined up to two hundred fifty of them a month. He wanted something else: a word from Khrushchev himself.

The visit of February 27 gave it to him. The account of it has been preserved. After Korolev, Glushko took the floor and lost himself in technical details, as if he were talking to first-year students. Korolev cut him short and concluded in his place. Then he showed large photographs of the rockets that had carried dogs. Seeing his guests in a hurry to leave, he went straight to the mock-up. He invoked Tsiolkovsky. He pointed out that the Americans’ rocket was “skinny” next to the R-7, and that the satellite would cost almost nothing, since the rocket was already paid for.

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, would write that his father, that day, “simply fell in love with Korolev.”

His Own Master

On August 14, 1956, a ministerial order at last detached Korolev’s bureau from the institute. OKB-1 became an independent organization, with its own plant. Korolev had four deputies: Mishin, Bushuyev, Okhapkin and Voskresensky.

On November 1, Tikhonravov and his group left their military institute to join him. Korolev had been asking for it since December 1954. They formed Department No. 9, in charge of spacecraft.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 4 (“A Report on an Artificial Satellite of Earth” and “The International Geophysical Year and the Soviet Satellite”: program of September 16, 1953, sentence inserted in December 1953, steps taken from January to May 1954, Tikhonravov’s report and Korolev’s letter of May 27, 1954, announcements of July-August 1955, Korolev’s marginal note, meetings of August 30, 1955, decree of January 30, 1956, visit of February 27, 1956, independence of OKB-1) and ch. 5 (Sergei Khrushchev’s remark).

Chapter 18 · 1956 – 1957 The Hardest Summer

On May 15, 1957, at 7:01 p.m. Moscow time, the first R-7 left its pad at Tyuratam. The four arms of the “Tulip” swung apart as planned, and the rocket climbed. Then the measurements showed that the engine of one of the side boosters had stopped at the ninety-eighth second. The man in charge of telemetry was still shouting that all was well, since the signals were coming in. Sergei Korolev had understood. His remark has been reported: “We wanted to astonish the world, but the rocket is lying three hundred kilometers from here.”

A Smaller Satellite

Six months earlier, Korolev had taken a decision that would change everything. In the autumn of 1956, Object D, the big scientific satellite, was falling behind. The subcontractors were dragging their feet; parts arrived that did not match the drawings. The test models, expected in October, were not finished.

Korolev at that time was rushing from one site to another: Kaliningrad, Kapustin Yar, Tyuratam, and the port of Molotovsk, where his submarine missile was being tested. Two worries gnawed at him. In September the U.S. Army had fired from Florida a rocket that traveled more than five thousand kilometers. He persuaded himself, wrongly, that it had been a secret satellite attempt. And the stand tests showed that the R-7’s engines performed a little below expectations: too little for a craft of more than a ton.

At the end of November, Tikhonravov guessed his torment and put it into words for him: “What if we made the satellite a little lighter? Thirty kilos or so, or even less?”

Korolev acted at once. On November 25, 1956, he set a young engineer to designing this small satellite. Another young man, Georgy Grechko, who would himself fly in space eighteen years later, calculated its trajectory. Keldysh, who had given so much to Object D, was fiercely against it. So were some of the bureau’s engineers. All ended up yielding. As a precaution, Korolev decided that the craft would be built in-house, with only two suppliers: one for the batteries, the other, Ryazansky, for the transmitter.

On January 5, 1957, he wrote to the government. He asked to launch two small satellites between April and June, just before the Geophysical Year. The United States, he asserted, was preparing a new attempt and was ready “to pay any price” to be first. The intelligence was false, notes the historian Asif Siddiqi, but the instinct was right: the Americans could have launched a satellite in early 1957.

On February 15 a decree approved the “simple satellite,” designated by the initials PS. One condition: one or two successful R-7 firings first. The big Object D was put back to 1958.

“I Will Not Go Back”

Korolev arrived at Tyuratam on April 10, 1957, with Pilyugin. On the way, he told him he would not leave until the missile had flown.

A State Commission directed the tests. Ryabikov chaired it. Korolev was its deputy chairman and “technical director.” On May 4, at his suggestion, the whole operation was rehearsed. The exercise went well, with one incident. Marshal Nedelin wanted to check the alarm. It did not work: a sergeant, gone for a smoke, had left a switch in the wrong position. When it was put back, the alarm went off, the firemen came running and hosed down the command bunker, with the commission inside.

On the afternoon of May 6 the rocket was taken to the pad. Ryabikov, Korolev, Nedelin and others accompanied it on foot. That gesture would become a ritual.

May 15

Fueling began at four in the morning and lasted nearly five hours. During the day, Colonel Maksimov, the commission’s secretary, reported a large oxygen leak at the base of the rocket. Korolev lost his temper. He demanded of Ryabikov that the officer be thrown off the pad for insubordination. Then he had to acknowledge that the leak existed. He apologized to the colonel in front of the whole commission. The repair was made, and work resumed.

After the failure, the investigation showed that a kerosene leak, at a pump outlet, had caused a fire almost from the start. The booster tore away, and the missile broke up. Debris fell as far as four hundred kilometers away.

Khrushchev, informed that same evening, remained silent and thoughtful. He had told his son: “If there is a need, Korolev will call me. That is what we agreed.”

At the range, the men were at the end of their strength. Voskresensky, seriously ill, was sent back to Moscow. Most members of the commission left. Korolev stayed to direct the investigation. He was fifty. He had a bad throat infection and received several penicillin injections. He wrote to his wife: “When things go badly, I have fewer ‘friends’… My state of mind is bad. I will not hide it; it is very hard to get through our failures… There is an atmosphere of alarm and worry… It is 55 degrees here.”

“So Much Perfume”

The second rocket was ready in early June. On the 9th the firing command was given, and nothing left: a nitrogen valve had stayed shut. On the 10th, the same thing. On the 11th, another abort. Immediately afterward, a violent storm drowned the range and flooded the basements of the assembly building.

In going through the measurements, one of the causes was found: another valve, installed in the wrong position. The fault lay with Korolev’s bureau. Siddiqi does not conceal what followed. Fair and generous in his technical judgments, Korolev would not accept that his bureau should carry the blame in front of the others. His usual tactic was to drown the problem in words, or to bring Glushko or Pilyugin to admit an error. He tried.

Ryabikov was not taken in. He is credited with this retort: “What a cunning man you are, Sergei Pavlovich! So much stink over what others may have done, and so much perfume for your own shit…”

July 12

The third rocket left on July 12, at 3:53 p.m. It rose to cheers. At the thirty-third second it began to spin on its axis, and the four boosters came off all at once.

The days that followed were the darkest. Everything the bureau had built in three years was called into doubt. Criticism came from above. There was talk of cutting back the program. The Geophysical Year had begun on July 1, and the rocket had not made a single successful flight.

The letters to his wife follow the slope. In mid-June: “Things are again not going very well.” And, all the same: “Here, now, we must wrest out the solution we need!” On July 8: “We are working very hard.” On July 23: “Things are very, very bad.”

One of his Soviet biographers would write that no days since the war were more painful to him than those of that burning summer.

Yet it was at that moment, according to the engineer Anatoly Abramov, that he showed himself at his best. He no longer looked for a culprit. “That was the moment, if ever, to despair,” Abramov wrote. “But Korolev’s composure and the absence of any search for scapegoats made everyone understand that we had entered a domain where no one had gone before us.” He adds what everyone knew: Korolev had not yet been rehabilitated, and arrest, prison and exile were still fresh in his memory. Behind his back, people were murmuring that thirty-two combustion chambers would never work together.

August 21

The fourth rocket was prepared with extreme care. It lifted off on August 21, 1957, at 3:15 p.m. This time everything worked: the engines, the separation, the guidance. The missile covered six thousand five hundred kilometers and arrived over Kamchatka. One shadow only: the thermal protection of the dummy warhead disintegrated at an altitude of ten kilometers. Five hundred men would spend nearly a week picking up the remains.

Korolev did not go to bed before three in the morning. He talked to his deputies about what was opening up, about the future, and above all about his satellite.

On August 27, Pravda published a communiqué: the Soviet Union had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of reaching “any region of the globe.” In the West, almost no one paid attention.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 4 (“From Object D to the Simple Satellite”: delays of Object D, Tikhonravov’s suggestion, order of November 25, 1956, letter of January 5, 1957, decree of February 15, 1957; “The R-7 in Flight”: State Commission, arrival of April 10, rehearsal of May 4, firing of May 15, 1957, and incident with Colonel Maksimov, Korolev’s remark, cause of the failure, letters to his wife, attempts of June 9, 10 and 11, Ryabikov’s retort, firing of July 12, A. Abramov’s testimony, firing of August 21, 1957, communiqué of August 27).

Chapter 19 · October 4, 1957 Sputnik

On the night of October 4, 1957, floodlights lit the launch pad at Tyuratam. In the underground command bunker, everyone was standing except the operators. Only two men were allowed to sit: Nikolai Pilyugin and Sergei Korolev. An engineer watching him found him nervous, though he tried to hide it. He scanned the dials, listened for the tone of the voices. When only a few minutes remained, he nodded to his deputy Voskresensky. At 10:28:34 p.m. Moscow time, the engines ignited.

A Sphere

The small satellite had been designed while the rockets were failing. The bureau’s engineers wanted a cone, which fitted well into the nose of the rocket. In early 1957, Korolev changed his mind and called for a metal sphere.

The craft that came out of the workshops was fifty-eight centimeters in diameter. It was made of two half-shells of aluminum alloy, filled with nitrogen. Inside: three batteries, two radio transmitters, a fan. Four rod-shaped antennas unfolded once in orbit. The whole weighed 83.6 kilograms, fifty-one of them for the batteries alone.

The two transmitters worked on wavelengths chosen so that radio amateurs around the world could pick them up. Their signal was a string of short pulses. They would give the famous “beep-beep.”

Korolev saw to it that the sphere was polished and perfectly clean. He cared about this for its reflective qualities, but also for its beauty. One day he flew into a rage at a young worker who had done a poor job on the surface of a mere mock-up: “This ball will be exhibited in museums!”

He thought of everything. Since it was doubted that so small an object could be seen from the ground, he had a reflector fixed to the rocket’s core stage, which would go into orbit too.

“Let Them Decide”

After the success of August 21, the agreement of the State Commission was still needed. Korolev asked for it. For several of its members it came as a complete surprise: they knew of the big Object D, not of this small satellite. The session turned to quarreling and reproaches.

At the next session, Korolev changed method: “I propose that we put to the Presidium of the Central Committee the question of national priority in launching the world’s first artificial satellite of the Earth. Let them decide.” No one wanted to bear the responsibility for an error of judgment. He got what he wanted.

On September 7 a second R-7 reached Kamchatka.

Korolev and his colleagues had hoped to launch the satellite on September 17, for the centenary of Tsiolkovsky’s birth. It was not possible. That day he was in Moscow, in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, where the old master of Kaluga was being honored. He gave a long speech. The audience was not told what his job was. He announced that “in the very near future” the USSR and the United States would carry out the first launches of artificial satellites. Nothing allowed the hall to guess that this was no vague prediction.

Two Days Earlier

On September 20 the commission set the launch for October 6. Korolev arrived at Tyuratam on the 29th. He stayed in a small house near the assembly building.

Then a piece of news alarmed him. A conference was to be held in Washington in early October. According to his information, Americans would present there, on the 6th, a paper titled “Satellite Over the Planet.” He convinced himself that the title announced an American launch for that same day. The local KGB representatives assured him it was nothing of the kind. He did not believe them.

He asked the commission to bring the launch forward by two days. It gave way. He signed the order on October 2, at four in the afternoon.

In the early morning of the 3rd, the rocket was brought to the pad. Korolev, Ryabikov and the others escorted it on foot. He told his engineers: “No one is hurrying us. If you have the slightest doubt, we will stop the tests and make the corrections on the satellite. There is still time…”

One of the satellite’s engineers, Oleg Ivanovsky, would remember it this way: no one, at that moment, was thinking about the magnitude of what was happening. Everyone did his own job, with its disappointments and its joys.

The Launch

In the command bunker stood Ryabikov, Keldysh, Glushko, Pilyugin. Voskresensky and Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Nosov directed operations, each at a periscope. “One minute!” called Nosov. A young lieutenant, Boris Chekunov, pressed the button.

The rocket, which weighed more than two hundred seventy-two tons, rose. Not everything was perfect. Several engines had lit late, which could have aborted the launch. At the sixteenth second, a system regulating propellant consumption failed. The kerosene ran out too fast, and the core engine shut down a second earlier than planned. But the velocity was there. At the three hundred twenty-fifth second, the sphere separated.

“Hold Off on the Celebrations”

Eight hundred meters from the pad, a crowd waited around a van. Inside, an operator, Vyacheslav Lappo, who had designed the transmitters himself, listened for the first signal. When the Kamchatka station announced it had picked it up, there was applause.

Korolev cut it short: “Hold off on the celebrations. The station people may have been mistaken. Let us judge the signals for ourselves, when the satellite comes back after its first trip around the Earth.”

It came back. The “beep-beep” came clearly out of the receiver. Ryazansky, who was in the van, telephoned Korolev at once in the command bunker.

In Moscow the calculators established the orbit: 228 kilometers at the lowest, 947 at the highest, one revolution in ninety-six minutes. Ryabikov waited for the end of the second orbit before telephoning Khrushchev.

“Don’t Repeat His Name”

Khrushchev was in Kiev, in a meeting with the Ukrainian leaders. At about eleven at night he was called to the telephone. He listened, came back and sat down, said nothing. Then, his son recounts, he could hold out no longer: “I can tell you some very pleasant and very important news. Korolev has just called.” He took on an air of mystery. “He is one of our missile designers. Remember not to repeat his name; it is secret. So, Korolev has just reported that today, a short while ago, an artificial satellite of the Earth was launched.”

The next day, at Tyuratam, one of Korolev’s deputies had a teapot of alcohol issued to each man. People gathered in the little movie theater. Ryabikov spoke, then Korolev, then Keldysh.

After nightfall, Korolev and a few of his people boarded a plane for Moscow. They had not slept the night before, and almost all of them dozed off. After takeoff, the pilot came out of his cabin and leaned toward Korolev: the whole world, he told him, was buzzing with this launch. Korolev got up, went into the cockpit, then came back to the passengers: “Well, comrades, you cannot imagine: the whole world is talking about our satellite.” And, with a broad smile: “It seems we have caused quite a stir…”

On the morning of October 5, Pravda had published the communiqué from the TASS agency. It was sober, and it was not the biggest headline of the day. The Soviet press gave the craft no name. It simply called it sputnik: “satellite,” in Russian.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 4 (“Sputnik”: shape and characteristics of the PS-1, Korolev’s words to a worker, reflector, sessions of the State Commission and Korolev’s proposal, firing of September 7, speech of September 17, 1957, decision of September 20, launch brought forward, remarks of October 3, testimonies of O. Ivanovsky, B. Chekunov and Ye. Shabarov, time and course of the launch, waiting for the first orbit, orbit, Sergei Khrushchev’s account, day of October 5 and flight home, Pravda communiqué).

Chapter 20 · 1957 – 1958 The Chief Designer

On December 12, 1957, Pravda published an article titled “Research into Cosmic Space.” It was signed “Professor K. Sergeyev.” That professor did not exist. The author was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. The man whose satellite had the whole world talking was allowed to write in the country’s leading newspaper, on condition that he not say who he was.

A Title in Place of a Name

Until 1957, the real functions of the chief designers were secret, but their names were not. After Sputnik, the names themselves disappeared. New editions of the histories of rocketry stopped mentioning Korolev. The encyclopedias presented him as the head of a laboratory, in a “machine building” institute they did not locate.

The press now designated him by a title: the “Chief Designer of Rocket-Space Systems.” Glushko became the “Chief Designer of Rocket Engines.” Keldysh, the “Chief Theoretician of Cosmonautics.” Tikhonravov was not even given a pseudonym.

Khrushchev explained it publicly. One day, he said, the photographs and names of these illustrious people would be known. For the moment, to ensure the country’s security and the lives of these scientists and engineers, they could not be revealed.

It was others who traveled and spoke. Academician Sedov, the man of the Copenhagen press conference, toured the world and lectured before audiences who believed they were looking at one of the founders of the program. Korolev’s engineers told one another a story about him. Invited one day to Tyuratam, in front of an R-7 ready to leave, Sedov is said to have asked where exactly the satellite was on the rocket.

The historian Asif Siddiqi concludes with a fact. Of the six chief designers whose names were classified secret in 1957, all eventually saw their names in print. All but one: Korolev.

A Dog for November 7

Back in Moscow on October 5, Korolev sent his deputies on vacation to the Black Sea. It was their first in years. He did not go.

Khrushchev called him to learn the details. In the course of the conversation he asked, as if in passing, whether another satellite could be launched for the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, on November 7. Korolev answered without hesitation that his team could send a dog. The accounts of this decision do not all agree, Siddiqi warns. Most agree on this division: the idea of the date was Khrushchev’s, that of the dog was Korolev’s.

The official order was dated October 12. The vacations were canceled, the deputies recalled. Less than a month remained.

They made do with what they had. They took a container intended for a vertical dog flight and added to it a sphere identical to that of the first satellite. The whole would remain attached to the rocket’s core stage. That avoided building a new transmission system. The assembly weighed 508.3 kilograms. Nothing was provided to bring the animal back: neither the technology nor the time allowed it. The doctors planned to put it to sleep by an automatic injection before the oxygen ran out.

Korolev left again for Tyuratam on October 26.

Laika

The dog chosen was named Laika. She was selected for her even temperament. The physician Vladimir Yazdovsky, the one Korolev had recruited in a park in 1949, recounted: “Laika was a wonderful dog… quiet and very placid. Before leaving for the cosmodrome, I once took her home and showed her to the children. They played with her. I wanted to do something nice for her. She had so little time left to live.”

She was placed in her container on October 31 at midday. It was very cold at Tyuratam, and the cabin was heated through a hose.

The rocket left on November 3, 1957, at 5:30 a.m. Moscow time. The animal’s pulse tripled during the ascent, then the readings returned to normal. The satellite was in orbit. With the rocket stage to which it remained attached, it weighed about six and a half tons.

Laika did not survive long. The temperature rose in the cabin, and she died of heat. Siddiqi, writing in 2000, places her death on the fourth day. Testimonies made public later placed it in the very first hours of the flight. We note the discrepancy without being able to settle it here.

The second Sputnik had something else to say. Its instruments worked for a week and recorded the signs of a belt of radiation around the Earth. The Soviet scientists were cautious in their interpretation. A few months later, the first American satellite would bring back the same measurements, and the discovery would go to the United States.

“In the Absence of Any Crime”

That year 1957 also brought him, quietly, what he had been waiting for for nineteen years. He had asked for his conviction to be reviewed on May 30, 1955. On April 18, 1957, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court annulled the charges, “in the absence of any crime.” He received the letter during the summer.

The honors followed. On June 29, 1957, he had been granted the degree of doctor of technical sciences, without a thesis. On December 18 he received the Lenin Prize. On June 20, 1958, he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences, at the same time as Glushko.

The Direct Line

Above him, the ladder was long: a state committee, the Military-Industrial Commission now chaired by Ustinov, a secretary of the Central Committee in charge of defense and space, whose name was Leonid Brezhnev, then Khrushchev.

In practice, Korolev skipped the rungs. Since the visit of February 1956, Khrushchev had listened to him. He later wrote in his memoirs that he had absolute confidence in him: “When he was defending his ideas, you could see the passion burning in his eyes, and his reports were models of clarity.”

That confidence was all his power. He had neither a ministry nor a budget of his own. The Soviet Union, Siddiqi writes, had no space program in 1957: no long-term goal, no governing body, no financial plan. The first Sputniks were isolated projects, put together in haste on the proposal of a few men whose names no one knew.

The big Object D, finally, took off in its turn. A first attempt failed on April 27, 1958: the rocket was destroyed at the ninety-seventh second. The backup left on May 15. With its 1,327 kilograms and its twelve experiments, this third Sputnik astounded Western scientists. They did not know that it was the last space project the Soviet Union had in hand.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 3 (Khrushchev’s judgment in his memoirs), ch. 4 (anonymity, titles, pseudonym “K. Sergeyev,” Khrushchev’s statement, Sedov anecdote) and ch. 5 (“The Immediate Aftermath”: Khrushchev’s request, order of October 12, 1957, design of the PS-2, V. Yazdovsky’s testimony, launch of November 3, 1957, Laika’s death, radiation belt, Object D; rehabilitation of April 18, 1957, honors, hierarchy). On Laika’s death in the first hours of the flight: paper by D. Malashenkov at the 2002 World Space Congress, as reported in the press (source not consulted directly).

Chapter 21 · 1958 – 1959 The Moon in a Suitcase

On September 12, 1959, at 9:39:26 a.m., a rocket left Tyuratam one second off the calculated time. It was the sixth that Sergei Korolev had launched toward the Moon in a year. None of the first five had reached its goal. Since September 6, the men at the pad had slept only in snatches, and had stopped shaving, out of superstition. When telemetry announced that the last stage had shut down at the planned instant, someone said out loud: “If you don’t sleep at all for a week before each launch, there won’t be any more failures.”

Five Projects at Once

Boris Chertok, Korolev’s deputy for guidance, compared those two years to the war, for their pace. In early 1958 the bureau was running five projects at once: putting the R-7 missile into army service, giving it a range of twelve thousand kilometers, adding a third and a fourth stage to it, designing a “heavy satellite” that would become a piloted spacecraft, and finally aiming for the Moon, Mars and Venus.

The Moon came first. A decree of March 20, 1958, ordered it. To reach it, the R-7’s two stages were not enough: a third was needed, to bring the probe to 11.2 kilometers per second.

That third stage needed an engine. Mishin persuaded Korolev not to ask Glushko for it. The bureau would make the combustion chamber itself. For the pump, they turned to an aircraft-engine designer from Voronezh, Semyon Kosberg. Chertok describes him: a blacksmith’s son, short, stocky, very lively. Korolev liked him from their first meeting.

The affair nearly went wrong. During a discussion about dividing up the work, Mishin lost his temper and threw an anti-Semitic insult at Kosberg. Kosberg stormed out, crossed the corridor, went into Korolev’s office and declared that he would not work with an anti-Semite. He ordered his deputy: “We’re leaving!” Korolev summoned Mishin. Chertok does not know what they said to each other. But Korolev had Kosberg brought back. There were explanations, and peace was made. Kosberg would work with him until his death, in January 1965, from the aftermath of a car accident. Korolev would be deeply shaken by it.

A Bomb on the Moon?

The projects received numbers. The first was to hit the Moon. The second was to go around it and photograph its far side. The third was the strangest. It came from a nuclear-weapons physicist, Academician Zeldovich: to explode an atomic bomb on the Moon, so that every observatory in the world would see the flash and no one could deny the feat.

Mock-ups of it were made. It was discussed only in a very small circle. Keldysh did not want it: the world’s scientists, he said, would not understand. He asked Korolev not to mention it to Khrushchev until everything had been discussed. Korolev wavered, Chertok writes. Chertok himself objected: what would happen if the rocket fell back? Keldysh went further: imagine the uproar if the thing came down on foreign territory, even without exploding.

It was Zeldovich who buried his own idea. He had calculated the duration of the flash in a vacuum: too brief to be photographed reliably from the Earth. Keldysh came to the bureau to announce it. He was in an excellent mood.

Gamblers

The first launch took place on September 23, 1958. The rocket broke up at the end of the first-stage flight. The second, on October 12, ended in exactly the same way.

Between the two, young engineers had found an explanation that most of the chiefs hated. The engines vibrated at a frequency that was also that of the structure. The two vibrations fed each other, and the rocket broke apart. They should have stopped and studied the question thoroughly. Chertok is unsparing: “We were like gamblers.” A Moon shot had been promised to Khrushchev for the anniversary of the Revolution. Neither Korolev nor Keldysh wanted a long investigation. Half-measures were all that was done.

After the second failure, they did what had to be done. A damper was installed on the oxygen lines. Korolev judged it shrewder to have the remedy presented to the commission by a scientist from another institute rather than by his own engineers: no man, he said, is a prophet in his own country.

The chairman of the State Commission, Konstantin Rudnev, drew the lesson in front of everyone: “If you add up all the expenses for each launch, it turns out that we are firing off entire cities. Our successes have gone to our heads.”

On December 4, a third launch, a third failure: a pump in the second stage.

The Artificial Planet

The fourth launch took place on January 2, 1959. This time all three stages worked. But the command to shut down the second-stage engine, sent from the ground by radio, arrived late. The probe passed six thousand kilometers from the Moon and went on. It began circling the Sun.

It was a failure: it was supposed to hit the Moon. Propaganda turned it into a triumph. The probe became the first “artificial planet” of the solar system, and it was given a name, Mechta, “Dream.” Chertok admits it bluntly: “Instead of the expected reprimands, we were flooded with congratulations.”

The craft did serve two purposes all the same. At one hundred thirteen thousand kilometers from the Earth it released a cloud of sodium, an artificial comet that foreign observatories could see. And its instruments detected no magnetic field around the Moon.

The fifth launch, on June 18, failed again.

September

In September, two rockets and two probes were brought out. Khrushchev was to leave for the United States on the 15th. Chertok writes that the engineers no longer needed him in order to want to succeed: their pride had been wounded.

On September 6 the launch was scrubbed: a connector had not been plugged in. On the 8th, an ice plug made them miss the time. On the 9th, the engines lit, then everything went out. In the silence of the command bunker, Korolev suddenly shouted at Pilyugin. The rocket was drained and taken away, and the other brought in.

That one left on the 12th, without a flaw.

It remained to prove that the Moon had been hit. Only one antenna in Europe was capable of following the probe: that of the British observatory at Jodrell Bank, directed by Bernard Lovell. Keldysh wanted to notify him at once. Korolev hesitated: what if they missed again? No one would believe in a second “artificial planet.” Keldysh prevailed and had the predicted time of impact passed on to Lovell.

That same afternoon, Korolev, Keldysh, Rudnev, Glushko and Ryazansky flew to Moscow. They wanted to report to Khrushchev before his departure. Korolev had another reason: he insisted on checking the condition of the gift himself.

The Pennant

The probe carried a metal sphere made of small five-sided plates of stainless steel. Each bore the arms of the Soviet Union and the inscription “USSR, September 1959.” The Mint had been striking them since 1958. It had had to redo them after each failure, with the new date. Korolev’s bureau had made a replica, in a wooden case lined with light blue velvet, the work of its best cabinetmakers.

On September 14, 1959, at 12:02:24 a.m. Moscow time, the probe struck the Moon. The flight had lasted thirty-eight hours and twenty-one minutes. Lovell confirmed: the signals had ceased one second after the predicted instant. The Soviet calculators had forgotten the time the radio wave takes to come from the Moon.

It was the first time an object made by human hands had reached another celestial body.

The next day, Khrushchev left for Washington. At the White House he presented the replica of the pennant to President Eisenhower. One newspaper wrote that he had arrived in America with the Moon in his suitcase.

Before American congressmen, a senator asked him whether the Soviets too had had failures. Khrushchev joked and told how one rocket had not worked “quite right,” how it had been replaced by another, and how the first was intact. The engineers read that transcript a few days later. They had caught up on a little sleep, and they had a good laugh.

Chertok does the count that no one published at the time: seven lunar launches in a year, two complete successes and one half-success. “We knew how to hide our failures.”

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. II, Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA SP-2006-4110, ch. 25 (“Lunar Assault”: projects of 1958, third-stage engine and the Mishin-Kosberg incident, plan for a bomb on the Moon, failures of September 23, October 12 and December 4, 1958, K. Rudnev’s remarks, launch of January 2, 1959, attempts of September 6, 8 and 9 and launch of September 12, 1959, notice given to B. Lovell, pennant, impact of September 14, Khrushchev’s trip) and ch. 29 (decree of March 20, 1958); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 12 (record of the first lunar probes).

Chapter 22 · October 1959 “The Moon Is Round”

On October 6, 1959, in Moscow, the telephone rang in Boris Chertok’s office. It was Sergei Korolev. “Boris, come at once! Don’t bring any papers. And bear in mind you won’t be going back to your office today.” Chertok objected that preparations for the Mars and Venus probes were in a critical state. “No, did you understand what I said? You have enough deputies. Come at once!” A Soviet probe was approaching the far side of the Moon, and it had become almost impossible to talk to it.

The Laundry

Photographing the face of the Moon that is never seen from the Earth is far harder than hitting it. It takes a probe that can orient itself, aim, photograph, and then send back its pictures. None had yet done so.

This one carried a device designed by a television institute in Leningrad. It took the pictures on film. Then, on board, it developed the film, fixed it, dried it, and scanned it line by line to transmit it by radio. The engineers had nicknamed it “the laundry.” During the tests it had given more trouble than everything else: the film came out spotted, or fogged.

The system that oriented the probe was the work of Boris Raushenbakh’s team; he was a veteran of the 1930s institute whom Korolev had found again. Chertok, who was used to missiles, put the chances of success at no more than twenty or thirty percent.

Korolev measured the risk. After the September success, he told Chertok what he expected. Khrushchev was returning from America on September 28: “We won’t be seeing him in Moscow,” he remarked with visible regret. The launch had to be on October 3 or 4. “No later! And mind, we absolutely must not disgrace ourselves now. Lovell and the Americans will be tracking the launch. If we do not see the far side of the Moon, it will be a terrible disgrace.”

On September 28, Moscow celebrated Khrushchev’s return. On behalf of the scientists, it was Academician Sedov who spoke. Chertok writes that he shared Korolev’s bitterness.

The probe left on October 4, 1959, two years to the day after Sputnik. The official communiqué said not a word about photography.

A Plane in an Hour

On the morning of the 6th, the news was bad. The telemetry was not coming through; commands were not reaching the probe. The only station able to communicate with it was in Crimea, on Mount Koshka, near Simeiz. The next session began at four in the afternoon.

Korolev decided to go there. In a little over an hour he obtained a Tupolev 104, the country’s first jet airliner, which was taken off an international route for him. He alerted the Air Force, which would keep a helicopter ready, and the Crimean authorities. Departure at noon.

There were six of them for an aircraft of a hundred seats: Korolev, Keldysh, Ryazansky, an official of the radio industry, Chertok and the engineer Arkady Ostashev. Ostashev was late. Korolev could not bear to wait. He had already lost his temper with Ryazansky over the radio commands that were not getting through. Keldysh was smiling, which did not help. After ten minutes Korolev gave the order to take off and, to calm himself, went off into the cockpit.

The plane taxied toward the runway. A car then appeared, cutting across the concrete. Ostashev jumped out, waving his bag. The plane was stopped, the ladder lowered. Korolev came back into the cabin, shook his fist at him and uttered words drowned by the noise of the jets.

On board there were stewardesses and a proper meal. None of them except Keldysh had ever flown in such a plane. Korolev unbent. Soon, he promised, the bureau would have planes like this. Then, to Ryazansky: “But if your radio commands don’t get through, Mikhail, you’ll be traveling in the Li-2, and it will be a long time before you see stewardesses like these again.”

The helicopter followed the Crimean coast. It passed over Koktebel, where Korolev had flown gliders in his youth. Chertok recited Pushkin. Korolev laughed. Then the pilot announced wet snow on the mountain where they were to land. Korolev wanted to attempt the landing. The pilot held firm: the road down would be too dangerous. They landed near Yalta.

The local Party officials were waiting for them with cars. They offered rest and the pleasures of the place. Korolev thanked them: “We are very pressed for time. Take us to the center at Simeiz.”

Having left at eleven, they were at the summit at half past two.

One Man in Charge

The station was a camp. A flat antenna of one hundred twenty square meters, transmitters in trucks, a wooden hut, tents, a field kitchen.

Korolev wanted to talk to the operators himself. It did not take him long to see what was wrong. Three men were giving orders at once: the engineer Yevgeny Boguslavsky, who had designed the radio link, and two colonels. The operators did not know whom to obey.

“Attention!” said Korolev. “During the communications sessions, I ask that all reports go to Yevgeny Yakovlevich Boguslavsky. And I ask that all operators carry out only his commands.”

That was all. Chertok notes that order was established on the instant.

At four o’clock the telemetry came in. To general surprise, everything was working on board.

In the evening it was discovered that there was no more of the special magnetic tape needed to record the images. Korolev flew into a fury. Then he telephoned the minister. The tape would leave Moscow on an airliner; a helicopter would be waiting at the airport. He turned to a colonel: “I am sorry, but this trouble is the fault of my comrades.”

They slept in an official seaside residence. The table was covered with wines. “No drinking!” said Korolev. “Tomorrow we leave at six.” They slept four hours.

The First Picture

On October 7, at 6:30 a.m., the device switched on. The probe was between the Moon and the Sun, about seven thousand kilometers from the Moon. It photographed for forty minutes. Then, as it headed back toward the Earth, the “laundry” developed its film.

The wait lasted hours. An astronomer, who had come at Keldysh’s invitation, explained that it was pointless: the radiation of space was bound to have fogged the film.

When the probe was fifty thousand kilometers away, the signal became stable. The command was given to reproduce the image. On the paper, line after line, a gray circle appeared, in which it took a great deal of imagination to make anything out.

Korolev could stand it no longer. He burst into the little room: “Well, what have you got there?”

“We have established that the Moon is round,” Chertok replied.

Boguslavsky pulled out the sheet, showed it to Korolev, and calmly tore it up. Korolev did not even get angry: “Why so soon, Yevgeny Yakovlevich? After all, it is the first, you understand, the first!”

Boguslavsky answered that it was bad and that the next ones would be better. They were. Picture after picture, details took shape. There was applause and congratulation. That evening, wine was allowed.

The Names

Before returning, Korolev took Keldysh, Ryazansky and Chertok to see a construction site near Yevpatoriya. The large antennas that were to talk to the probes sent toward Mars were being built there. The officers promised a date. Korolev frowned: that deadline would not do at all; everything had to be ready in the first quarter of 1960. An officer invited him to come back in May, when the place would be one of the finest beaches in Crimea. “All you think about is your beaches! This one is not bad, of course. But the main thing is that you don’t forget the deadlines!”

Back at his bureau, he surprised his deputies. Instead of throwing himself into day-to-day business, he shut himself in with astronomers to examine the photographs and discuss the names to be given to the features discovered. His secretary turned visitors away: he had asked not to be disturbed.

Chertok saw the strategist in this. Korolev was hurrying to take the initiative, for fear that others, one day, with better pictures, would take it from him.

A photograph was published on October 27, 1959. As for the names, the Central Committee stepped in and entrusted the matter to a commission of the Academy. The list appeared on March 18, 1960: Giordano Bruno, Jules Verne, Hertz, Lobachevsky, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Marie Curie, Edison… Keldysh and Korolev had the physicist Kurchatov, who had died in February, added to it. On the far side of the Moon, a crater now bears the name of Tsiolkovsky.

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. II, Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA SP-2006-4110, ch. 29 (“Ye-2 Flies to the Moon and We Fly to Koshka”: photo-television unit and orientation system, Korolev’s words before the launch, meeting of September 28, launch of October 4, 1959, call of October 6 and flight to Crimea, Mount Koshka station, Korolev’s order to the operators, the magnetic-tape episode, photography of October 7 and reception of the images, visit to the Yevpatoriya site, choice of names, list of March 18, 1960); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 5 (B. Raushenbakh).

Chapter 23 · 1957 – 1960 The Program: “Humans to Mars and Venus”

On July 5, 1958, Sergei Korolev and Mikhail Tikhonravov signed a memorandum of a few pages and sent it to the commission that ran the military industry. It bore a modest title: “Preliminary Considerations on the Prospects of the Mastery of Cosmic Space.” It listed satellites, probes, a piloted spacecraft, stations around the Earth. Then, once all that was done, it stated what would become possible. First, it wrote: “Flight of humans to Mars and Venus.” The Moon came only afterward.

A Plan Instead of One-Off Feats

The first three Sputniks had been isolated initiatives. Korolev wanted something else: a program. As early as December 30, 1957, he had sent the leadership a first letter with Keldysh. Its title called for “a new powerful industry” for the study of space.

The memorandum of July 1958 went further, and it had dates. For the years 1959 to 1961, it planned to study the exploration of Mars and Venus by automatic craft, which would return to the vicinity of the Earth with photographs. For 1963 or 1964, a launcher able to put fifteen to twenty tons into orbit. It asked for ion engines for travel between the planets. From 1961 to 1965, a ship for one or two people, and stations. From 1963 to 1966, probes to Mars and Venus. It mentioned research on closed-cycle life support systems, on assembly in orbit, on radio links over very great distances.

Last came the distant goals, in this order: the flight of humans to Mars and Venus; the flight of humans to the Moon and their return; a permanent “station colony” on the Moon.

The historian Asif Siddiqi dwells on that order. For Korolev and Tikhonravov, he writes, brought up as they were on Tsiolkovsky and Tsander, landing a man on the Moon was not a priority. The journey to the planets came first. That idea would dominate the bureau’s long-term studies for the following five years.

He notes something else. Unlike so many earlier letters, this text does not speak of the Americans. It waves no “race.” It is the program of two men saying what they would like to do.

A Year Without an Answer

A year later, no decree had answered. Korolev changed allies. Tikhonravov had no political weight. Keldysh had. Between May and July 1959, Korolev sent three letters with him in quick succession.

The most important was dated May 27. It proposed separating space from missiles. The same organizations were now doing both, they wrote, and that had been useful. But the goals had become too vast: it was time to call in “new forces and new organizations.” They asked for a Central Scientific Research Institute for Interplanetary Research, where all spacecraft would be designed, seven specialized institutes, and a council headed by Keldysh.

One sentence is surprising, coming from a man whose very name was secret. That institute, they wrote, could become “a scientific center of space exploration on an international scale,” in cooperation with the socialist countries.

On December 10, 1959, the government at last issued a decree on space policy. It was the first. It created only Keldysh’s council. But it approved three things that mattered: a four-stage R-7 to send probes to Mars, Venus and the Moon, the piloted spacecraft, and studies of a heavy launcher.

There would be no institute. The army was the only one paying, and it did not want a large space program.

“The Devil’s Venom”

Meanwhile, Korolev was losing ground where he had been strongest: with Khrushchev.

The R-7 was a poor weapon. It took hours to fill it with liquid oxygen, and it could not be kept ready. In May 1958, Khrushchev asked him whether there was a better solution, with propellants that keep. Korolev answered that it was impossible: big engines could not be made with such toxic substances. He proposed instead a new missile, the R-9, still using oxygen, but half the weight and much quicker to prepare.

Khrushchev promised to think about it. He was not satisfied. He confided to his son that Korolev seemed to him more concerned with space records than with defense.

The next day he sent for Glushko. Glushko had always preferred those propellants, and oxygen had been giving him trouble for years. He assured him that an intercontinental missile with storable propellants was feasible. He recommended a designer: Yangel.

Khrushchev saw Korolev again. Korolev repeated his opinion of what he called “the devil’s venom.” Then, learning that the contract was going to Yangel, he made an offer that was unlike him. Khrushchev reported it: “I propose that you give this acid-fueled missile project to me. Besides that, I will also make an oxygen-fueled missile, capable of almost instantaneous action.”

Khrushchev refused. Korolev insisted. The head of government finally cut him off sharply, reminding him whom he was talking to.

Siddiqi dates the cooling from that meeting. Korolev no longer had the direct line. More and more he had to go through Ustinov, through Brezhnev, through Marshal Nedelin, men whose concern was defense, not space.

Glushko Crosses Over

The second consequence was graver still. Glushko, his comrade of the institute, the sharashka and Germany, had sided with a rival. For Korolev, Siddiqi writes, that was unforgivable.

The cracks were old. There had been the refusal of the small steering engines, in 1954. There had been, in the summer of 1957, a scene that Korolev described to his wife in a letter. Glushko had arrived that day and, to everyone’s stupefaction, had started saying in the foulest language that their work was worthless. Korolev added that he had answered him calmly, and that she could imagine what it had cost him in nerves.

The quarrel spread to the R-7’s third stage. Glushko wanted to try a new propellant on it. His engine was never ready. Korolev had his own built with Kosberg, in nine months.

It broke out over the R-9, finally approved on May 13, 1959. Glushko’s engine vibrated and exploded on the stand. Korolev then brought into the game an aircraft-engine designer from Kuibyshev, Nikolai Kuznetsov. In November 1959 he wrote to Brezhnev asking that Glushko be removed from the missile. Ustinov ruled in Glushko’s favor.

Siddiqi draws up the balance of the affair. Khrushchev no longer regarded Korolev as the country’s best missile designer: that was now Yangel. Korolev and Mishin attached themselves to liquid oxygen for good. The break with Glushko was complete. And Kuznetsov, an engine man from aviation, had entered the story. These four facts would weigh on everything that followed, right up to the rocket that was meant to go to Mars.

“Your Affairs Are Not Going Well”

On January 2, 1960, Khrushchev summoned Korolev, Glushko, Keldysh and Pilyugin. The Americans had just published their long-range plans. He declared, to everyone’s surprise, that successes in space mattered no less than missiles. Korolev reported his words the next day to his deputies: “Your affairs are not going well. You must aim for space without delay. In the United States they are working on it on a broad scale, and they will be able to overtake us.”

The door was open. Korolev shut himself in with Mishin, Kryukov and Chertok to prepare what he called a big space plan. He needed a rocket much larger than the R-7. Glushko proposed making one by clustering R-9 missiles together. Korolev refused: he wanted an entirely new vehicle. It was called “N,” the initial of the Russian word for “carrier.”

In early June 1960 he presented his launcher to Khrushchev. He praised its military usefulness. He also spoke of exploring the Moon, Mars and Venus.

The decree was signed on June 23, 1960. It provided for a first rocket, the N1, able to put forty to fifty tons into orbit, then a second, more powerful. Among the projects it listed was a heavy interplanetary ship, for two or three cosmonauts, intended to fly around Mars and Venus. It had dates: 1962 to 1965.

Siddiqi judges that decree harshly: hastily written, wildly ambitious, remarkably unrealistic. The Ministry of Defense, which paid for everything, was interested in neither the Moon nor the planets. But a text signed at the top of the Soviet state now spoke of sending humans around Mars.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 5 (third stage, Kosberg’s engine) and ch. 6 (“Organizing for the Space Program”: letter of December 30, 1957, Korolev-Tikhonravov memorandum of July 5, 1958, and the author’s commentary, letters of May and July 1959, decree of December 10, 1959, conversations of May 1958 with Khrushchev, words reported by Khrushchev, letter of summer 1957 about Glushko, R-9 and letter to Brezhnev, meeting of January 2, 1960, N launcher, decree of June 23, 1960).

Chapter 24 · 1958 – 1960 A Sphere for One Man

On the morning of February 15, 1958, Sergei Korolev called Mikhail Tikhonravov into his office. He formally charged him with studying a ship capable of carrying a man into orbit around the Earth. Tikhonravov put a thirty-two-year-old engineer of his department, Konstantin Feoktistov, in charge of it. At sixteen, during the war, Feoktistov had been a scout for the partisans. The Germans had captured him, shot him and left him for dead. He was only wounded. He waited for night to crawl away. He now led twenty young engineers.

“Approaches with No Future”

Nothing then obliged anyone to aim for orbit. Since 1955 the bureau had been studying something more modest: a man sent straight up, like the dogs. Korolev himself had long defended that route. In 1958 he changed his mind.

Not everyone followed him. At a meeting at the Academy of Sciences, a leading physician worried about the publicity a fatal flight would receive. A senior official of the defense industry called Korolev a “science fiction writer.” Others, including some of the chief designers, would have preferred to start with hops.

Korolev’s answer has been reported: “These are approaches with no future. We need ships to fly around the Earth. Gradual visits to space have their effectiveness, but they have no significance for science or for spaceflight. I am for orbital flight: we can reach the goal without intermediate stages.”

The historian Asif Siddiqi recognizes in this the man who had leapt over the R-3. Korolev did not believe in small steps.

The Ball

The hardest part was the return. A craft reentering the atmosphere at eight kilometers per second heats up terribly. Feoktistov’s group examined every shape. A cone would reduce the crushing load on the pilot and allow the descent to be steered. But a more elaborate shape takes time.

A sphere was chosen. A ball does not need to be oriented: if its center of gravity is placed toward the rear, it turns the right way by itself. Korolev understood, Siddiqi writes, that the advantages of the cone weighed nothing against the only factor that counted: time. It was once that choice was made that he decided, privately, to take the project to the government. The engineers would call the capsule sharik, “the little ball.”

To coat it, a plastic reinforced with asbestos fabric was selected. In calculating its thickness, an engineer made an error of a factor of two. By luck the mistake had no consequence: Korolev had demanded in advance that the required thickness be multiplied by four.

There remained the landing. Korolev did not like parachutes. He had long dreamed of a helicopter rotor that would unfold to set the capsule down. He approached the great helicopter designer, Mikhail Mil. Mil refused, and explained himself to a deputy: a man flies twice around the globe, the whole world applauds, the star heads back toward the Earth, and then, bang. “Who is to blame? We are! No, we will not take part in this undertaking.”

They fell back on the parachute. But to set down gently a ball of more than two tons, immense ones would be needed. The engineers found an unexpected solution: at an altitude of seven kilometers, the pilot would be ejected with his seat and come down separately.

The Man or the Spy

The report was signed on August 18, 1958, by Korolev, Bushuyev, Tikhonravov and Feoktistov. It envisaged a first piloted flight in December 1960 at the earliest.

Korolev then faced a dangerous choice. The army expected a photoreconnaissance satellite from him. His bureau did not have the strength to carry both projects together. He preferred the man. But neglecting the needs of defense, Siddiqi writes, was a charge bordering on treason. Feoktistov spoke of a “fierce battle” that lasted several months.

Once again it was the Americans who helped him. On October 1, 1958, NASA was born. A few days later it started a piloted spacecraft program, which would be called Mercury. In November the Council of Chief Designers gave priority to the piloted ship.

Korolev found something better. The spy satellite also had to bring something back to Earth: its film. Why not house the cameras in the same ball as the pilot? One ship would serve both purposes. Siddiqi wonders whether this was not a ruse to get human flight through under cover of the army.

The decree of May 22, 1959, concerned the reconnaissance satellite. With the help of Keldysh and Rudnev, Korolev managed to have a clause added at the very end: “… and also a satellite intended for the flight of a human.”

A Passenger

The ship that came off the drawing boards in 1959 weighed 4.7 tons. It had two parts. The ball, 2.3 meters in diameter, housed the pilot, installed on an ejection seat weighing eight hundred kilograms. Behind it, a compartment in the shape of a double cone held the instruments and the braking engine. That compartment did not come back.

The pilot had a porthole fitted with a sighting device, an instrument panel and a small rotating globe that showed him over which point he was flying. He was given ordinary air, at ground pressure, and not pure oxygen as the Americans were: it was simpler, and the risk of fire was lower.

One basic difference separated this ship from its rival. It was designed to carry out the whole flight, from launch to landing, without the man touching a single control. The pilot could take over in an emergency. But the Soviet engineers, Siddiqi writes, did not consider him anything more than a passenger. He gives the reason: the ship had not been designed by aircraft builders, but by a bureau that until then had made only missiles and cabins for dogs.

The Old Friends

For this project Korolev surrounded himself with men he trusted, often of long standing.

The parachute tests were entrusted to two of his oldest companions: Pyotr Flerov, a friend from the gliding years, and Arvid Pallo. They dropped balls from a transport plane over Kazakhstan. The fifth carried dogs. It landed well, then rolled down a hill and disappeared. The dogs were found after a long search, worn out but in one piece. On April 10, 1960, the two men reported to Korolev that the system was ready.

The ship’s orientation was Boris Raushenbakh’s business. He too came from the institute of the 1930s. Arrested in 1942 because he bore a German name, he had survived a camp. His team joined Korolev’s bureau on January 6, 1960.

The engine that had to brake the ship to bring it back was the part on which everything depended: if it did not fire, the pilot stayed in orbit. Glushko did not want to take it on. Korolev turned to Aleksei Isayev. On returning to his own bureau, Isayev calmly announced to his engineers: Korolev “proposes that we quickly do a small job, but a very important one: bringing a man back from space to the Earth.” Korolev saw him several times, asked precise questions, and never requested a change. Seven months later the engine was running on the stand. On April 25, 1960, it was ready.

As a precaution, the orbit was chosen low enough for the ship to fall back by itself after ten days if that engine failed. The air reserves were planned for ten days.

The spacesuit was the subject of a dispute. The bureau’s engineers judged it unnecessary, since the cabin was pressurized. The doctors demanded it. In mid-1960 Korolev ruled for the doctors, despite the weight.

On July 3, 1959, Ustinov had given him another plant, on the other side of town: a former gun factory, which had produced nearly half the country’s field artillery during the war. The first spherical shells came out of it the following month.

At the end of 1959 the first test article left the plant. Feoktistov said what he had felt on seeing, standing there, what his team had drawn: “It was an awesome sight.”

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 5 (“Designing the First Spaceship”: debates of 1958 and Korolev’s words, order of February 15, 1958, K. Feoktistov, choice of the sphere, thermal protection, M. Mil’s refusal, report of August 18, 1958, priority given in November 1958, decree of May 22, 1959, description of Object K, automation, tests by P. Flerov and A. Pallo, B. Raushenbakh, A. Isayev’s engine, spacesuit, transfer of the plant on July 3, 1959).

Chapter 25 · 1959 – 1960 Twenty Pilots and Some Dogs

On June 18, 1960, Sergei Korolev went for the first time to the center where the future cosmonauts were being trained. Six young Air Force officers were waiting for him: the six being prepared as a priority. Three months earlier they had not known he existed. Even that day they were not told his name. He was introduced to them as “the Chief Designer.” One of the six was named Yuri Gagarin. He was twenty-six. From that first meeting he made an excellent impression on Korolev.

Whom to Send?

The question had come up in 1959. Sailors, rocket engineers and racing drivers were considered. The Air Force doctors argued that fighter pilots already knew oxygen starvation, accelerations and the ejection seat. Keldysh agreed with them.

It was Korolev who set the measurements: between twenty-five and thirty years old, no taller than one meter seventy-five, no heavier than seventy-two kilograms. One had to fit in the ball.

He also said bluntly what he expected of these men. Automatic flights and animal flights had shown it, he explained: Soviet technology did not require, as the American project did, that the first cosmonauts be highly qualified engineers. The historian Asif Siddiqi notes that this was not quite true of the Americans. But it says well what Korolev wanted: men capable of carrying out exactly what had been planned.

Military doctors, in pairs, toured the air bases in the west of the country. They examined more than three thousand files. The pilots were not told what it was about: there was talk of “special flights.” Some did not understand what was wanted of them. Others guessed at once and asked to consult their families. That was forbidden.

Two hundred passed the first screening. They went through the rotating chair, the low-pressure chamber, the centrifuge. The plan had been to keep seven or eight. Korolev insisted on tripling that number: he wanted a group much larger than that of the seven American astronauts. At the end of 1959, twenty men were chosen.

None was a test pilot. Gagarin had two hundred thirty flying hours. Their chief was an Air Force general, Nikolai Kamanin, the famous hero of an Arctic rescue in 1934. For ten years no Soviet cosmonaut would leave the ground without his agreement. Korolev would have to reckon with him.

“Ships of Space”

On May 15, 1960, three years to the day after the first R-7, the first example of the ship left for orbit. It was empty, without a heat shield, and was not meant to return.

The communiqué had to be drafted. What should this object be called? Korolev proposed a word, korabl, “ship”: “There are sea ships, river ships, airships. Now there will be space ships!” The press announced a “satellite-ship.” The expression “spaceship” entered the official language that day. The ship itself already had a name, still unknown to the public: Vostok, “East.”

The flight went well until the last act. Before firing the braking engine, it was noticed that a sensor of the orientation system was not responding correctly. At Tyuratam, Chertok recommended using the backup system. Korolev at first agreed with him. Then Keldysh and Raushenbakh persuaded him to keep the primary system. He gave in.

The ship oriented itself exactly backward. The engine, instead of braking it, pushed it into a higher orbit. Korolev, indignant, handed out reprimands to several of his engineers, Feoktistov among them.

Lisichka

The second ship carried two dogs, Chaika and Lisichka. Korolev was particularly fond of Lisichka, “little fox.” The affection was mutual: this usually calm dog grew lively whenever he came to see her during the preparations.

On July 28, 1960, nineteen seconds after liftoff, an engine caught fire. The rocket exploded at the twenty-ninth second. Both dogs were killed.

The accident forced the question of rescue at liftoff to be spelled out. The first forty seconds were judged the most dangerous: if the rocket failed, the pilot would be ejected with his seat.

Belka and Strelka

The third ship left on August 19, 1960, at 11:44 a.m. On board: two dogs, Belka and Strelka, forty mice, two rats, insects, plants, seeds. Two television cameras filmed the dogs.

The pictures were worrying. At first the two animals were deathly still. Without the readings of their pulse, one could not have said whether they were alive. Then they became agitated, with convulsive movements. On the fourth orbit, Belka squirmed and vomited. Dr. Yazdovsky watched in silence. Then he gloomily told the commission: a man’s flight would have to be limited to a single orbit.

The next day, on the eighteenth orbit, the backup system oriented the ship correctly. The capsule reentered. The dogs’ container was ejected and came down under its parachute, ten kilometers from the planned point. Belka and Strelka were in good health. They were the first living beings to return from orbit around the Earth.

A Man’s Life

Korolev returned to Moscow on August 28. On September 7 he had eleven chief designers sign a document on the state of the piloted ship. It was not a technical text like the others. Section after section, it reviewed what protected the pilot: every duplicated system, every pyrotechnic cartridge.

The whole was frighteningly complex: a rocket of six blocks in three stages, two hundred forty-one vacuum tubes, more than six thousand transistors, fifty-six electric motors, eight hundred relays, fifteen kilometers of cable. One hundred twenty-three organizations were working on it. None of it could be guaranteed free of defects.

So Korolev used, Siddiqi writes, his method as a leader. He made every designer, every plant director, every officer understand that a cosmonaut’s life depended on his share of the work. The chain of responsibility went down to the last worker in the shop. The habits of the missile industry, the text said, no longer applied: here, failure was not acceptable.

Three days later, the ten most senior defense officials and the six chief designers wrote together to the Central Committee. They proposed launching a man in December 1960. On October 11, Khrushchev approved: it was “a task of great importance.”

October 24

On the evening of October 24, 1960, Korolev called the engineer Arkady Ostashev into his office. He had just received a call from Tyuratam. There had been a serious accident at the range. Ostashev’s elder brother, Yevgeny, had been there. Korolev immediately authorized him to leave. He himself did not yet grasp what had happened. He learned it during the night, as the news came in.

The rocket was not his. It was his rival Yangel’s new missile, the R-16, the one with storable propellants. It was being prepared for its first launch. It was leaking. The commission had ordered it repaired without being drained. Half an hour before the scheduled time, nearly two hundred people were still around the pad, among them Marshal Nedelin, to whom it was suggested that he move away. He is said to have answered: “What is there to be afraid of? Am I not an officer?”

The second-stage engine ignited by itself, because of a fault in the control system. It set fire to the propellants of the first. One hundred twenty-six people died, according to the count Chertok accepts; other sources give figures ranging from ninety-two to one hundred sixty-five. Nedelin was identified only by his medal. The younger Ostashev took fourteen hours to recognize his brother. Yangel survived because a general had drawn him into a shelter to smoke a cigarette.

It was announced that the marshal had died in a plane crash. That lie would be maintained until 1989.

Korolev lost the man who had warned him in 1949 and supported him since 1956. Nedelin also chaired the commission for the piloted ship. Work stopped for more than two weeks. The December flight would not take place.

December

The next two launches failed. On December 1 the braking engine malfunctioned. The capsule was in danger of coming down outside the Soviet Union. An explosive charge, installed for that case, destroyed it with its two dogs. The engineers had not provided this device for piloted flights.

On December 22 it was the third stage that shut down too early. The capsule came down in Siberia, in one of the most inaccessible regions of the country, near the place where the Tunguska meteorite had fallen. Korolev sent his old companion Arvid Pallo. The team was dropped two days later, in snow up to the waist, at forty below zero. It knew that the explosive charge was due to go off sixty hours after landing. When it reached the capsule, the sixty hours had passed. It had to be defused. It would be discovered that the cables had burned through during the descent. The two dogs were alive.

Korolev asked that this failure be announced in the press. The State Commission refused.

The first piloted flight was put back. In the United States, the first hop by an astronaut was being prepared for the spring.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 7 (“Gagarin”: criteria and Korolev’s remarks on the cosmonauts, selection, N. Kamanin, visit of June 18, 1960, flight of May 15, 1960, and Korolev’s words about “ships,” accident of July 28, flight of Belka and Strelka, document of September 7 and letter of September 10, 1960, catastrophe of October 24, 1960, flights of December 1 and 22, 1960, A. Pallo’s expedition).

Chapter 26 · April 12, 1961 “T Plus One Hundred. How Do You Feel?”

On the evening of April 11, 1961, at Tyuratam, Yuri Gagarin and German Titov were sleeping in a small house near the launch pad. It had been Marshal Nedelin’s. By 9:30 p.m. they were asleep. Sergei Korolev came quietly to make sure all was well. The doctors had slipped sensors under the mattresses: both men were sleeping peacefully. Korolev himself did not close his eyes all night. One thought would not leave him, an officer recounted: Cape Horn. If the rocket’s last stage shut down too early, the ship would come down there, in a sea known for its constant storms.

A Month Earlier

In March he had done something unusual. He invited to his bureau a few veterans of GIRD, the group from the Moscow cellar. They did not know what he had become: his work was secret. They talked of the 1930s. Toward the end, Korolev said: “Now we have come very far!” And he took them to a workshop.

One of them, Nikolai Yefremov, described that moment. In the large, well-lit hall they saw at once their dream of long ago. Korolev introduced it to them, “literally introduced it, as if it were a living thing”: the beautiful rocket. Off to one side, on a pedestal, was the cabin of a ship ready for the flight of a man.

Two test flights took place, on March 9 and 25. Each carried a dog and a mannequin in a spacesuit, for a single trip around the Earth. To check the radio link, a voice was needed. An engineer described the dilemma. A countdown would make the West believe the Russians had secretly launched a man. A song would have people saying the cosmonaut had lost his mind. In the end a folk choir was recorded. Hearing the mannequin sing like a whole choir, he said, was very funny.

Both flights succeeded. Between the two, on March 23, the youngest of the cosmonauts, Valentin Bondarenko, twenty-four years old, burned to death in an isolation chamber in Moscow. Nothing would be said of it for twenty-five years.

Three Envelopes

On March 29, before the State Commission, Korolev declared that he was ready to launch a man.

That same evening the request to the Central Committee was drafted. The ship would make one orbit of the Earth and land in the Soviet Union. A KGB representative demanded that a destruct charge be installed in it, as on the test ships. All the others opposed it. He gave way.

The commission also decided that the announcement would be made as soon as the ship was in orbit, and not after its return. It gave its reasons: to make a rescue easier, and to prevent a foreign government from declaring that the cosmonaut was a spy. The historian Asif Siddiqi stresses that it put the pilot’s life ahead of the fear of admitting a failure.

Three communiqués were prepared and delivered in advance to the radio and the TASS agency in sealed envelopes. The first announced success. The second, very short, announced the death of the cosmonaut at launch. The third asked all governments to come to the aid of a man who had come down at sea or on foreign soil.

It was Tikhonravov who obtained that the ship should publicly bear its real name. Such a flight, he argued, could not be called “the sixth satellite-ship.” Korolev approved. It would be Vostok.

The Choice

Korolev arrived at Tyuratam on the evening of April 3. The six cosmonauts joined him on the 5th. They had been told to tell their wives that the launch would take place on the 14th, three days later than the real date, to spare them worry.

On April 8, General Kamanin proposed Gagarin as pilot and Titov as backup. The commission approved without debate. The next day Kamanin told the two men. Asked much later what he had felt, Titov answered: “Why ask! Painful or not, it was unpleasant, to say the least.”

When the cosmonauts had voted among themselves, anonymously, on who should go first, seventeen out of twenty had named Gagarin. One of Korolev’s engineers, Raushenbakh, said of him that he never tried to ingratiate himself and was never insolent: he had an inborn tact.

That same Raushenbakh gave him his last instructions on the eve of the flight. He described his confusion. He looked at this young man and knew that the next day he was going to wake up the whole world. At the same time he could not bring himself to believe it. He would tell him to switch this on, not to forget that, then fall silent, and a little voice would whisper to him that none of it was going to happen.

In those same days Korolev was running another affair. On April 9, from a neighboring pad, he carried out the first launch of his new missile, the R-9.

The Morning

Gagarin and Titov were woken at 5:30 a.m. They were brought a bunch of wildflowers. They breakfasted from tubes: meat paste, marmalade, coffee. They were put into the pale blue pressure suit, then the orange coverall. A bus took them to the rocket.

Korolev was waiting for them at its foot, with Keldysh and the generals. All the witnesses said so: he looked exhausted. He watched in silence as Gagarin made his farewells. The cosmonaut told the chairman of the commission in a few words that he was ready. The long speech broadcast later had been recorded in Moscow, well beforehand, from a text written by others.

Gagarin embraced Korolev, stepped into the elevator, turned and waved.

In the command bunker a small table covered with a green cloth had been set up for Korolev. On it, a radio set and a red telephone. That telephone was for giving the password that would trigger the pilot’s ejection if the rocket failed in the first forty seconds. Three men knew it: Korolev, Voskresensky and the colonel directing the launch. His predecessor had died in the October catastrophe.

Korolev had had the test pilot Mark Gallai admitted to the room. It was not for his skills as a pilot: Gallai wrote, and someone would be needed to tell the story.

Some Music

At 7:10 a.m. Gagarin switched on his radio. At 7:50 the hatch was closed. A contact indicated that it was not seated properly. Three engineers removed the thirty screws and started again. It took nearly an hour.

Meanwhile, they talked. The cosmonaut Popovich, in charge of communications, asked Gagarin whether he was getting bored. “If there were some music, I could stand it a little better.” Korolev took the microphone: “Station Zarya, fulfill Kedr’s request. Give him some music, give him some music.”

Two minutes passed. Korolev: “Well, have they given you music?”

“Not yet.”

“Of course. That’s musicians for you: now here, now there, but they do nothing very fast, as the saying goes, Yuri Alekseyevich.”

At 8:19 Gagarin announced: “They’ve put on love songs for me.”

At 8:41 Kamanin read him his pulse: sixty-four. “Roger. So my heart is beating.”

Korolev and Voskresensky, for their part, swallowed tranquilizers. They knew the figures. The three-stage rocket had been launched sixteen times. It had failed eight times.

The “Threes”

Liftoff took place at 9:06:59.7 a.m. Moscow time. Gagarin called out: “Poyekhali!” — “Off we go!”

Popovich was supposed to handle communications. Korolev took the microphone from him and kept it for a good part of the ascent. At 9:09: “T plus one hundred. How do you feel?”

“I feel fine. And you?”

At 9:10: “The fairing has been jettisoned, everything is normal. How do you feel?”

“… Fairing jettisoned… I see the Earth. The g-load is increasing a little. I feel excellent, in good spirits.”

“Well done! Excellent! Everything is going well.”

“I see the clouds… It’s beautiful. What beauty!”

Then the third stage ignited. Korolev, Siddiqi writes, was literally shaking. He had demanded that a device print out before his eyes the state of the engine: “5”s if all was well, “2”s in case of failure. The tape filled with “5”s. Suddenly they were “3”s. No one knew what a “3” meant. A few seconds, then the “5”s came back. Feoktistov would say that those seconds shortened the designers’ lives.

At the six hundred seventy-sixth second the ship was in orbit. It had climbed seventy kilometers higher than planned. If the braking engine failed, the natural return would take longer than expected. In the bunker, they knew it.

Moscow radio announced the news only fifty-five minutes after liftoff. At Tyuratam no one understood that silence. The communiqué gave Gagarin the rank of major: he had left as a lieutenant.

“Is He Alive?”

Gagarin was not flying the ship. The controls were locked by a code. He had been given half of it in a sealed envelope, in case he lost contact with the ground. He looked out the porthole, ate, drank, took notes. His pencil got away from him and floated out of reach.

At 10:25, over Africa, Isayev’s engine fired for forty seconds. The instrument compartment was then supposed to separate. It did not: cables held it. The ship began to spin. Gagarin described the scene in his report, kept secret for thirty years: “a corps de ballet,” head, then feet, head, then feet. He worked out that he would land in the Soviet Union in any case and transmitted the agreed signal: all is well. The separation finally came at 10:35, ten minutes late.

On the ground nothing more could be heard. Korolev telephoned Khrushchev, who was on the Black Sea coast: “The parachute has opened, he is landing. The ship seems to be in good condition!” Khrushchev, greatly agitated, asked: “Is he alive? Is he sending signals? Is he alive? Is he alive?”

At seven thousand meters the hatch blew off, and Gagarin was ejected. He recognized beneath him the Volga, a railway bridge, a spit of land: it was the Saratov region, where he had learned to parachute. He came down at 10:55 in a field, near the village of Smelovka. The flight had lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes.

A woman and a little girl approached. On seeing him, the woman slowed down, and the child ran away. Gagarin waved his arms: “I am one of yours, I am Soviet!”

Speechless

At Tyuratam the champagne was opened. Korolev laughed, for the first time in days. His colleagues had never seen him like that.

The commission flew to the landing site. Standing before the capsule, Korolev could not take his eyes off it. He touched it, examined it from every angle.

Then they joined Gagarin at Kuibyshev. The young man said quietly: “All is well, Sergei Pavlovich, everything is in order.” According to a journalist, Korolev was speechless. He did not know what to reply.

On April 14, Gagarin arrived in Moscow to the cheers of the crowd. The motorcade drove to Red Square, where Khrushchev and the leaders were waiting. Korolev followed, several cars behind, in a nondescript vehicle. He had been forbidden to wear his decorations: a foreign agent might wonder who this man was.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 7 (“The Road to Vostok,” “Gagarin in Orbit,” “The Secret World”: reunion of the GIRD veterans and N. Yefremov’s account, flights of March 9 and 25, 1961, death of V. Bondarenko, sessions of March 29 and April 8, sealed communiqués, choice of Gagarin, testimonies of B. Raushenbakh, G. Titov and K. Feoktistov, night of April 11, the fear of Cape Horn, events of April 12 and transcript of the radio exchanges, Gagarin’s flight report, call to Khrushchev, landing, reunion at Kuibyshev, day of April 14).

Chapter 27 · 1960 Eight Months for Mars

On February 28, 1960, Sergei Korolev approved a schedule. It concerned a craft his bureau designated by two characters: 1M, the first Mars vehicle. The documents were to be ready by March 15, the drawings in April, manufacture completed in July, shipment to Tyuratam made in mid-August, the launch at the end of September. From the first sheet of paper to the launch toward Mars, that made eight months. His deputy for spacecraft, the director of his plant and Boris Chertok judged those deadlines impossible. Korolev had all three of them sign.

The Window

One does not leave for Mars whenever one likes. The Earth and Mars circle the Sun at different speeds. They are in a favorable position only about once every two years, for a few weeks. In 1960 the window opened at the end of September and closed around mid-October. The best day was September 26. After that, every day lost cost weight. If it was missed, one had to wait for 1962.

Chertok has explained how such a decision was made. No one at the top ordered these flights. The Central Committee adopted proposals that came from below. And no one among the ministers dared tell Khrushchev that the deadline was unreasonable.

“If We Are a Year Late for Mars”

In April 1960, Korolev was preparing the text of the big decree. He wrote into it the probes to Mars for 1960 and 1962, and those to Venus. Then, for the following three to five years: a rocket of one to two thousand tons, a crewed station, a lunar ship. And finally an interplanetary ship for two or three men, able to fly around Mars and Venus, followed by another, intended to land on the surface of the planets.

His deputies read it, and worried. Mishin, Voskresensky and Chertok proposed writing “five to seven years.” Bushuyev backed them timidly.

Korolev refused. Chertok remembered his answer: “If we are late with the piloted landing on the Moon, the Americans will overtake us. If we are a year late with the piloted flight around Mars or Venus, we will be forgiven. But if Chelomey or Yangel propose completely crazy deadlines, it is they who will be given those missions.”

Chertok adds an admission: he and his comrades did not merely accept. They believed in it. If not in five years, then surely in ten.

A Four-Stage Rocket

To send a probe to Mars, the three-stage R-7 was not enough. A fourth was added. Keldysh’s mathematicians and the bureau’s ballistics experts devised a new maneuver. The first three stages placed the fourth, with the probe, in a parking orbit around the Earth. It was from there that it fired to set off toward the planet.

It was elegant and formidable. The last engine had to start in weightlessness, in a vacuum, out of sight of every Soviet station. No one had ever done that. This rocket, designated 8K78, would go on to launch all the Soviet probes to Mars, Venus and the Moon.

The probe itself was designed by Gleb Maksimov’s group. It oriented itself on the Sun and on the star Canopus. It had no onboard computer. For its small correction engine, Korolev turned to Isayev, who said: “The journey to Mars is worth the risk.”

Shop 44

In August, after the flight of Belka and Strelka, Chertok went to the shop where the probes were being assembled. Two months from launch, nothing was ready. The radio system, ordered from an outside bureau, did not exist. He alerted Korolev.

Korolev telephoned the minister of the radio industry, then took everyone to the supplier’s. He decided that the equipment would be delivered as it was, without integrated tests: those would be done at his own bureau. In the car on the way back, he said to Chertok: “Boris, you are incorrigible. Do you think I don’t understand that their business is a complete failure?”

On August 30 the two probes arrived at Tyuratam by plane, half assembled. The month of September broke every record for malfunctions. A radio engineer spent his days halfway inside the probe, soldering iron in hand. The chairman of the commission, Rudnev, said to Chertok: “Every night I see the same backside sticking out of the vehicle! Is it going to leave for Mars too?” Two women solderers worked seventeen hours at a stretch.

Voskresensky, who was used to first attempts, had no illusions. He advised Chertok: “Forget that radio and all the Martian problems. The first time, we won’t get any farther than Siberia!”

Life at Tyuratam

The best day had passed. Each day of delay meant the probe had to be lightened. On October 3, after a stormy session, the device that was to photograph Mars from about ten thousand kilometers was removed.

There remained an instrument more ambitious still. A professor had designed it to look, from a distance, for signs of life on the planet’s surface. Korolev proposed trying it first on the spot, in the steppe. It was pointed at the soil of Kazakhstan. The instrument gave its verdict: there was no life on Earth, at Tyuratam. The laughter was general. The instrument was removed.

On October 4 they celebrated the third anniversary of Sputnik. A French merchant had offered a thousand bottles of champagne after the photographing of the far side of the Moon. A hundred were opened.

October 10 and 14

The first launch took place on October 10, 1960. During the third-stage flight, at about the three hundred ninth second, a gyroscope sent a false signal. The rocket veered by more than seven degrees. The engine was cut off. Everything fell back and burned up over eastern Siberia. Voskresensky had been right.

The second launch took place on October 14. A liquid-oxygen leak had frozen a kerosene valve. The third stage did not ignite.

In both cases the probe was not to blame: it was the rocket that had failed. Chertok concludes in one sentence: “The first window to Mars closed. We moved on to Venus.” When they left the range, on October 18, Korolev and his people were somber.

Six days later, at the same range, Yangel’s missile exploded.

Venus, and a Medal

The Venus window opened in February 1961. On the 4th, the fourth stage refused to ignite. The reason was soon understood: an electrical unit, placed in a vacuum, had stopped working. In less than twenty-four hours a repair was improvised, by enclosing it in a sealed casing.

On February 12, 1961, at 7:04 a.m., all four stages worked for the first time. A Soviet probe was on its way to another planet. The press would call it Venera 1. At breakfast, Korolev was in an excellent mood. The probe carried a pennant protected against heat, and he joked: only the pennant would reach the surface of Venus, and the wrath of Zeus would fall on those who had signed the protocol. “Boris and I signed it. Let us drink again so that Zeus forgives us!”

The probe fell silent one million nine hundred thousand kilometers from the Earth. A design flaw had switched off its receivers along with everything else. Korolev reprimanded Chertok severely for having given way to the designers on that point. A rule was drawn from it: never switch off the receivers again.

The affair had an epilogue. The failed probe of February 4 had not fallen into the ocean, as had been thought, but in Siberia. A boy, bathing in a river, cut his foot on a metal sphere. His father opened it, found a medal inside, and took it to the police. The KGB handed it to Keldysh.

In the summer of 1963, Korolev, smiling like the cat that ate the canary, unwrapped a bundle of crumpled paper in front of Chertok and held out the blackened medal: “I received a gift from the Academy, and I decided it was yours by right.”

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. II, Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA SP-2006-4110, ch. 31 (“Onward to Mars… and Venus”: schedule of February 28, 1960, draft decree of April 1960 and Korolev’s answer to his deputies, 8K78 launcher, preparation of the 1M probes, remarks by K. Rudnev and L. Voskresensky, instruments removed, launches of October 10 and 14, 1960, launches of February 1961 to Venus, story of the medal) and ch. 32 (departure of October 18, 1960).

Chapter 28 · 1959 – 1963 The Ship for Mars

On the evening of April 30, 1960, in Sergei Korolev’s design bureau, an engineer named Gleb Maksimov presented his plans: a large ship able to carry three men around the planet Mars and bring them back. When he had finished, another engineer unveiled his own work in turn. It was Konstantin Feoktistov, the designer of the Vostok. With his group he had been working separately, in secret, to surprise his chief. His ships did not fly around Mars. They landed there. Korolev, it is said, was delighted to see that Mars aroused such passion.

An Old Goal

The historian Asif Siddiqi, who has studied those years closely, gives this part of his book a two-word title: “To Mars.” Since Tsiolkovsky, he writes, Mars had been for Soviet space scientists the most important goal of all. President Kennedy’s speech of May 1961, which set the United States on course for the Moon, changed nothing in this at first.

He adds that it was, to a great extent, Korolev’s personal concern. He looks for its source in his youth, spent reading Tsiolkovsky. Thirty years earlier, in a Moscow cellar, Fridrikh Tsander had greeted his comrades with a cry: “Onward to Mars!” Korolev was one of those who heard it. He was now in a position to answer it.

Maksimov’s Ship

The first studies began in 1959. Korolev entrusted them to the group of Maksimov, a veteran of Tikhonravov’s team, who was already designing the automatic probes to the Moon and the planets.

The project took a name: TMK, the Russian initials for “heavy interplanetary ship.” It meant to be realistic. Its declared aim was to get there quickly, with the means at hand.

A single giant rocket placed seventy-five tons in orbit around the Earth: an acceleration stage and a fifteen-ton ship. Three men were on board. Since the rocket could not be relied upon, a cautious variant was provided: launch the ship empty, and bring its crew up to it in a Vostok-type craft.

After checkout in orbit, the stage fired and sent the ship toward Mars. There was no landing. The TMK passed by the planet, observed it, and used its gravity to bend its course and return toward the Earth. On arrival, a capsule separated with the three men and came down by parachute in the Soviet Union.

The journey lasted two to three years.

Twenty Meters for Three Years

On paper, the TMK was a cylinder about twenty meters long and four meters in diameter. It had three compartments. The largest, seventy cubic meters, was reserved for biological research. The other two, of twenty-five cubic meters each, housed the instruments and the crew.

Every detail answered a danger that was only beginning to be measured. Against solar flares, the instrument compartment contained a shielded shelter, where the men would take refuge during periods of high activity. Against prolonged weightlessness, the ship would spin on its axis for almost the whole trip, to create artificial gravity. For power, large solar panels. For food, a “chlorella reactor”: a culture of microscopic algae.

The draft plan of this TMK-1 was completed on October 12, 1961. That was six months to the day after Gagarin’s flight.

Feoktistov’s Daisy

Feoktistov’s project was of another size. Korolev gave him the green light.

This time two giant rockets were needed, hence one hundred fifty tons assembled in orbit. The ship had the shape of a daisy. At its heart, a small nuclear reactor. Around it, like petals, the radiators that carried off its heat. The cabin was at one end of the stem.

That reactor did not feed an ordinary engine. It supplied current to electric engines, whose thrust was tiny: seven and a half kilograms. But they pushed without stopping, for months. The ship slowly gathered speed, until it tore itself free of Earth orbit.

On reaching Mars, it went into orbit around the planet. A vehicle separated from it and descended to the surface. It was made of five platforms: one for the cabin and a drill, one for a reconnaissance glider, two for the return rockets, one for the nuclear power source. For a year this assembly moved across the surface of Mars and did science, transmitting its results to the ship left in orbit. Then part of it took off again, rejoined the ship, and they came home with the same electric engines.

The crew numbered ten. The expedition lasted three years.

Engineering Problems

Feoktistov has said how Korolev looked on this project. He knew perfectly well that the landing was not for tomorrow. But the idea of building such a ship, in his words, “excited him terribly.” By all accounts, Siddiqi adds, he saw in these seemingly fantastic proposals engineering problems rather than dreams. He followed the work of both groups closely.

The bureau devoted real resources to it. Since 1958, with a physics institute at Obninsk, it had been studying nuclear-powered electric engines. The decree of June 1960 approved that work. One of the bureau’s ballistics experts, Mikhail Floriansky, recounted that he had shown Korolev that with such engines the mass to be launched could be brought down to one hundred twenty-five tons. The ship, he said, had the shape of a rifle bullet, with a hatch at the tip.

Breathing for Three Years

The hardest question was not the engines. It was life. No reserve of air, water and food could suffice for a three-year journey: it would weigh too much.

In 1962 Korolev created a department for this and put Ilya Lavrov in charge. Its mission: a closed-cycle life support system. Lavrov set chemistry aside and chose biology. He wanted to reproduce, on a very small scale, the cycle of life on Earth.

Water would be recovered from the moisture the men gave off in breathing, then purified. The rest would come from processing wastes. Oxygen would be regenerated from carbon dioxide by the algae, which would also serve to treat those wastes. The basic food would be freeze-dried. Vegetables would grow on board, in soilless greenhouses, and would save twenty to fifty percent of the mass of provisions. To light them, large external reflectors would gather sunlight.

The Notes of September 1962

There is a document in Korolev’s own hand. These are notes he jotted down in September 1962, and which were made public only nearly twenty years later. In them he reviews artificial gravity, life support systems, biological research.

He also speaks of a large station in orbit around the Earth, close to the Mars ship in its construction. And he writes this sentence: “Perhaps the heavy interplanetary station will be, in a first phase, the heavy orbital station, which will make it possible to debug all the systems reliably in the vicinity of the Earth, for example for one year.”

Before leaving for years, then, the ship would be tried out near the Earth.

Seventy-Five Tons

In April 1963, Bushuyev presented a report that took stock. Two solutions remained in contention. The first used ordinary chemical engines: a ship of six hundred eighty tons was then needed, assembled in orbit after ten launches. The second fitted into a single launch of seventy-five tons, thanks to electric engines. A complex of one thousand six hundred thirty tons, requiring twenty to twenty-five launches, was even studied.

The timetable set in the early 1960s was as follows: a piloted flight around Mars between 1968 and 1970, a landing in the early 1970s.

These figures explain a decision that would be hard to understand without them. The giant rocket Korolev was calling for at the same time was to carry seventy-five tons into orbit. Siddiqi thinks it was Maksimov’s studies that fixed that number. Officially, this rocket was a “universal launcher,” good for all sorts of military uses that were left unspecified. In reality, he writes, its primary payload was a piloted Mars ship.

He sums up Korolev’s thinking this way. The Moon was a worthy goal, but it was not the end. It was an important step toward the ultimate goal: landing cosmonauts on the surface of Mars. The road was to be traveled step by step. First stations around the Earth, serving as bases. Then interplanetary ships. This plan, Siddiqi notes, was remarkably faithful to the ideas Tsiolkovsky had formulated half a century earlier.

All this work remained secret until the late 1980s.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 8 (“To Mars”: G. Maksimov’s studies from 1959, description of the TMK, draft plan of October 12, 1961, evening of April 30, 1960, and K. Feoktistov’s variant, electric engines, M. Floriansky’s testimony, K. Bushuyev’s report of April 1963, I. Lavrov’s department and the closed-cycle system, envisaged timetable, K. Feoktistov’s remarks about Korolev, handwritten notes of September 1962, the author’s judgment on the N1’s payload).

Chapter 29 · 1960 – 1962 “We’ll Do Without You!”

In February 1962, in the Kremlin, a commission had been sitting for days to settle one question: what would the biggest rocket ever designed in the Soviet Union be filled with? Sergei Korolev wanted liquid oxygen and kerosene. Valentin Glushko wanted propellants that keep, toxic and powerful. Korolev spoke of “powder kegs.” Glushko shot back: “I see, what you would like is a steam engine! You want to fly in space and keep your hands clean?” He invoked the interests of the state. Korolev, shouting by now, cut him off: “Listen, if you don’t want to, don’t do it! We’ll do without you!” A dead silence fell. The two men’s deputies quietly left the room.

The “Carrier” Rocket

The rocket in question bore the letter N. The decree of June 1960 had provided for two, a medium one and a big one. In early 1962, Korolev’s engineers dropped the medium one. The big one took its name: N1. It would have to place seventy-five tons in orbit around the Earth. Gagarin’s rocket placed fewer than six.

The historian Asif Siddiqi specifies what that mass was for: military missions, and a piloted expedition to Mars, which was then one of the bureau’s favorite plans for the future.

Such a vehicle was designed in tandem, the stages one on top of the other, and no longer as a “packet.” It needed engines of a power unknown until then, and many of them. The country’s most experienced engine designer was named Glushko.

Two Men, Two Liquids

The quarrel was over a technical question, and it was serious on both sides.

Glushko had good reasons. The big oxygen engine he had attempted for the R-3, ten years earlier, had never worked: it vibrated until it destroyed itself. Storable propellants burned without trouble, and the army was asking for them. Above all, he had just promised another designer, Chelomey, one-hundred-fifty-ton engines of that type. Making others, of the same size, with oxygen, seemed to him double work.

Korolev had his. These substances were poisons, and they ignited on mere contact with each other. He had seen what that led to: on October 24, 1960, one hundred twenty-six dead around Yangel’s missile. On a giant rocket, meant to carry men, he did not want them.

He even dreamed of going further. On April 8, 1960, he had asked by letter that the country equip itself with a liquid-hydrogen industry, the most energetic fuel there is. Glushko had written in 1935 that liquid hydrogen would never be of any practical use. Industry did not follow. Siddiqi speaks of a strategic mistake: the Americans would use it to go to the Moon.

The Escalation

In January 1961, at Tyuratam, Glushko announced that his engines would deliver one hundred tons of thrust, and not one hundred fifty as agreed. More of them would therefore be needed. Korolev protested.

In July 1961, two weeks before Titov’s flight, he went in person to Glushko’s, at Khimki, to convince him. The conversation began calmly. It quickly turned accusatory. Glushko called his ideas about the N1 “dilettantism” and reminded him of the failure of the R-3 engine. Korolev reminded him of the R-16 catastrophe. They parted without settling anything.

In December 1961, Glushko sent him an official letter: the N1 had to be redesigned for his propellants. A Soviet historian saw in it “a sort of ultimatum.” Glushko claimed to have authority from on high to demand it.

The government then created a commission, chaired by Keldysh. Glushko sensed that it leaned toward Korolev. For the first time, he quarreled openly with Keldysh himself.

Then came the Kremlin sessions, from February 10 to 21, 1962. Siddiqi measures what was at stake. Korolev needed Glushko far more than Glushko needed him. Building the rocket on which the whole future depended without the country’s best engine designer was a considerable risk. Glushko could do without the N1: he had Chelomey.

The commission recommended oxygen and kerosene.

Kuznetsov

Korolev had only one recourse left: Nikolai Kuznetsov, the aircraft-engine designer from Kuibyshev whom he had brought into the game in 1959. Kuznetsov had little experience of rocket engines. Of the four engine designers consulted at the outset, Glushko and he were the only ones to have accepted the first two stages. With Glushko gone, there was no choice left.

Korolev measured the leap. Going from a rocket with a six-ton payload to one of seventy-five was an enormous risk. He proposed first building a more modest missile, which would serve to try out the new engines.

Pitsunda

At the end of February 1962, Khrushchev gathered the marshals, the ministers and the designers at Pitsunda, on the Black Sea. The purpose was to decide on the weapons and rockets of the coming years.

On the first day, Chelomey spoke. He was brilliant, at ease. He obtained his big rocket, the UR-500, with Glushko’s engines.

Korolev spoke only the next day. Khrushchev’s son, who was present as one of Chelomey’s engineers, described the scene. Korolev expressed himself in short, choppy sentences. He showed his posters of the N1. He stressed the delays and the lack of money. He slipped in, as if in passing, that the payload had to be raised from forty to seventy-five tons: forty were not enough for the Moon and the planets. Then he announced that all the engines would be made by a newcomer, Kuznetsov.

Khrushchev was startled. Why not Glushko? Korolev answered bluntly: Glushko had refused, and was in any case taken up with orders from Yangel and Chelomey.

Then, in front of the head of state, the minister of defense and the commanders of all the services, Korolev and Glushko began to quarrel violently. Khrushchev, who had remained silent, cut them off. He charged Ustinov with examining Korolev’s proposals.

It must be pointed out that this account is not the only one. The biographer Yaroslav Golovanov gives an entirely different one, in which it was Khrushchev himself who proposed going to seventy-five tons, with a battle station in mind. Siddiqi reports both without being able to decide.

The small test missile was set aside. Yangel, who spoke after Korolev, proposed a heavy launcher in his turn. The decree that followed, on April 16, 1962, approved Yangel’s projects and Chelomey’s. For the N1, it authorized only a draft plan, “with economic justification.” Korolev left empty-handed.

The Draft Plan

He signed it on May 16, 1962. The file submitted to the experts ran to twenty-nine volumes. The N1 appeared in it with its three stages. An automatic system watched over the engines: if one of them faltered, it shut it down, and shut down the one opposite as well, to keep the balance.

Korolev had taken care to involve a very large number of organizations in the project. It was, it has been said, to reduce the number of critics.

In July 1962, an expert commission chaired by Keldysh examined the whole. Glushko defended his propellants there one last time. It ruled for Korolev. Glushko then refused to make the engines. Barmin, Ryazansky and General Mrykin tried to reconcile them. They failed.

The decree approving the N1 was issued in September 1962. It did not say what it would be used for. Korolev presented it to the army as a carrier of military craft. That was his old method: a rocket first, under the flag of defense. The rest would follow.

The End of a Team

Siddiqi draws up the balance. The Soviet space program was now split into two camps. Korolev and Glushko would never work together again.

They had known each other since the early 1930s. They had shared the institute, arrest, the Kazan sharashka, Germany, the R-7, Sputnik, Gagarin. The R-7’s engines were Glushko’s.

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs: “They made an excellent team. Unfortunately, they parted… I did everything to reconcile them. In vain.”

At his side, Korolev kept his first deputy. Vasily Mishin was forty-five. He had been with him since 1946, and Korolev was preparing him to succeed him. He was even more attached to liquid oxygen than Korolev was, and less of a diplomat. Mishin recounted that after a disagreement they could go weeks without speaking to each other. But they settled their differences without witnesses.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 8 (“Looking to the Future”: letter of April 8, 1960, on hydrogen, meeting of January 1961, visit of July 1961 to Khimki, letter of December 1961, propellant commission and sessions of February 10 to 21, 1962, with the words exchanged, increase to 75 tons, Pitsunda meeting according to Sergei Khrushchev and the divergent version of Ya. Golovanov, decree of April 16, 1962, draft plan of May 16, 1962, expert commission of July 1962, portrait of V. Mishin, N. Khrushchev’s judgment).

Chapter 30 · October 1962 The Mars Rocket and the Bomb

On October 27, 1962, at Tyuratam, Boris Chertok went to the building where the rockets were assembled. He had been preparing three Mars probes there for twelve days. He found the building guarded by armed soldiers equipped with gas masks. Inside, the combat missile that had been sleeping under its tarpaulin along the wall had been uncovered. Soldiers surrounded it. There was no one left beside the third Mars rocket. The colonel in command of launches, Anatoly Kirillov, came up to him, his face funereal. They had been on familiar terms. That day, the colonel addressed him formally.

“Korolev Works for TASS”

The army paid for Korolev’s rockets, and it reminded him of it. Chertok reported the saying that went around among the military: “Yangel works for us. Korolev works for TASS,” the news agency.

Korolev knew it. One day, returning from the Ministry of Defense, he said to Bushuyev and Chertok: “They will not admit that their time has passed. There are capable young officers there, but their way is barred.”

In January 1961 he had come back from a meeting with Frol Kozlov, the Party secretary in charge of defense. He brought back this sentence: “Yangel has first priority. Chelomey is in reserve. And you are last in line.”

Three Rockets for Mars

The Mars window reopened in the autumn of 1962. Korolev had planned three launches: October 24, November 1 and November 4. The first two probes were to pass close to the planet and photograph it. The third carried a vehicle that was to descend to the surface.

These probes belonged to a new family. In early 1961, while the launches to Venus were being prepared, Korolev and Keldysh had convened a council at the range. Korolev proposed there that each probe should no longer be built as a one-off. There would be a series. A common compartment would serve for Mars as for Venus. To it would be attached, according to the mission, a camera unit or a descent vehicle. Six were ordered.

At the end of the summer of 1962, the first three left for Venus. Three times the fourth stage failed. The American probe Mariner 2, launched on August 27, would be the first to fly past another planet.

Voskresensky drew his conclusion. He told Chertok: “I recommended to Sergei that he give up Mars this year. We are up to our necks in trouble. But he doesn’t listen to me. We did not conquer the goddess of Love. I do not believe we will do better with the god of War.”

Chertok replied: “Our mission is to open the way.”

October 24

Chertok left for Tyuratam on October 15. Korolev stayed in Moscow. The three rockets and the three probes were being prepared at the same time, with two teams relieving each other every twelve hours. Chertok directed the work on the probes, Voskresensky on the rockets. Keldysh followed the instruments.

On October 22, President Kennedy announced to the world that Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba.

On the morning of the 24th, the first Mars rocket left. The first three stages worked. The fourth ignited, and its pump exploded after seventeen seconds. The debris remained in orbit around the Earth. Chertok notes that, on that day, American defenses could have taken it for something else.

On the 25th, the second rocket was on the pad. Chertok wrote: “The world was on the brink of thermonuclear war, and we were calmly preparing a launch to Mars, in the hope of satisfying humanity’s age-old curiosity: is there life on Mars?”

October 27

Colonel Kirillov explained. He had received the order to open the sealed envelope provided for this case. He was to prepare the combat missile, mount its nuclear warhead, of three megatons, roll it out, fuel it, aim it, and wait. That had already been done at another pad. Here, the teams were being taken off Mars. And the Mars rocket was going to be removed from its pad, to make room.

Moscow could no longer be reached.

Chertok asked him whether he would have the courage to give the order to fire. Kirillov answered that he was a soldier. And he added that at that very moment, on the other side, an officer like himself, “some Jones or other,” was standing at his periscope waiting for the order to fire on Moscow, or on this range.

In the small house that would later be called “Gagarin’s cottage,” Chertok found Voskresensky, Keldysh and two others playing cards. There was a watermelon and cognac. Voskresensky raised his glass to the Secretary-General of the United Nations: “To the health of U Thant! And God grant that this is not our last glass!” Keldysh said: “I have a feeling that everything will work out.”

Less Than a Minute

Chertok went to Korolev’s cottage. Through a roundabout line, he managed to get Moscow. The secretary, Antonina Alekseyevna, answered. Then he heard Korolev.

The voice was calm. “Boris! I know about everything. Don’t do anything foolish. We are working and eliminating the defects. Give everyone my regards. Understood?”

The conversation lasted less than a minute.

That evening, Kirillov jumped out of his car and embraced Chertok: “All clear!” The Mars rockets went back to their place.

Chertok, opening the next chapter of his memoirs, tried to say what made his chief singular. Korolev, he writes, knew how to live in two worlds almost at the same time. He was demanding to the point of cruelty when a combat missile was concerned. And he became an affable dreamer again as soon as he found an hour for half-fantastic projects of interplanetary ships.

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 4 (“The Cuban Missile Crisis… and Mars”: remarks by the military and by Korolev, preparation of the three probes, launch of October 24, 1962, alert of October 27, dialogue with Colonel A. Kirillov, evening at the cottage, telephone call to Korolev, end of the alert) and ch. 5 (portrait); vol. II, Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA SP-2006-4110, ch. 31 (meeting with F. Kozlov, 2MV series, launches to Venus in 1962, L. Voskresensky’s remarks).

Chapter 31 · 1962 – 1963 Mars 1

On November 1, 1962, at 7:14 p.m., a four-stage rocket left Tyuratam. Sergei Korolev had arrived from Moscow just before the launch. He was in an excellent mood. This time everything worked. The fourth stage ignited in orbit, burned for the required time, and released a probe of 893 kilograms. It moved away from the Earth. The next day Pravda announced its name: Mars 1. It was the first human-made craft actually on its way to the Red Planet.

A Flash in the Sky

The day had been strange. At 2:15 p.m., five hours before the launch, the sky over Tyuratam lit up. The army had just exploded a nuclear charge at an altitude of sixty kilometers, as part of a test. The radio stayed silent for more than an hour.

The Cuban crisis had been over for four days. At the range, someone ventured a joke about the alert. Korolev snubbed him: “Instead of making bad jokes, you would do better to prepare the next launch. This was a flyby. It would be far better to send a descent module to Mars!”

The next launch took place on November 4. The third probe carried the vehicle that was to descend to the planet. The fourth-stage engine shut down after thirty-three seconds. It remained in Earth orbit.

Out of three attempts, a single probe was on its way. Since 1960, that made one in five.

A Crumb of Rosin

Mars 1 carried what the probes of 1960 had not been able to keep. Its main mission was to photograph Mars while passing close to it. It was also to find out whether the planet has a magnetic field. The journey was to last a little over seven months.

As early as November 5, at the deep-space communications center at Yevpatoriya, in Crimea, Keldysh and Chertok understood that there would be no photographs. The probe was not holding its orientation. It had lost all its nitrogen, the gas that feeds the small nozzles used to turn it. A valve had stayed open.

Korolev, back in Moscow, wanted to know why. He had the whole manufacturing process examined. He even brought in criminal investigators. The cause was found: a crumb of rosin, the resin used in soldering, had lodged under the valve seat and prevented it from closing.

A speck of dust was enough to deprive humanity of the first close-up image of another planet.

One Hundred Six Million Kilometers

The probe flew on all the same. It could no longer orient itself, but it talked. For one hundred forty days, it was listened to.

On March 21, 1963, its last signal was received. It was then one hundred six million kilometers from the Earth. No radio link had ever been held at such a distance.

It passed silently by Mars in June 1963.

Pravda of December 15, 1962, had published a description of the craft. It said nothing, of course, of the five others.

Opening the Way

The engineers drew a design lesson from this failure. The next series would duplicate the orientation nozzles. It would first be tried in space under a neutral name: Zond, “probe.”

Korolev went on. In 1964, at the next window, he would again launch a probe toward Mars.

Chertok said, of those years, that no one at the top of the state ordered these launches to the planets. The proposals came from below. They came, for the most part, from a man who was at the same time directing the construction of two military missiles, a spy satellite, a piloted spacecraft and a giant rocket.

In February 1962, at the height of the engine quarrel, that man had demanded seventy-five tons in orbit. In the autumn, in the middle of the missile crisis, he was launching three probes toward Mars. Voskresensky had said it in his own way: he did not listen.

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. II, Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA SP-2006-4110, ch. 31 (launches of October 24, November 1 and 4, 1962, nuclear test of November 1, orientation failure of Mars 1 and investigation, duration of communications and distance reached, 3MV series and Zond probes); vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 4 (launch of Mars 1, mass, objectives, Korolev’s remarks). Dates of last contact and flyby: caption in the NASA edition and NASA’s NSSDCA catalog.

Chapter 32 · 1961 – 1963 Each Flight Farther Than the Last

On June 14, 1963, at Tyuratam, the cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky was strapped into his capsule at the top of the rocket. Malfunctions followed one another: a transmitter, then a hatch, then a gyroscope in the third stage. Sergei Korolev, ill for weeks, pale, his voice hoarse, shouted: “Where the devil is Kuznetsov?” Viktor Kuznetsov was the designer of the gyroscopes. The two men quarreled in front of all their colleagues. The repair took six hours. Bykovsky waited in his ball. At the last instant, a cable appeared not to have disconnected. Korolev, Voskresensky and Colonel Kirillov had a few seconds to decide. They launched.

Twenty-Four Hours

After Gagarin, Korolev set himself a rule, which the historian Asif Siddiqi calls his unwritten law: each flight had to mark a clear advance on the previous one.

In May 1961 he took a few days’ rest at Sochi, on the Black Sea, with his wife, the cosmonauts and the doctors. The second flight was discussed there. The doctors, General Kamanin and the cosmonauts themselves, Gagarin included, asked for three orbits. Korolev demanded seventeen: a full day. He prevailed.

In mid-July, Khrushchev asked him to have the flight take place before August 10. On August 13, construction of the Berlin Wall would begin.

German Titov left on August 6, 1961. He made his seventeen orbits. He was the first man to suffer from space sickness. Korolev was greatly troubled by it.

“They Do Nothing for Six Months”

On June 17, 1961, nearly seven thousand people were decorated for Gagarin’s flight. The press published only seven names, those of leaders. Korolev received the star of Hero of Socialist Labor for the second time, on June 20, in the Kremlin, at a secret ceremony.

His bureau then numbered about fifteen thousand people. He was no freer for it. In the autumn the army demanded that the spy satellite come before everything else. The Vostoks waited.

On February 20, 1962, the American John Glenn circled the Earth three times. Three days earlier, Ustinov had telephoned Korolev: he needed a flight in mid-March. It was impossible. Kamanin noted in his diary: “That is the style of our leaders: they do nothing for six months, then they demand a complex mission in ten days.”

Two Ships

Korolev wanted to launch three ships at once. He was granted two. He also wanted three-day flights. The doctors, Kamanin, Keldysh and the chairman of the commission were opposed. Siddiqi writes that he rolled over them like a bulldozer.

On August 11, 1962, Andrian Nikolayev took off. During the ascent Korolev, very nervous, gripped the red telephone. The next day, Pavel Popovich joined him. The accuracy of the second launch was such that the two ships passed about five kilometers from each other. They had no means of maneuvering. In the West, people believed there had been a rendezvous in space. Mishin would say: “We did not disabuse them of their illusions.”

The two men stayed up there four days and three. When Khrushchev had it requested that Popovich’s flight also be extended, Korolev answered as a diplomat: he saw no great advantage in it, but he would not vote against.

The Hospital

His health had been poor for years. His schedule made it worse: eighteen-hour days, for weeks on end. Siddiqi describes him as an incurable workaholic, who wanted to check everything himself.

Shortly after the double flight, he was seized with violent pains. It was an intestinal hemorrhage. He stayed a long time in the hospital, and left it only on September 15, 1962. He was sent to rest at Sochi. He worked there by telephone.

A month later, he was in Moscow during the Cuban crisis, and at Tyuratam for Mars 1.

Two Valentinas

The idea of sending a woman into space was not his. It came from Kamanin, in the summer of 1961. Korolev, like Keldysh and the minister of defense, was at first opposed. The Central Committee decided on March 21, 1963.

Several young women had trained. One had to be chosen. Keldysh and Dr. Yazdovsky preferred Valentina Ponomareva. Korolev, Kamanin and the head of the training center chose Valentina Tereshkova.

Korolev one day asked Ponomareva why she looked sad. She answered: “I am not sad. I am serious, as always.”

On May 10, 1963, at a session of the commission, Korolev and Glushko found themselves in the same room, at the height of their quarrel. Korolev complained there about a plant that had delivered twenty-eight defective parts to him.

June 1963

When he arrived at Tyuratam for the double flight, he had been running a fever for weeks. The doctors had diagnosed an inflammation of the lungs. He directed the work all the same.

Bykovsky left on June 14, after the six hours of malfunctions. Two days later, on June 16, 1963, at 12:29 p.m., Valentina Tereshkova lifted off in her turn. She was the first woman in space.

Bykovsky stayed nearly five days in orbit. It was a record for a solo flight.

Tereshkova’s flight went less well: Dr. Yazdovsky’s report on her condition was severe. Korolev saw her alone on July 11. He came out displeased. Kamanin recorded in his diary the remark he then made, in crude terms: he wanted nothing more to do with women’s flights. No Soviet woman would return to space before 1982.

Two Unknowns at a Wedding

On November 3, 1963, Nikolayev married Tereshkova in Moscow, at the Government Reception House. Khrushchev was there. Among the guests, far from him, stood two men no one introduced: Korolev and Glushko.

A week later, the New York Times published their two names, as those of the men who might well be the mysterious “Chief Designer.” Moscow confirmed nothing. Until April 1961, American intelligence had believed that the program was directed by Academician Sedov’s commission.

The biographer Yaroslav Golovanov reported what Korolev said about this anonymity. He rarely spoke of it. He said only that it allowed him to live more quietly. He felt, according to Golovanov, a kind of weariness and secret joy on reading that Sedov was being taken for him.

Secrecy had become his way of life. He kept no diary. He kept no documents at home. He had made his wife swear to silence. All he told her after Gagarin’s flight was that the rocket had three stages. One day, in the kitchen, Nina Ivanovna uttered the word “Tyuratam.” He questioned her at length to find out where she had heard it.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 7 (stay at Sochi, debate on the length of the second flight, G. Titov’s flight, decorations of June 1961), ch. 9 (“Space Politics”: Korolev’s rule, N. Kamanin’s diary, flights of Vostok 3 and 4, hospitalization of 1962, choice of the first woman cosmonaut, flights of Vostok 5 and 6, meeting of July 11, 1963, wedding of November 3, 1963) and ch. 10 (Ya. Golovanov’s remarks on anonymity and secrecy). The date of the next spaceflight by a woman (1982) is a fact of general history.

Chapter 33 · 1958 – 1964 The Rivals

At the end of July 1961, three months after Gagarin’s flight, Sergei Korolev met in secret with another chief designer, Grigory Kisunko, who was developing missile defense. Both were under attack from the same rival. Korolev said to him: “This is the second time they have tried to strike me out of life.” They thought of writing together to the Central Committee. They gave it up.

The Decree of May 13

A month and a day after the triumph of April 12, the government issued a decree whose title gives its meaning: “On the Revision of Plans for Space Objects Toward Defense Objectives.” It overturned the big decree of June 1960. Funds passed from Korolev’s bureau to another. The goals were refocused on the military.

The historian Asif Siddiqi sees two causes. Defense, which financed everything, wanted weapons. And the Party secretary in charge of these matters, Frol Kozlov, did not like Korolev. He had already sided against him more than once.

The beneficiary was named Vladimir Chelomey.

Chelomey

He was a brilliant scientist, who had made his career in naval cruise missiles. He was ambitious and he spoke well. In 1958 a young engineer had joined his bureau: Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the head of state.

His projects were immense. He proposed a “rocket plane” and a “cosmoplane,” a vehicle intended for interplanetary travel. The ultimate goal of the cosmoplane was a piloted expedition to Mars, with return to Earth. Mars, then, was not Korolev’s dream alone.

Korolev had nothing but scorn for these plans. He called them a “circus.” In 1959 he said to some of Chelomey’s deputies: “Why would we need such a system today? All of that is fantasy. In space, precise goals must be solved today, for example photographing the far side of the Moon.” The man who had been called a science fiction writer in 1958 was now reproaching another for dreaming.

Chelomey had on his side Khrushchev, the head of the defense department of the Central Committee, and the minister of aviation. He had against him Ustinov, who detested him. In October 1960 he absorbed Myasishchev’s bureau and large plant in Moscow. By the end of 1962 his organization was bigger than Korolev’s. He was building a heavy rocket, the UR-500, with the engines Glushko had proposed for the N1. It would be known as the Proton.

Between the two men, however, personal relations remained courteous. On January 20, 1963, Chelomey came to see Korolev at Kaliningrad. They reached an understanding: Korolev would supply him with R-7 rockets to launch his first satellites. With Glushko, it was not the same.

Yangel

The other rival was at Dnepropetrovsk. Mikhail Yangel, the former deputy who had become director and then left for Ukraine, had won the game Korolev had refused to play. His storable-propellant missiles were the ones the army wanted. Since the quarrel of 1958, it was he, and not Korolev, whom Khrushchev regarded as the country’s foremost missile designer.

The missile Korolev set against him, the liquid-oxygen R-9, was giving trouble. Testing had begun three days before Gagarin’s flight, and it was going badly. Each failure weakened the bureau’s position with the military and the Party.

How Decisions Were Made

Siddiqi has described the mechanism. In the Soviet Union, it was not the leaders who conceived space projects. It was the chief designers who pushed them, each his own. The leaders then decided, according to their friendships.

Khrushchev supported both Chelomey and Korolev. Ustinov supported Korolev and Glushko, and fought Chelomey. Kozlov had an aversion to Korolev. The result was that competing projects were approved side by side.

Siddiqi’s thesis goes further. Seen from the West, the Soviet space program looked like a priority of the state, run with a firm hand. It was the opposite. The feats were proposed by the designers, approved reluctantly, then exploited by propaganda.

The Artillerymen

Korolev had another adversary, less visible: the missile command. These were artillerymen, often veterans of Germany in 1945. Spy satellites interested them. Men in space did not.

The Air Force, for its part, wanted piloted flight: the cosmonauts were its pilots. Korolev supported it. On March 21, 1963, he proposed in writing that the Vostok flights be transferred to it. He lost. At the end of 1964 a space directorate was indeed created, but within the Missile Forces. “The artillerymen have won again”: the remark is reported by Siddiqi.

The military chiefs, Minister Malinovsky foremost among them, refused to finance what they called his idle dreams.

On October 26, 1963, an Institute of Biomedical Problems was at last created to study human life in space. It was the answer, four years late, to the letter of May 1959.

“No Money”

In the early 1960s the bulk of his bureau’s work remained military: the R-9, two solid-propellant missiles, a “global” missile. To these were added the spy satellite, a communications satellite, scientific satellites, the probes to the Moon, Venus and Mars, and the N1.

To replace the Vostok, his engineers had been designing since 1962 a new ship, with three compartments, able to dock with another. It would be called Soyuz, “Union.” During its design, Feoktistov one day proposed reducing the capsule’s diameter to two meters. Korolev marked out the corresponding area on the floor of his office. He made one of the authors of the proposal stay in it until the end of the meeting. Then he gave way all the same.

In early November 1963 he complained publicly of having “no money” for this ship. Eighty million rubles were needed. Thirty had been committed. The decree approving it was issued on December 3, 1963. Its first aim was to send men around the Moon.

Soyuz would fly after his death. Sixty years later, it is still flying.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 6 (V. Chelomey, his projects and his backers, Korolev’s remarks in 1959, absorption of Myasishchev’s bureau), ch. 7 (decision-making mechanism), ch. 8 (decree of May 13, 1961, meeting with G. Kisunko, UR-500, Soyuz spacecraft and the capsule anecdote) and ch. 9 (the author’s thesis, Air Force and Missile Forces, institute of October 26, 1963, the bureau’s workload, complaint of November 1963, decree of December 3, 1963, visit of January 20, 1963).

Chapter 34 · 1963 – 1964 From Mars to the Moon

In early June 1963, Nikita Khrushchev invited Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko to his dacha, with their wives. He wanted to reconcile them. He did not succeed. Korolev took advantage of the meeting to set out a project: landing cosmonauts on the Moon, by means of three N1 rockets. He gave the price: ten to twelve billion rubles. Khrushchev hesitated. He answered: “I’ll think about it.”

The Order of the Goals

Until then, the Moon had not been his principal objective. In July 1962, when he defended the N1 before the experts, he listed five uses. Defense came first. Then science. Then, in a single line, “research and mastery of human flight to the Moon and the nearest planets (Mars, Venus).”

Until mid-1963, writes the historian Asif Siddiqi, the piloted expedition to Mars was pursued with some vigor. Those were the years of Maksimov’s ship and Feoktistov’s “daisy.”

But in the United States, since Kennedy’s speech, the Apollo project had been advancing. The first Saturn rockets were flying. At the end of April 1963, before the council chaired by Keldysh, Korolev declared that the N1 would make a landing on the Moon possible.

Eight Projects

On July 27, 1963, he submitted a report on the use of the N1. He set out eight projects in it. The first was the piloted landing on the Moon: three N1s, two hundred tons assembled in orbit. Then came lunar vehicles.

The other five all looked toward Mars and Venus. There was the piloted flyby ship, which now weighed seventeen tons. Automatic craft to be put into orbit around the planets. Others to be landed on their surface. A family of planetary ships. And the landing of humans on Mars. For that, the report gives a figure: a complex of three hundred thirty to six hundred sixty tons in Earth orbit, that is, six to twelve N1s.

It also mentioned probes to Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and an “orbital space institute,” a station of seventy tons, then of two to three hundred.

On September 23, 1963, he signed his “Proposals for the Research and Mastery of the Moon.” The plan was divided into themes. The third, L3, was the landing, planned for 1967 or 1968. The same day, he signed an eleven-point plan for the years 1965 to 1975. Siddiqi comments on it in one sentence: he refused to give up his old dreams. Piloted missions to Mars and Venus and large stations still figured in it.

The Rocket at a Standstill

While he was writing plans, the N1 was not moving forward. Money was short everywhere.

At Kuibyshev, Kuznetsov had no test stands for big engines. In 1962, out of fifty-seven tests of his first engine, only eight had succeeded. Korolev sent him stern letters. At the same time he wrote to the regional officials: “The people in Kuibyshev are having a hard time. Help them!” He was pressing, says Siddiqi, every button.

In 1964 his bureau received twenty-three million rubles of the forty-five it had asked for. Kuznetsov received twenty out of fifty. At the start of the year, work on the N1 was at a complete halt.

It was in this penury that a decision was taken, as early as March 1963, that would weigh heavily. The N1’s first stage had twenty-four engines. Prudence would have it tested whole on the ground before flying. The test stand would cost too much and take too long. Korolev, Mishin and Kryukov gave it up. They would rely on the automatic system that shut down failing engines, and on sample testing: two engines in six would go on the stand.

Korolev also wanted the rocket to leave complete from the first launch, with all its real stages. He explained himself: “If the rocket lifts off with mock-ups in place of the second and third stages, how will I dare show my face on leaving the bunker?”

“Beat the Americans, but for Free”

On March 17, 1964, Korolev, Mishin, Kuznetsov and Pilyugin were received by Khrushchev. The notes Korolev prepared for the meeting have been preserved. They list what the N1 would make possible: craft for Defense, the landing on the Moon, piloted interplanetary missions. Khrushchev promised his support, verbally.

His son Sergei summed up his father’s attitude: he wanted to beat the Americans, but for free.

Two months later, nothing had changed. On May 25, 1964, Korolev drafted a letter to Brezhnev. The tone was no longer that of a report. “We have lost a great deal of precious time on the N1.” The funds for the launch pad had been cut from eleven million to seven, then to four. The situation was “absolutely intolerable.”

His rivals, meanwhile, were advancing their pawns. Yangel proposed his own heavy rocket for the Moon. Chelomey proposed sending a man around the Moon with his UR-500.

August 3, 1964

The decisions came during the summer. On June 19, a decree at last guaranteed funds for the N1. The first flights were put back from 1965 to 1966. Yangel’s rocket was stopped.

On August 3, 1964, the government issued the decree “On Work on the Study of the Moon and Cosmic Space.” It set a five-year plan, in which probes to Venus and Mars still figured. And it launched two piloted lunar projects.

The first, flying around the Moon before 1967, was entrusted to Chelomey. The project Korolev had been preparing for that mission with his Soyuz ships was buried.

The second was the landing. It was entrusted to Korolev. But it was no longer a matter of three N1s. There would be only one per expedition. The date was set: 1967 or 1968, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution.

Three years and three months had passed since Kennedy’s speech.

What It Changed

Siddiqi stresses the significance of this decree. Khrushchev cared more about money and missiles than about cosmonauts. It was Korolev’s persistence alone, he writes, his letters, his meetings, his conferences, that produced the decision of August 1964.

He ascribes two motives to him. The first was not to leave the Moon to the Americans. The second was to save the N1: a rocket without a mission, which no one finances, ends up as scrap.

But he also underlines what Korolev gave up. Measuring himself against Apollo was, he writes, a major and unprecedented change from the vision inherited from Tsiolkovsky: first stations around the Earth, then flights to the planets. The Moon, which had been only a step, became the goal.

Mars remained in his plans. But it was the Moon, from now on, that had a date.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 9 (“Space Politics”: five goals of July 1962, council of April 1963, meeting of June 1963 at the dacha, report of July 27, 1963, proposals and plan of September 23, 1963, N. Kuznetsov’s engines and funding, abandonment of the first-stage test stand and Korolev’s words, meeting of March 17, 1964, Sergei Khrushchev’s remark, draft letter of May 25, 1964, decrees of June 19 and August 3, 1964, the author’s analysis).

Chapter 35 · 1964 Three Men Without Spacesuits

On February 4, 1964, General Kamanin recorded in his diary a scene he had never witnessed before. Sergei Korolev had just received an order: to abandon the Vostok ships still to be built, and to fly three men together, before the end of the year, in a converted Vostok. The Americans were preparing a two-seat ship. They had to be beaten to it. Kamanin wrote: “It was the first time I had seen Korolev completely at a loss.” And he reports his words: it would be impossible to turn a single-seat ship into a three-seater in a few months.

Where Did the Order Come From?

The witnesses do not agree, and that must be said. Mishin maintained that Khrushchev telephoned Korolev to demand it. Khrushchev’s son holds the opposite: the idea came from Korolev, who wanted to stay first as long as possible. There are signs that Korolev was thinking about it as early as February 1963. A Russian historian thinks he accepted in exchange for a firmer commitment on the Moon.

The historian Asif Siddiqi does not settle the question of origin. But he judges the decision severely: one of the most harmful of those years. The space race, he writes, became a circus act. He does not exonerate Korolev, in whom he recognizes an “almost pathological” desire to be first.

How to Win Over One’s Engineers

The Vostok ball was made for one man in a spacesuit, on an ejection seat. To fit three men into it, the seat and the suits had to go. There would therefore be no means of saving the crew if the rocket failed in the first tens of seconds. And no recourse if the cabin lost its air.

The bureau’s engineers protested. Feoktistov recounted it: they said it would be dangerous, and that it would be better to wait for the Soyuz.

Korolev turned them around with one sentence. If a three-seat ship was built, he announced, one of the three seats would go to an engineer of the bureau. A few days later the first sketches were on his desk.

Fifty engineers worked on it for five months. A second braking engine was added, for safety, and solid-propellant rockets that fired just above the ground to soften the landing, since the men would no longer eject. The ship would be called Voskhod, “Sunrise.”

February 11

A week after the order, on February 11, 1964, Korolev was in a meeting in his office at Kaliningrad. He suffered a heart attack. He was hospitalized for several days.

The doctors prescribed a vacation. He put it off.

He had always wanted to see foreign countries. England attracted him. Brezhnev opposed any trip to the West. He was allowed Czechoslovakia. He left for it with his wife on June 27, 1964, for three weeks. It was the only time, between 1947 and his death, that he left the Soviet Union.

Even there he had no name. At the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Party, he was not allowed to sign the guest book. He said to his hosts: “When I come back to Czechoslovakia, you will know who I am.”

He was back in Moscow on July 16.

An Engineer on Board

Since 1962 he had wanted to fly what he called “passengers”: no longer only military pilots, but engineers and scientists. The Air Force did not want them.

He imposed his crew: a pilot, Vladimir Komarov; an engineer, Konstantin Feoktistov, the very man who had designed the ship; a physician, Boris Yegorov. Feoktistov’s health was mediocre: an ulcer, poor eyesight. The medical certificate was signed under pressure from Korolev.

Two candidates were set aside for reasons that had nothing to do with their worth. The scientist Georgy Katys, because his father had been shot in 1931. The cosmonaut Boris Volynov, because his mother was Jewish. Siddiqi writes that Korolev, a former Kolyma prisoner, felt the first refusal as an affront, and that he was “resolutely not anti-Semitic.” He could do nothing about it.

On September 18 he exploded: “The Air Force keeps putting spokes in the wheels! I will end up training my own cosmonauts!”

A Furnace

The summer and autumn were bad. To test the new landing, a capsule was needed. None was available. Korolev had the one in which Titov had flown taken out of his bureau’s museum. On September 6 it was dropped from a plane. The parachute hatch did not open. The historic capsule crashed and broke apart. The fault, Chertok would say, lay with the bureau.

On September 24 and 25, Khrushchev came to Tyuratam to review the country’s rockets. Chelomey took the opportunity to unveil a design for a giant rocket able to go straight to the Moon: a rival to the N1. Khrushchev asked that the two be compared. Korolev wrote to his wife: “I spent these days as if in a toxic furnace. In essence, all our work of recent years was put to an examination… Fortunately, everything went very well.”

Nina Ivanovna was to have an operation on October 1. In the middle of preparations for the launch, he made two round trips between Tyuratam and Moscow.

On October 11, the eve of the launch, he turned on the designer of the telemetry, Aleksei Bogomolov. Kamanin recorded the scene. Korolev called him a coward. “I want nothing more to do with you. Get out!” Kamanin adds: “By this fit of rage, Korolev knocked himself off his pedestal as a talented organizer. In four years of working together, it was the first time I had seen him in such a state. I felt sad for him. It took him fifteen minutes to calm down.”

October 12

The Voskhod lifted off on October 12, 1964, at 10:30 a.m. Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov had no spacesuits. Korolev, the witnesses say, was so tense that he was shaking.

The flight lasted one day. Feoktistov and Yegorov, who had had very little training, suffered from weightlessness: one thought he was upside down, the other bent forward. For six orbits, all radio contact was lost.

When the time came to order the return, Korolev asked the crew whether they were ready. Komarov answered: “The crew is ready. But we would like to extend the flight.” Korolev: “Understood. But we had no such agreement.” Komarov insisted: they had seen many interesting things.

Korolev is then said to have quoted Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Then: “We shall keep to the program all the same.” The line is famous. It is not certain. Siddiqi warns that the accounts differ: some give it incomplete, another attributes the request to Feoktistov, and Chertok, who was there, maintains that Korolev never quoted Shakespeare.

During the descent, the radio fell silent. They waited. At last a helicopter pilot reported that he could see the ship on the ground, and three men standing and waving to him. The room burst into applause.

Kamanin noted Korolev’s words: “Is it really over? Has the crew really come back from space without a scratch? I would never have believed anyone who told me that the Voskhod could be made out of the Vostok, and that three cosmonauts would fly in it into space…”

The Next Day

The three men were supposed to speak to Khrushchev by telephone. They were told not to wait.

By the morning of October 15, all was clear. Khrushchev was no longer in power. Leonid Brezhnev replaced him at the head of the Party, Aleksei Kosygin at the head of the government. The cosmonauts’ speeches were corrected.

Korolev lost the man who, since February 1956, had listened to him. Siddiqi warns against a legend: that of a Khrushchev manipulating a dreamer for his propaganda. He never, he writes, ordered a launch on a whim. His power lay in an unspoken threat: that of withdrawing his support.

Mishin, twenty-five years later, judged this flight without indulgence: it had contributed nothing; it was a simple waste of time, for prestige.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 9 (order of February 4, 1964, according to N. Kamanin’s diary, divergent versions of its origin, the author’s judgment) and ch. 10 (“There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth…”: design of the Voskhod, K. Feoktistov’s testimony, heart attack of February 11, 1964, trip to Czechoslovakia, choice of the crew, test of September 6, Khrushchev’s visit and Korolev’s letter, scene of October 11, flight of October 12, 1964, and radio exchanges, divergent versions of the Hamlet quotation, Korolev’s words after the landing, fall of Khrushchev, V. Mishin’s judgment).

Chapter 36 · March 1965 “Exit the Ship and Come Back In”

On March 18, 1965, it was cold at Tyuratam, and snowing. Sergei Korolev arrived at the launch pad tired and gaunt. He had had a lung infection during the preceding weeks. Before the two cosmonauts stepped into the elevator, he said to the younger, Aleksei Leonov: “I will not give you a lot of advice, Lyosha. Don’t try to be too clever. I ask only one thing of you: exit the ship, and come back in. A fair solar wind to you.” Leonov was thirty. In a few hours he was to do what no one had done: leave his ship, in mid-flight, and float in the void.

The Cavalry Charge

This was the second of the two feats decided on in 1964 to beat the Americans. The first was the three-man flight. This one was called Vykhod, “Exit.”

General Kamanin would have liked to begin with a test flight with a single man. Korolev refused: every piloted flight had to be a major advance. Kamanin noted it in his diary, in September 1964: “Korolev is in a hurry, as always. He prefers the cavalry charge to methodically prepared offensives.”

To go outside, an airlock was needed. An engineer proposed one that inflated: folded at launch, it extended like a concertina once in orbit. It was entrusted to the plant that made the spacesuits, headed by Gai Severin.

Korolev asked Severin to prove to him that this airlock was strong. Severin hung from it. Korolev smiled.

“The Evening Is Not Good”

On February 22, 1965, an example was launched without a crew, to try everything out. All the airlock operations went well. Then the ship exploded into one hundred eighty pieces. It would be understood that two ground stations had sent it the same command at the same instant, and that the two superimposed signals had been taken for a command to descend. Wrongly oriented, the ship fired its braking engine, and the destruct system did the rest.

Kamanin, who had left the room reassured, came back five hours after the launch and greeted Korolev with a “good evening.” Korolev answered: “No, Nikolai Petrovich, the evening is not good. It seems the ship has blown up…”

So neither the jettisoning of the airlock nor the return to Earth had been tried. The ground tests failed one after another. Severin would speak of a “really grave” situation. There was talk of postponing the flight. But the first American two-seat ship was due to leave at the end of March. On March 7, the reentry at least was checked, by fixing the airlock ring to a military satellite. It came back intact.

On March 8, Korolev wrote to his wife: “We are trying to do everything without haste. Our motto: ‘the safety of the crew above all.’ May God give us the strength and the wisdom to remain faithful to it… I always believe and hope for the best, even as all my efforts, my mind and my experience are strained toward foreseeing the worst, that menacing presence that lies in wait for us at every step into the unknown.”

On March 13 he said to the two cosmonauts: “The most important thing in your flight is to return to Earth in good health. We have no need of thoughtless heroics.”

Twelve Minutes

The rocket left at ten o’clock. Alarms went off during the ascent. When the ship was finally in orbit, Korolev, who did not smoke, lit a cigarette.

The commander, Pavel Belyayev, inflated the airlock. Leonov entered it. At 11:32 the outer hatch opened. At 11:34:51 Leonov pushed himself outside. He was held by a five-meter tether. His first words were: “I can see the Caucasus.”

He stayed twelve minutes and nine seconds in the void.

The return went badly. In the vacuum, his suit had ballooned. Leonov recounted it: his feet had come out of his boots, his hands out of his gloves; he no longer controlled his limbs. He was supposed to go in feet first. He could not. He then opened a valve and lowered the pressure in the suit. Then he went in head first, and had to turn around in the narrow tube to pass into the cabin. His pulse rose to one hundred forty-three, his temperature to thirty-eight degrees Celsius. At 11:51 the outer hatch was closed.

Korolev Takes Charge of the Room

The next day they had to come back. The pressure was dropping in the air tanks. On the seventeenth orbit the braking engine was to fire automatically. Belyayev calmly reported that it had not fired. The sensor that oriented the ship on the Sun had failed.

In the control room there was confusion. An engineer who was present described what followed: “Korolev took charge. He established silence and asked everyone to sit down. Then he calmly listened to the man responsible for the control system.”

He proposed bringing the ship back by hand: Belyayev would orient it himself and fire the engine. Shabarov and Raushenbakh hurriedly gathered the necessary figures. They were written on a sheet of paper, which each engineer signed. On Korolev’s orders, it was Gagarin who transmitted them to Belyayev.

In the cabin, the maneuver was an ordeal. To sight through the porthole, Belyayev had to lie across both seats, while Leonov held him in place. They then needed forty-six seconds to get back into position before firing the engine. Those seconds carried them well beyond the planned point.

The ship landed on March 19 at 12:02 p.m., three hundred eighty-six kilometers from the target, in the snow-covered taiga of the Perm region. For four hours nothing was known of the crew. Korolev had one precise fear: that a sensor, touching a tree branch, might have fired the landing rockets too early.

A helicopter pilot at last caught sight of the red parachute and the two men. But the forest was too dense to land in. A marshal forbade hoisting them up on a cable. Korolev and Kamanin protested without success. Belyayev and Leonov spent two nights in the snow.

“Ahead of Us Is the Moon”

On March 21, at Tyuratam, the return was celebrated. Korolev raised his glass: “Friends! Ahead of us is the Moon. Let us all work together toward the great goal of conquering it. Do you remember how our collective used to work in friendship?”

Barmin, the designer of launch pads, one of the six of the first Council, answered in an undertone: “We worked in friendship when we were all chiefs… Now there is a Chief Theoretician and a Chief Designer…”

On March 26, at the press conference, Keldysh imposed the official version: the ship had landed “at the planned point.” Kamanin and Korolev would have liked to tell the truth.

The historian Asif Siddiqi sees in this flight the absolute zenith of the Soviet program, and Korolev’s swan song. No Soviet cosmonaut would fly for the following twenty-four months. He himself would never see another one leave.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 10 (Vykhod project, N. Kamanin’s diary, inflatable airlock and G. Severin’s demonstration, loss of the ship of February 22, 1965, letter of March 8 and remarks of March 13, 1965, words to A. Leonov, spacewalk of March 18, 1965, and its timings, difficulties of the return through the airlock, failure of March 19 and testimony about Korolev, landing in the Urals, toast of March 21 and V. Barmin’s reply, press conference of March 26, the author’s judgment).

Chapter 37 · 1964 – 1965 “I Need a Ton”

One day in 1963, Sergei Korolev put his fist under the nose of one of his deputies. Leonid Voskresensky had directed testing since Kapustin Yar. He was demanding that the first stage of the lunar rocket be tested whole on the ground before flying. Korolev had neither the money nor the time. He shouted: “You ought to be beaten with a stick!” Voskresensky answered: “I am fifty years old. I am past the age of being threatened with a stick.” Korolev then took him in his arms: “Forgive me, Leonid… I lost my temper.”

A Single Rocket

The decree of August 1964 had given Korolev the Moon, and a deadline. He still had to find out how.

His first plan called for three N1 rockets and assembly in Earth orbit. At the end of 1964 he gave it up for the scheme the Americans had chosen for Apollo, and which Yury Kondratyuk had imagined as early as 1929. A single rocket carried everything. On arriving near the Moon, the ship went into orbit, and a small module separated from it to descend.

But the N1 had been designed for seventy-five tons. The American rocket would carry about one hundred thirty. With seventy-five tons, one does not go to the Moon in a single launch. At least ninety-five were needed.

Engines were added to the first stage: there would be thirty instead of twenty-four. And weight was trimmed everywhere. The historian Asif Siddiqi speaks of a maniacal obsession with mass. Korolev promised a bonus of fifty to sixty rubles for every kilogram saved. To Chertok he said: “I don’t need your ten kilos. I need a ton.”

The preliminary plan was signed on December 25, 1964. The lunar module would carry only one man. To get into it from the main ship, that cosmonaut would have to go out into the void, as Leonov did.

Those Who Said No

Inside the bureau itself, able men refused to believe in it.

Ilya Lavrov, the one studying life support systems for the Mars ships, judged the project “on the edge of the fantastic.” Feoktistov would later say that ninety tons were not enough, and that the conflicts were continual.

Gleb Maksimov, the author of the Mars ship, did more. In August 1964 he wrote Korolev a personal letter to dissuade him. Korolev had him transferred away from headquarters. The man who had been designing the road to Mars for him was set aside for opposing the road to the Moon.

Keldysh himself, for the first time, stood against him. His exclamation has been remembered: “What nerve does it take to land a single man on the Moon? That is the direct road to the psychiatric hospital!” On the substance, his criticism was precise: no system had any reserve. On February 10, 1965, his commission approved it all the same.

At the end of 1965 the project was still not finished. It had reached ninety-three tons.

Voskresensky

The most painful refusal was Voskresensky’s. A priest’s son, with no higher degree, he had an intuition for machines that had become legendary. It was to him that Korolev had nodded before Sputnik.

When Khrushchev released five hundred million rubles for the N1, Voskresensky declared that ten times more would be needed. Korolev answered that if such sums were asked for, the project would be stopped. Voskresensky then refused to sign any document about that rocket. He resigned in 1964.

He would die in December 1965, of a brain hemorrhage, at fifty-two.

Back to the Wall

The year 1965 was one of encirclement. Glushko obtained that a study be made of an N1 redone with his own engines. He attacked the rocket, Siddiqi writes, with relentless ardor. He had other chief designers sign a letter to the Central Committee blaming Korolev for all the project’s faults.

Among those who sided with Glushko and Chelomey were Barmin and Viktor Kuznetsov, two of the six of the Council of 1946. Korolev was wounded by it. He spoke of betrayal. Only Pilyugin, the guidance specialist, remained at his side. In September 1965, Korolev would choose his system for a lunar ship, even though that of his own engineer was lighter. Siddiqi sees in this fidelity to a tacit contract forged over twenty years.

The army, for its part, wanted to hear nothing of it. In January 1965 the minister of defense, Marshal Malinovsky, declared: “We cannot afford and we will not build super-powerful launchers or flights to the Moon. Let the Academy of Sciences take care of that.”

The small missile that was to serve for testing the N1’s engines in flight was canceled in the middle of the year. A Russian historian put it this way: apparently, someone feared it would be a success.

Four N1s a year were to be built. One and a half were. Ground testing was cut short. Mishin would say that the industrial base was two years behind.

He Fights

Korolev did not bend. On August 14, 1965, he wrote to Brezhnev. He asked that forces be concentrated on the N1 and that Chelomey’s rocket be stopped. He gave assurances that flight tests could be expected to begin within a year.

On September 1, a witness heard him speak of the N1 “with visible satisfaction.” He called it his child. It was to be “in metal” before the end of the year.

In September, a commission visited the two rival bureaus, to decide who would send a man around the Moon. At Chelomey’s, it found wooden mock-ups. At Korolev’s, some ten Soyuz ships in metal. On October 25, 1965, a decree settled it by a compromise: the rocket would be Chelomey’s, the ship Korolev’s. After five attempts since 1961, Siddiqi writes, he at last had his hand on the flight around the Moon.

On November 11, 1965, he signed with Mishin the final plan for the lunar expedition. Keldysh’s commission approved it in December.

Mars, Still

In the midst of that battle, two signatures show where his gaze remained.

In August 1965 he approved the draft plan of an engine. It was not an engine for the Moon. It was an electric engine powered by a nuclear reactor, with a thrust of eight kilograms, designed specifically for piloted interplanetary ships. It was the kind of engine that Feoktistov’s “daisy” called for.

On September 28 he signed documents on nuclear engines intended for future launchers.

And at the end of 1964 he had asked Raushenbakh to study an experiment for a coming ship: to link the cabin to the rocket’s last stage by a cable one kilometer long, and spin the whole, to create artificial gravity. It had figured, in September 1962, in his pages of notes on the Mars ship.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 9 (nuclear-electric engine of August 1965) and ch. 11 (“Three Steps to the Moon”: single-launch scheme, the hunt for weight and the remark to B. Chertok, preliminary plan of December 25, 1964, opposition from I. Lavrov, G. Maksimov, K. Feoktistov and M. Keldysh, scene with L. Voskresensky and his resignation, V. Glushko’s offensive, N. Pilyugin, Marshal Malinovsky’s statement, cancellation of the GR-1, letter of August 14, 1965, visit to the two bureaus, decree of October 25, 1965, plan of November 11, 1965, documents of September 28, 1965, artificial-gravity project).

Chapter 38 · 1964 – 1965 “A Learning Process”

In the autumn of 1965, after yet another probe had crashed on the Moon, the master of the military industry, Dmitry Ustinov, wanted to settle accounts. The Military-Industrial Commission met in the Kremlin. Boris Chertok was to give the report. Sergei Korolev had made him redo his posters three times. When the chairman gave Chertok the floor, Korolev stood up, put his hand on his shoulder and made him stay seated. “Allow me to speak. Does the chief designer not have the right to speak in place of his deputy?” He spoke for one minute.

One Minute

Since January 1963, his bureau had been trying to set a craft down gently on the Moon. It had not succeeded once. From 1963 to the end of 1965 there would be eleven attempts: four rockets did not reach orbit, two probes did not leave it, two missed the Moon, three crashed on it. After the failure of March 1965, General Kamanin noted that Korolev had been more affected than anyone: he looked downcast, and seemed to have aged ten years.

While preparing for the session, Korolev had taken Chertok to task over the tone of his report: “To listen to you, one would think that after each failure we understand everything at once. Where were we before, then? It must be explained that we are going through a learning process. Our ministers are not stupid.”

Before the commission, he said this: “There is one general cause that explains everything: it is a learning process. In our plans we provided neither resources nor time for learning. That is our mistake. We have paid for it. I ask the commission to authorize one launch for us, and to decide according to its result.”

Keldysh backed him. Then Ustinov: “I support Sergei Pavlovich.” The session was supposed to last an hour and a half. It lasted ten minutes. On the way out, his friend Tyulin summed up: “Sergei got us all out of trouble. But he has put our backs to the wall.”

Chertok would later give the underlying explanation. Rockets by the dozen were obtained without difficulty. The few million rubles that ground test stands would have required were not. So everything was learned by trial and error, directly in space.

Two Probes to Mars

The planetary probes had followed the same path. After Mars 1, the bureau built an improved series. On November 11, 1963, a test example remained in Earth orbit: the fourth stage, again.

At the next window, on November 30, 1964, a probe really did leave for Mars. It was called Zond 2. It carried a camera unit. Its solar panels did not deploy completely. A control unit malfunctioned. Contact was lost on the way.

The sources do not agree on what followed, and we give both versions. Chertok writes that contact ceased after one month, and that the probe, for want of a trajectory correction, missed Mars by six hundred fifty thousand kilometers. NASA’s catalog states that communications were lost in early May 1965, and that the probe passed, silent, about one thousand five hundred kilometers from the planet on August 6, 1965.

On July 18, 1965, an identical probe, Zond 3, was launched outside any Mars window, to try the machine out on a distant trajectory. On the way, it photographed the far side of the Moon. Contact was held for seven and a half months. This time everything worked.

It was the last that Korolev would launch in the direction of Mars.

Giving Away

That year he took a decision that his own deputies found hard to accept. To concentrate his bureau on piloted flights and the N1, he parted with everything else.

The reconnaissance satellites went to Kuibyshev, to his former engineer Dmitry Kozlov. The communications satellites left for Siberia, to another of his pupils. And the automatic probes to the Moon, Mars and Venus were entrusted to a bureau at Khimki, near Moscow, headed by Georgy Babakin.

Raushenbakh and Chertok were hurt. Chertok summed up their feeling: so much work, and now that we are nearly there, to give it all away! Korolev overrode them.

Chertok ended up doing him justice: “What other chief designer would have been so generous? That generosity too was a Korolev phenomenon.”

It was that bureau that would later set craft down on the Moon, on Venus and on Mars.

The Pennant on Venus

In November 1965 the bureau carried out its last interplanetary launches. Three probes left for Venus, on November 12, 16 and 23. The third failed.

The second, Venera 3, would reach Venus on March 1, 1966, and deposit there a pennant bearing the arms of the Soviet Union. It would be the first human-made object to touch another planet. Korolev would not know of it.

Chertok drew up the balance without disguise. In five years the bureau had launched nineteen times toward the neighboring planets. Only one of those launches fully reached its goal: that one. But those years left a deep-space communications center in Crimea, and a school of engineers. Cosmonautics, he says, was going through its infancy.

Tyuratam, for the Last Time

On December 1, 1965, Korolev arrived at Tyuratam with Keldysh. The day was mild and calm. Before any meeting, he asked to see a construction site: that of the large building where the N1 would be assembled. Thirty thousand square meters. The concrete columns were already standing. Five thousand soldiers of the engineer corps were working there. Ten kilometers away, two launch pads were being built.

Barmin told him that building was going far more slowly than when the range was created, ten years earlier. The Ministry of Defense had lost interest.

On December 3, at 1:46 p.m., a probe left for the Moon. It was the eleventh landing attempt, the one he had asked the commission for. It was also the last launch he attended, and his last night in the small house where he had stayed for eight years.

On the Plane

He flew to Crimea, from where the probe would be tracked. The engine designer Isayev, who was on board, described the journey to Chertok.

Keldysh asked Isayev, in front of Korolev, what he thought of Kuznetsov’s engines. He implied that Glushko’s would be ready sooner. Korolev exploded: “Mstislav Vsevolodovich! Stop this game. You have already done the N1 enough harm…”

The two men, who had been on familiar terms for years, switched to formal address. Keldysh retorted: “Sergei Pavlovich, do not forget yourself!” Tyulin stepped in: “Enough, fellows! Does anyone have another bottle?”

Isayev added, for Chertok alone: “With the N1, you are in a real mess. In ’68 we will not have the engines.”

“Be Quiet!”

At the Simferopol station, Korolev entrusted the conduct of operations to Boguslavsky, as in 1959: “Take charge of all the sessions. Pay no attention to us. Only, give the commands loud and clear. I want to understand too.” He had Chertok sit beside him, to comment on everything for him in a low voice. He ticked off each stage on a sheet of graph paper.

On the night of December 6 to 7, the probe was approaching the Moon. He sent out everyone who was not taking part. He had taken off his jacket. He was wearing the woolen shirt his engineers called the Korolev uniform.

Everything was going well. Chertok let slip: “We’re out of the woods.” Korolev cut him off: “Be quiet!”

At 12:51 a.m. the signal ceased. The probe had begun to spin, and had crashed. The cause would be found: a fiberglass bracket, badly molded by a worker, had broken and punctured an inflatable cushion.

Babakin proposed trying again in two months. Korolev answered, sadly: “Yes, we will try again. If they still trust us after this.”

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 14 (“Last Launches Under Korolev”: session of the Military-Industrial Commission and Korolev’s words, transfer of the probes to G. Babakin, launches to Venus in November 1965, balance, last stay at Tyuratam, A. Isayev’s account, night of December 6 to 7, 1965, at Simferopol, table of launches from 1960 to 1966); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 10 (transfers to D. Kozlov, M. Reshetnev and G. Babakin), ch. 11 (N. Kamanin’s diary) and ch. 12 (record of the Ye-6 lunar probes). For Zond 2: NASA’s NSSDCA catalog.

Chapter 39 · December 1965 – January 4, 1966 “Well, Carry On!”

On the morning of January 4, 1966, a meeting was being held in Vasily Mishin’s office. The weight of the lunar modules was under discussion. The door opened. Sergei Korolev was on the threshold, in overcoat and fur hat, a package in his hand. Everyone stood up. He had, Boris Chertok writes, a tender and melancholy smile. He said a few words, nodded, then: “Well, carry on!” He withdrew slowly, without closing the door. “It did not occur to any of us,” Chertok wrote, “that we had just said goodbye to him.”

What He Was Hiding

He had been ill for months, and almost no one knew it. In August 1965 his blood pressure had fallen abnormally low. In September he had violent headaches. He was going deaf. His heart worried him.

There was something else, which his colleagues would learn only after his death: intestinal hemorrhages, which came on him even at the launch range. After the Kremlin session, in the autumn, he slipped away several times to the hospital on Granovsky Street, nicknamed “the little Kremlin.” In the canteen he said in passing: “We are leaving for Venus. We are done with the Moon, and I am leaving you for about a week. These doctors will not let me go.”

To his wife, toward the end of the year, he confided: “I am in a constant state of extreme exhaustion and tension, but I cannot let it show at any price. I am holding on with all the strength I have.”

He was seriously thinking of leaving his post. Nina Ivanovna recounted it. He sometimes came home at the end of his tether and said: “I cannot go on working like this, you understand. I am leaving!”

In November he complained to Kamanin about Glushko, who had just criticized him harshly before the commission: “Glushko believes himself the principal heir of Tsiolkovsky, and thinks that we only make tin cans…”

A Night in December

After the return from Crimea and the failure of the lunar probe, he had, one night, a severe hemorrhage. It was not the first. He forbade his wife to call an ambulance. The next day he refused to go to the hospital: the day was full; he had to answer for the failure.

On Tuesday, December 14, he finally entered Granovsky Street for tests. He took work with him: an article for Pravda, notes on the probe. The head of surgery concluded that it was an intestinal polyp. He told him: “Go home, celebrate the New Year with Nina Ivanovna, then come back, and we will remove the polyp. A simple little operation.”

He left on Friday the 17th. He was at his office that same day.

A Truck

That December 17, among the papers waiting for him was a request from the director of a boarding school for blind children, in a neighboring town. The school needed a truck.

Korolev ordered in writing that one be handed over to it, reconditioned and fitted with a tarpaulin. He added on the paper: let our sponsorship be in deeds, not in words. And further: “What else can we do to help this school? I await your proposals.”

Voskresensky

While he was in the hospital, Leonid Voskresensky died suddenly. The sources do not agree on the day: the historian Asif Siddiqi and Chertok, in one chapter, give December 14; the account from the Korolev memorial house, which Chertok quotes in another, gives the 16th.

The funeral took place on December 19. Korolev wept openly. He said: “Leonid, you were the first to open this road.” And to a veteran of the bureau: “How hard it is to bury my closest and most reliable assistant, my devoted friend, dead before his time…”

It had been a year of bereavements. In January he had lost Kosberg, the engine designer of the third stage. He had also lost a young engineer of the bureau, and the builder of Tyuratam. Now Voskresensky.

An Evening of Laughter

The next day, December 20, Boris Raushenbakh’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated in a Moscow restaurant. It stood on Tsander Street. His friends had prepared a prank. The famous radio announcer Levitan, the one who announced the Sputniks and the cosmonauts, read a parody speech in his solemn voice. A young journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, had brought a fake issue of his newspaper.

Korolev and his wife laughed until they cried. Chertok notes: “It had been a long time since we had seen Korolev so cheerful.”

That journalist would publish, nearly thirty years later, the great biography of Korolev.

With the Cosmonauts

On Sunday, December 26, Korolev and Nina Ivanovna were invited to Star City. The cosmonauts showed them their new apartments, the swimming pool. They had lunch. A photograph was taken.

Gagarin questioned him about what came next. The answers were vague: the Soyuz was being prepared; work was under way on a station, on an automatic landing on the Moon. In 1965 there had been only one Soviet piloted flight. The Americans had made five.

Kamanin noted that the cosmonauts were pessimistic as never before. Their boundless faith in Korolev was shaken, he wrote, by Korolev himself. Two months earlier, Gagarin and his comrades had sent Brezhnev a letter about the program’s stagnation. They had received no answer.

“I Am Not Worried”

Before the New Year he went to see his mother, who was also in the hospital on Granovsky Street. A surgeon said to him quietly: “Don’t worry, the operation is nothing. They are only worried about your heart.” He answered: “I am not worried.” That evening he had unusual pains in his heart.

On December 31 he received those close to him. Then he went to see in the New Year in the country at the home of a secretary of the Central Committee, with the Keldyshes. They came home at half past four in the morning. Chertok specifies that in his last years he hardly drank at all.

On January 1, 1966, Pravda published an article titled “Steps into the Future.” It was signed “Professor K. Sergeyev.” Its last sentence was: “The human mind knows no limits!”

The Papers

On Sunday, January 2, he went to the office to go through his mail. On the 3rd he put his correspondence in order. He entrusted certain unsigned documents to a colleague, with this instruction: hand them to no one before his return. He added: “And if I am late in coming back, Mishin may see them.”

On the evening of January 4, he walked home with his wife toward their house in Ostankino. Just before the gate, he spoke to her. Nina Ivanovna reported his words: “I want to say something to you… If anything happens to me, I beg you, leave this house.” She cried out: “My God, Seryozha, what are you talking about?” He answered: “That is all I had to say.”

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 14 (hospital visits in the autumn of 1965, date of December 14 for L. Voskresensky’s death) and ch. 17 (“Korolev’s Last Days, Death, and Funeral,” with the account by L. Filina, director of the Korolev memorial house, and Nina Koroleva’s recollections: hemorrhage in December, tests of December 14 to 17, truck for the boarding school, funeral of December 19, evening of December 20, visit of December 26, visit to his mother, New Year’s Eve, article of January 1, days of January 2, 3 and 4, 1966); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 11 (health in 1965, words to his wife, remark about V. Glushko, N. Kamanin’s diary, cosmonauts’ letter, bereavements of 1965, words at L. Voskresensky’s funeral).

Chapter 40 · January 5 – 14, 1966 The Operating Table

On January 13, 1966, at the Kremlin hospital, the anesthetist Yury Savinov came to show Sergei Korolev the result of a test. The polyp that was to be removed the next day was not suspicious. Korolev listened to him. Then he said: “Doctor, you are our friend. Tell me: how long can I live with this?” And he placed his hand on his heart.

From His Bed

He had entered the hospital on January 5. Mishin was standing in for him at the bureau. Among those around him, no one was alarmed: there was talk of a routine operation. Tyulin said: “Korolev will be back in a week.” He had already invited friends to celebrate his birthday. He would be fifty-nine.

On January 7, at the ministry, the new minister humiliated Chertok in front of his peers. Mishin, beside himself, wrote out his resignation. Korolev learned of it. From his bed, he telephoned: “Tear up that report. Ministers come and go, and we stay at our work. Resignations are all they are waiting for from us.”

On January 11 the surgeon took a sample of the polyp for analysis. The procedure caused a severe hemorrhage.

On January 12 he turned fifty-nine. His wife and his mother, Maria Nikolayevna, came to wish him a happy birthday in his room.

The Minister Operates

The surgeon was the minister of health himself, Boris Petrovsky. Chertok reports that Korolev was flattered by this.

On the morning of January 14, Nina Ivanovna was at the hospital. She saw her husband before he was taken away. She was told it would take an hour.

It took more than four hours.

The accounts agree on the essentials. The removal of the polyp set off heavy bleeding. The abdomen had to be opened. The surgeons then discovered what no examination had shown: a tumor the size of a fist. The certificate would speak of a sarcoma. It was removed.

A further difficulty arose. The tube that was to make him breathe could not be passed. A tracheotomy had to be performed.

On the reason, the two main sources differ. The historian Asif Siddiqi writes that Korolev’s jaw, broken in 1938 during the interrogations, did not open wide enough, and that he had not told the doctors. Chertok, following the account from the memorial house, does not mention a jaw: he attributes the difficulty to the shape of his neck, which was very short. We cannot decide between them. If the first version is correct, the prison of 1938 caught up with him twenty-eight years later.

A great surgeon, Aleksandr Vishnevsky, was called in as reinforcement. He arrived late. Nina Ivanovna reported, years afterward, the remark he is said to have made: “I do not operate on corpses.”

The operation ended. Half an hour later the heart stopped. Attempts were made to revive him. They failed.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev died on January 14, 1966. He had been fifty-nine for two days.

“He Should Not Have Died”

The official report, signed by five physicians, lists a sarcoma of the rectum, sclerosis of the heart and of the arteries of the brain, and emphysema. It attributes death to acute heart failure.

There was no commission of inquiry.

In 1970, Vishnevsky confided in Chertok. The examination made before the operation had been insufficient. The tumor was enclosed in its capsule, without metastases: Korolev, he said, could have lived a long time with it. Nothing was ready in the operating room, either for artificial respiration or to take over from the heart. He added a hard sentence: Korolev himself was to blame, since he had insisted on being operated on by a minister. And he concluded: “A victim of our medicine. He should not have died.”

Siddiqi reports another opinion, that of most of the doctors consulted: in any case, he had only a few months left to live.

The biographer Yaroslav Golovanov wrote, in 1994: “Korolev did not die a natural death.”

These judgments do not agree. We give all three.

Noon

At about noon, the engineer Pavel Tsybin, the friend from the gliding days, came running into Chertok’s office: “Sergei Pavlovich is dead!”

That evening the deputies gathered at the bureau. They could not believe it.

Glushko, for his part, was in a meeting when he learned the news. His words have been reported: “Sergei Pavlovich is no longer with us… Well, where were we?”

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 17 (admission to the hospital, biopsy of January 11, visit of January 12, conversation with Yu. Savinov, operation of January 14, 1966, A. Vishnevsky’s remarks, medical report, P. Tsybin’s announcement); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 11 (telephone call to V. Mishin, course of the operation, jaw broken in 1938, doctors’ opinion, V. Glushko’s reaction, Ya. Golovanov’s judgment).

Chapter 41 · January 16 – 18, 1966 A Name

On Sunday, January 16, 1966, at six in the morning, Moscow radio broadcast a death notice. The voice was that of Levitan, the announcer of great occasions. It announced the death of Academician Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, and it said who he was: the designer of the first satellites and of the ships that carried the first humans into space. For nine years the world had known him by a title. That morning, for the first time, Soviet citizens heard his name.

The Obituary

It was Boris Chertok who had been charged with writing the text. Shaped by twenty years of secrecy, he drafted a cautious notice, in which there was no mention of rockets.

He took it to the Central Committee, to Ivan Serbin, the feared head of the defense department. Serbin smiled: “It cannot be so modest. People must be told the truth about Korolev.” And he showed him another text, which named the designer of the satellites and the ships.

The decision to reveal his name was taken by Brezhnev.

The truth, however, had its limits. Chertok had written a sentence about the “years of unjust persecution.” Serbin struck it out. And the signatures of Korolev’s deputies were removed from the notice: their own names remained secret.

In the New York Times, the news appeared on page 82.

The Line

On January 17 the coffin lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. It was in that hall that he had spoken, in 1957, for the Tsiolkovsky centenary, without anyone saying who he was.

It was very cold. From nine o’clock a line formed. It stretched as far as Soviet Square. These were people who, the day before, had never heard that name. The opening hours were extended by an hour.

The body was cremated during the night.

The Wall

On January 18 the urn was carried out of the House of Unions by Keldysh, Tyulin, Gagarin and the chairman of the commission. The deputies then took it: Mishin, Shabarov, Abramov, Chertok. Then the cosmonauts, as far as Red Square.

Keldysh gave a speech. Brezhnev and the members of the Politburo carried the urn to the Kremlin wall. An artillery salute was fired.

The plaque reads: “Korolev Sergei Pavlovich. December 30, 1906 – January 14, 1966.” The date of birth is given there in the old calendar.

General Kamanin listened to the speeches. The speakers, he notes in his diary, insisted on saying that Korolev was one great scientist among others. “That is not true. He was the Chief Designer, not only in title but in substance. His name should come before those of all our cosmonauts.”

The Evening

The funeral meal was held in the house in Ostankino. Later, Gagarin, Titov, Popovich, Komarov, Bykovsky and Feoktistov ended the evening at Chertok’s. Komarov said he had doubts about the causes of the death.

Chertok makes, in his memoirs, a remark that says a great deal. Outside the bureau, he writes, he would be unable to name a single person who was a true close friend of Korolev’s.

There remained his family. His mother, Maria Nikolayevna, who would outlive him by fourteen years. His wife, Nina Ivanovna. And his daughter Natalia, born of his first marriage, who had kept her distance for so long. She became a surgeon, like her mother. She would publish, much later, a book about him. It is titled Father.

The Succession

As early as January 16, the deputies met. It was Viktor Makeyev, the pupil who had left for the Urals, who brought them together. He told them they must name the successor themselves. He himself refused the post.

Bushuyev and Chertok proposed Mishin. Only one of those present voted against. The letter to the Central Committee was drafted during the night and signed at five in the morning.

Ustinov would have preferred someone else. Mishin’s appointment was not signed until May 11, 1966, four months later.

The historian Asif Siddiqi measures the void. For twenty years Korolev had held four roles together: running a bureau of thousands of people, speaking to the leaders, negotiating with the other designers, and saying where they were going. Mishin was a good engineer. He was not a diplomat. No one, Siddiqi writes, combined those qualities.

Sources: B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, Hot Days of the Cold War, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 17 (drafting of the obituary and conversation with I. Serbin, announcement of January 16, days of January 17 and 18, 1966, meeting of the deputies, remark on Korolev’s isolation, family); A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 11 (L. Brezhnev’s decision, signatures removed, New York Times, funeral, N. Kamanin’s diary) and ch. 12 (succession, appointment of May 11, 1966). Dates of Maria Nikolayevna: Russian Wikipedia (tertiary source).

Chapter 42 · After 1966 What Remained

On February 3, 1966, at 9:45 p.m. Moscow time, a sphere fifty-eight centimeters across bounced on the surface of the Moon and came to rest. Four petals opened. A camera began to turn. It was Luna 9, the first craft to make a soft landing on another celestial body, and to send back pictures from it. The probe had been designed in Sergei Korolev’s bureau, then entrusted to Babakin’s. It was the twelfth attempt. Korolev had been dead for less than three weeks.

The Probe and the Newspaper

The story of those pictures has an irony the historian Asif Siddiqi points out. They did not appear first in Pravda. The British observatory at Jodrell Bank, the very one Keldysh had had notified in 1959, picked up the signals, and the English press published them first. The slowness of the Soviet bureaucracy had done the rest.

On March 1, 1966, Venera 3 reached Venus with its pennant.

The N1

The great rocket flew four times, from February 1969 to November 1972. It never reached orbit. The first stage, with its thirty engines, had never been tested whole on the ground: its flaws were discovered in flight, one after another, as Voskresensky had feared.

In the meantime, on July 20, 1969, two Americans had walked on the Moon.

On May 22, 1974, Mishin was relieved of his duties. He was in the hospital at the time. Korolev’s bureau was merged, with Glushko’s, into a single organization, which was given the name Energia. At its head was placed Valentin Glushko. Siddiqi observes that he then had more power than Korolev had ever had.

The N1 program was suspended the following month and officially closed in 1976. All the work was kept secret until the late 1980s.

Mars, After Him

The Mars project did not die out at once.

In the autumn of 1964, Korolev had given Ilya Lavrov a whole department, charged with studying the piloted expedition to Mars. An institute in Siberia was working for it on regenerating water and air with algae. The story goes that two of its young researchers came to see Korolev one day and offered him water obtained in that way from urine. He declined. But he remained very interested.

After his death, a ground simulator of the ship was built. On November 5, 1967, three men shut themselves inside it: a physician, a biologist, a technician. They drank water and breathed oxygen drawn from their own wastes. They ate freeze-dried food and the vegetables of a small greenhouse. They came out on November 5, 1968. The experiment had lasted one year to the day.

In 1969, after the first American flight around the Moon, the Soviet leaders suddenly took an interest in Mars. Mishin’s bureau presented a detailed expedition design. Two N1 rockets. One hundred fifty tons assembled in orbit. Electric engines powered by nuclear reactors. Six cosmonauts, three of whom would go down to the surface. It was the direct heir of Feoktistov’s project.

It was given a code name, Aelita. That is the title of a 1923 novel, which tells of the journey of two Russians to Mars.

Nothing came of it. It depended on a rocket that did not fly.

What Still Flies

Other things lasted.

The R-7, designed in 1953 and 1954, is still in service, under other names. Its silhouette has not changed: a central core, four conical boosters. It still hangs, at the launch pad, between the arms of the “Tulip.”

The Soyuz spacecraft, which Korolev called “the machine of the future” in the spring of 1964, flew for the first time with a man in April 1967. That flight cost Vladimir Komarov his life. The ship was corrected. It still carries crews today.

Babakin’s bureau set craft down on the Moon, on Venus, and, in 1971, on Mars.

The pupils Korolev had sent to found bureaus in the provinces, Makeyev in the Urals, Kozlov at Kuibyshev, Reshetnev in Siberia, each built a branch of the country’s space industry.

The Name

After January 1966, the name that had been hidden was given everywhere. A street in Moscow has borne it since 1968. Busts were erected as early as 1967. The first Soviet biographies appeared in 1969.

The truth came later. The decrees, the letters, the 1962 notes on the Mars ship were published little by little, from 1980 on. Boris Chertok’s memoirs appeared in the 1990s, as did General Kamanin’s diary. In 1994, Yaroslav Golovanov, the journalist of the evening of December 20, 1965, published the eight hundred pages of Korolev: Facts and Myths.

In 1996, the town of Kaliningrad, near Moscow, the former Podlipki, where in 1946 he had set up a small department in a gun factory, changed its name. It is called Korolev.

On the far side of the Moon there is a crater Korolev. There is another on Mars.

Sources: A. A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, NASA SP-2000-4408, ch. 12 (Luna 9 and publication of the pictures, succession), ch. 16 and 17 (N1 flights, Aelita Mars project of 1969, I. Lavrov’s department, anecdote of the regenerated water, isolation experiment from November 5, 1967, to November 5, 1968), ch. 18 (reorganization of May 22, 1974) and program tables (N1 dates); B. Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. III, NASA SP-2009-4110, ch. 14 (Venera 3) and ch. 17 (posterity, biographies, town of Korolev). Facts of general history not taken from these works: date of the first step on the Moon, death of V. Komarov on April 24, 1967, landing of Mars 3 in 1971, the Korolev craters on the Moon and on Mars (nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union).