The cosmonaut business again.
It was only much later, as I took the train back to Moscow, that I did the math: Triyanov was fifty-five years old, since he had recently left active duty in the Air Force. He would have been about twenty-seven, close to my age, when the awful purges began, when Stalin massacred thousands of old Bolsheviks and a lot of young ones, in addition to God knows how many others.
What must Party meetings have been like in those days? With the Terror loose in the land? When any innocent statement could be twisted into a slander against the Soviet State?
I shuddered, and not from the cold.
9
“The Moon Speaks Russian!”
At 9:44 Moscow Time, on the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1966, a vehicle once known in the bureau as the thirteenth in the E-6 series, officially Luna 9, a two-meter-tall collection of cylinders topped by an onion-shaped covering much like a church dome, began firing its single retro-rocket as it dropped toward the dark-gray surface of the Moon. Locally it was just after sunrise on the Ocean of Storms, near the lunar equator.
For forty-five seconds the motor fired, slowing Luna’s rate of descent to twenty-five kilometers an hour. Then the onion dome blew open and an object the size and shape of a basketball sprang free one second before the cylinder and its rocket crunched into the lunar soil. The basketball landed softly some distance away, bouncing once, twice, into a crater perhaps twenty-five meters across, rolling to a stop on the dusty upslope.
Four minutes passed as the top of the basketball opened like the petals of a flower, sprouting four whip-wire antennas and a small panoramic television camera. The basketball had been deliberately made bottom-heavy, so the top of the basketball wound up on top. The petals themselves served as antennas for receiving commands from Earth.
Then a message was beamed across three-hundred thousand kilometers to the giant receiving antenna at our deep-space tracking site in Simferopol, Crimea. It took a second and a half for the radio signal to travel that distance. I’m here! I made it! Luna 9 said.
The control room, filled with tired men in civilian clothes and in the green uniforms of the Central Space Office, erupted in cheers. After five years of failure, the USSR had soft-landed a spacecraft on the Moon, beating the Americans by months. Now we — not the Americans — would discover just what the surface of the Moon was really like. Was it covered in dust that would swallow a heavy spacecraft and a cosmonaut? Or was it solid ground like some Earthly desert?
At 4:50 the next morning, the first pictures began to arrive at Simferopol. Over the next two hours, half a dozen photos would be transmitted, showing a panoramic view of ordinary rocks casting their long shadows, the rim of the crater, the black sky of a lunar day, and even one of Luna’s own antennae.
Some of the pictures were broadcast live over Moscow television as they were received, which is where I first saw them on the morning of the fourth, in the common room of my apartment building just after breakfast. Given the nature of our Soviet-built television, the pictures were little more than black-and-white blurs accompanied by what sounded like a rush of static interrupted by occasional beeps and blips — telemetry from the probe.
Yet, this was a tremendous achievement. The Americans had managed to crash a Ranger probe into the Moon, but they were nowhere near ready to land one softly as we had. (That day’s Izvestiya was headlined, “The Moon Speaks Russian!”) It was obvious that the lunar landing rattled our American and European rivals, since the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England pirated the Luna 9 photos and published them without permission.
I’m ashamed to say that Luna 9’s victory also served to show the superiority of our bureau’s systems to those of Chelomei, as I reminded Lev, who joined me in the common room to view the pictures. “If your boss needs directions to the Moon,” I teased, “we can help.”
“Comrade Chelomei would merely thank your bosses for lighting the way for his glorious and much larger Proton rocket and our spacecraft — which will be successful long before its ninth try.” Lev was as sarcastic as ever, but in his eyes I saw conflict. He was pleased that our country had accomplished the landing, but also knew that the Korolev bureau would get the acclaim. In the battle over which organization would make the lunar flight, every weapon counted.
Filin and his team returned to Kaliningrad the middle of the next week, the day after the heroic Luna 9’s batteries expired and the pictures stopped coming. The weather was so awful — clear skies with a vicious wind — that the triumphal reception was moved inside.
I was lucky to squeeze in, and then only because Grechko, one of the future bureau cosmonauts, worked on Filin’s team and was able to get a pass for me.
The welcome was a big deal. A lectern had been set up at the front of the hall next to a long table covered in green baize. The various masters of space were there, in strict order of rank — from the Hammer himself, Afanasyev, who really did loom over the others like a monolith. Next to him was the mysterious Tyulin, the bureau’s master-in-waiting; then Artemov, looking flushed and possibly drunk; and several unfamiliar faces, all of whom were soon identified as Barmin, Ryazansky, Pilyugin, Babakin — heads of other enterprises that had contributed to the success of Luna 9.
At the very end was Filin himself, surprisingly subdued with this talk of space victories and State prizes. I said as much to Triyanov, catching up to him on the walk back to Building 11. “It’s probably just exhaustion,” he said. “Even before Korolev died, Filin bore the brunt of all the failures. I think he took them personally, even though most of them were caused by exploding rockets.” Here he smiled wickedly. “Artemov’s rockets.”
I recalled Filin’s habit of taking to his bed when things were especially bad; certain personalities would have the same reaction when things were going especially well for them, as if intense emotion of any kind caused a collapse. “Well, this must be a happy day for the whole bureau.”
“Yes and no. Right now the Hammer is over in the main building telling Artemov that he wants this bureau to take over the program to send a cosmonaut around the Moon.” Triyanov did not mention the name “Chelomei,” nor did I offer it up. I was learning.
“I thought that had already been decided. We were to build all the manned lunar vehicles.”
“We were given the manned lunar landing back in 1964, but another organization was given the manned lunar orbit. Can you imagine anything so stupid? You build one set of vehicles, a launcher, and a manned craft, to go ninety-nine percent of the way to the Moon, and turn around and build a whole different set to cover the last twenty kilometers!” He shook his head. “Well, that was the Khrushchev style.
“Before he died, Korolev had managed to shoot a lot of holes in this arrangement. He showed how we could send a simplified version of our own Soyuz spacecraft on the lunar orbit, and had lined up Ustinov and others behind it. It helped that the competition was shooting itself at the same time.
“But no one, not even Ustinov, was going to risk a war with the Hammer and the others as long as we were still crashing Lunas. Now, though…” He paused as we flashed our passes to the guard and entered our building. “Filin is probably the only one who realizes how much work has landed on their shoulders. And how pitiless the Hammer will be about our deadlines.”