I immediately remembered that I had arranged for him to come and meet Filin — the pass had been good enough to get him through the gate, but insufficient to get him into any of the buildings. The problem was that I had not confirmed the meeting today with Nadiya, Filin’s assistant, and with members of the State Commission wandering around loose, it was unlikely that Filin could take any time for Lev.
I felt terrible: He had traveled all the way from Reutov and even done a Stakhanovite job of shaving and wrestling himself into a tie. But I tried not to show my confusion, explaining about the emergency meeting, and reversing course back toward Filin’s office.
Filin’s woman lived for moments like this, where she had the power and I was a crawling serf. “As you can imagine,” she said, with immense satisfaction, “his whole morning was taken up with this meeting, and I’m sure he won’t have any time for student interviews.” She made “student interviews” sound like “colonic surgery.”
I was trying to think of how I could make this mistake up to Lev when Filin entered, looking surprisingly happy. “Yuri! You dodged a bullet in that meeting today.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Several members of the commission, including Tyulin, would love to kill the Voskhod flights. But others want them to go ahead. You don’t want to be in the middle of that war, my friend. Keep yourself out of the line of fire when you get to the cosmodrome.”
Filin had, in passing, mentioned a possible trip for me to Baikonur, but I had assumed it was months in the future, and said as much. “No, we’re leaving tonight! Didn’t you hear the commission set a launch date?” He became aware of the birdwoman twitching at his side. “What is it, Nadiya?”
Both of us explained the matter of Lev’s interview as Filin nodded with amusement. “Where is he now?”
“Out in the hall.”
“Well, since he traveled all the way out here… bring him in.” I tried not to show any sign of triumph as I brought Lev in, but I’m not sure I completely succeeded.
As Filin held the door for Lev to enter, he turned to me one final time: “What are you waiting for? Go and get packed!”
11
State Scientific Test Range Number 5
My country’s giant launch center, known to Western powers as Baikonur Cosmodrome, held as many outright lies as secrets, beginning with its name: Baikonur was actually the name of a town some two hundred kilometers to the northeast, the direction the early Sputniks, Lunas, and Vostoks were launched. Our Party leaders knew that American spy systems would be able to detect any launches, but hoped to conceal their source for as long as possible by pretending the site was farther along the trajectory than it really was.
This ruse was thought necessary because until 1960 the cosmodrome had the only pads capable of launching long-range missiles against America. Of course, on May Day 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over central Russia, after having flown directly over “Baikonur” with its cameras clicking away, and not for the first time.
Nevertheless, the facility known in bureau paperwork as State Scientific Test Range Number 5—to its growing number of residents as Tyuratam, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and to any friends and relatives who might try to write them as Post Office Box 500, Tashkent—still bore the entirely fictitious name of Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The facility had been dug out of trackless desert beginning in 1955, when our missiles began to outgrow State Test Range Number 4 near Volgograd. A commission had weighed sites in Perm (north) and Stavropol (south) before settling on the third choice of an open pit mine a few kilometers north of the railhead at Tyuratam on the Syr Darya River.
It allowed Sergei Korolev and the other early missile designers to fire their R-5s, R-11s, and R-7s over vast emptiness toward Kamchatka in the Far East, where warhead reentries could be tracked.
The construction was a miserable business: Winters in this desert could be brutal, and following a brief spring when tulips bloomed on the steppe, the crushing heat of summer followed, with temperatures easily climbing into the thirties and hot sand blowing. Have I mentioned the flies? The utter lack of trees?
Nevertheless, the labor battalions did their job, and the first launch-pad grew on the edge of an old quarry. Others began to sprout to the east and west — what the locals called the “left flank” and “right flank” as opposed to the “center.”
Baikonur’s growing pains were years in the past when our plane arrived late on the wintry afternoon of February 12 at the Outskirts Airfield at Leninsk, the name for the new military city surrounding old-town Tyuratam. To give you some idea of the scale of the place, we were still forty kilometers south of Baikonur’s center and its Voskhod launch-pad. There wasn’t a single structure to indicate that we were near the world’s first spaceport.
We lived in a hotel in Leninsk, from which we were bused to the center every morning at seven A.M. The less said about the hotel, the better. What I remember most is that the bathroom in the room I shared with another bureau engineer was so foul (and the weather too cold to allow us to open the windows for fresh air) that we quit using it, preferring to use a common one on the floor below.
The drive took the better part of an hour, though halfway there we passed the first signs of the space complex itself, the huge tracking antennas of Area 21, situated on the only hill for kilometers around.
Area 2, the heart of the center, was dominated by the giant slab-sided assembly building. It was here that segments of the bureau’s launch vehicles, brought by rail from the manufacturing plant in Samara (the launch vehicle itself) or from Kaliningrad (the upper stages), were assembled on a kind of giant rotisserie; the core of the launch vehicle would be rotated a quarter turn so that its four strap-on boosters could be attached. This was the genius of the Korolev team: In 1954 they had been ordered by the Kremlin to build a rocket strong enough to carry our heavy atomic bombs. But no country possessed a single-rocket engine capable of lifting the things, so Korolev’s team clustered four simple, reliable engines in a central stage, then surrounded that element with four tapering strap-ons, each with four clustered engines of its own.
Shorn of its upper stages, the vehicle (in its basic form known as the R-7) looked more like a cone than a slim, needle-nosed rocket ship. Certainly it bore little resemblance to its distant parent, the Nazi V-2. Looks didn’t matter; the Seven did its job admirably well. And in my first days at Baikonur, learning of this for the first time (because the configuration of the Seven was still secret from everyone in the world except American intelligence services), I was struck by its size, ruggedness, and reliability.
I spent a week inside the assembly building, climbing in and out of Spacecraft Number 5 in my stocking feet from dawn to after dark. I had many supervisors, each with a set of alligator clips or leads that needed to be plugged into various systems inside the spacecraft.
Even though a Voskhod had held three cosmonauts (admittedly, not in comfort), there was damned little room for me; unlike the test vehicle used on the aircraft tests, this was configured to hold two dogs. Naturally, the hounds couldn’t be expected to sit in couches, so a spacecraft-within-a-spacecraft had been built, with two side-by-side harnesses that would hold the canine cosmonauts, who would be hooked up to an amazing number of wires, hoses, and so on.
Nevertheless, I did my best to follow the orders of engineers from our bureau as well as researchers from the medical institute, and a couple of scientists as well.
In my few spare moments I marveled at the lack of sterile conditions. I had by then seen pictures of American space vehicles being prepared for launch inside chambers that resembled hospital operating rooms by technicians in surgical masks, with the air pressure higher inside than outside, to keep dust particles from penetrating.