Interlude
My first sessions with Yuri Ribko took five long evenings at the Rendezvous in Korolev. It was somewhere around the end of the first discussion that I decided he had a story worth listening to, and I began to record the tale. I went back to the U.S., and contact between us ceased.
Then, unexpectedly, less than two months later, I found myself flying back to Russia. I telephoned Ribko, who agreed to meet again. Soon a pattern was established: Ribko would arrive late, grudgingly accept a beer, then insist on complaining about some new American slander against Russia on the International Space Station project, which had stalled because of the failure of the Russians to live up to an agreement to build certain components to an agreed-on schedule.
One night in our second session I got fed up. “If anyone should be complaining, it’s America. Your government hasn’t put a goddamn dime into the service module and right now it’s going to delay the whole project by a year or more.”
His face flushed and he reached for the bottle. “First of all, you expect us to give up our space station—” Good old Mir was still in orbit that winter, nine years beyond its design life and eighteen months after everyone on the planet thought it was finished. “—and surrender to yours.” He smiled. “I’m not saying this is my personal view. But it is a view which would be shared in this neighborhood.” The Rendezvous was on Tsiolkovsky Street, a few blocks north and east of Russia’s Mir flight control center, which itself was just across the street from the gigantic facilities of the Energiya Corporation, what used to be Experimental Design Bureau Number 1, aka the Korolev Bureau. “And we hear that your Boeing company is as far behind on its module as we are on ours. But everyone prefers to blame the Russians.”
With that, he clinked his beer glass against mine. “Through adversity to the stars,” he said. After that, things went more quickly, though I had to miss a night because my editor wanted me to visit some nightclub on Kutuzov Prospect, which had the tallest, thinnest, most dangerous-looking women I’ve ever seen.
So there was a break in Yuri’s narrative, ending in April 1966, with the cancellation of Voskhod 3, with Artemov as the new leader of the Korolev bureau, with new problems on the home front.
He wanted to pick up the story early the following year. “What happened in between?” I said. “It must have been important.”
“What happened was one success after another for America, and one hidden failure after another for us.”
Well, from my knowledge of space history, I knew that after the quasisuccessful docking flight of Armstrong and Scott on Gemini 8, NASA had flown four Gemini missions, each one aimed at improving techniques for rendezvous and docking, and for EVA.
Not that these missions were routine. Stafford and Cernan on Gemini 9 had seen their Agena docking target fail to reach orbit — and an inert replacement failed to shed its aerodynamic shroud, so the crew could only rendezvous and not dock. Cernan’s EVA had turned out to be pretty madcap, too. He was supposed to strap himself into a rocket-powered backpack and fly around. To protect Cernan’s fabric pressure suit from the hot gases of the backpack’s rockets, engineers had added a layer of wire mesh to his legs! Fortunately, Cernan’s suit overheated and, blinded by sweat, he was unable to don the backpack at all, probably saving himself from an ugly and fatal accident.
Later missions—Gemini 10, 11 and 12, crewed by Young and Collins, Conrad and Gordon, Lovell and Aldrin — went progressively better.
At the same time, the U.S. matched the accomplishment of the bureau’s Luna 9 by soft-landing Surveyor 1 on the Moon on June 2, 1966, and even improved on it: Surveyor landed under its own rocket power, like a future manned spacecraft, where Luna 9 had bounced on the surface like a basketball. The U.S. did the Russians one better by scouting Apollo landing sites from above with two wildly successful lunar orbiter missions.
The first Apollo launcher and spacecraft were tested in 1966, too, though without astronauts aboard. The next steps were manned Apollo flights, scheduled to begin in February 1967, and the test of the giant Saturn 5 launcher.
As for the Russians—
They tried their own lunar orbiters, modifications of the E-6. The first, called Luna 10, was a success in April — May 1966, though it didn’t carry cameras. Luna 10 did manage to serenade the delegates of the 23rd Party Congress with a rendition of the “Internationale” played from lunar orbit, however.
The next orbiter crashed into Kamchatka. The third got safely on its way to the Moon, but suffered a systems failure en route. Failure. A fourth, Luna 12, finally carried Soviet cameras into lunar orbit.
A follow-up to Luna 9, Luna 13, bounced onto the Moon’s surface near the crater Seleucus on Christmas Eve.
Work proceeded on unmanned tests of the L-1 and its Earth orbital precursor, called Soyuz.
Chelomei’s Proton launcher, following two initial successes, failed in late March, grounding it for several months.
And at Baikonur, the assembly building and launchpads for Russia’s giant Moon launch vehicle, the Carrier, took shape.
As the new leader of the Korolev bureau, which was given the clunky new name of the Central Experimental Design Bureau of Machine-Building, Boris Artemov plowed ahead with Soyuz, with L-1, with the Carrier rocket. He also defied General Kamanin and the Soviet Air Force by creating his own cosmonaut team under Stepan Triyanov. As part of the bureau’s reorganization, it became known as Department 731.
Meanwhile, Yuri Nikolayevich Ribko graduated from the Bauman Higher Technical School and in June 1966 became a full-fledged member of Department 731.
Scorpion 2
Enemy Activity Reported
17
The Launch
Baikonur had changed noticeably since my first trip there, not eight months in the past. Great strides had been made in construction of the Carrier rocket facilities: The giant assembly building, just a skeleton of girders in February, was now enclosed, solid, a monolith on the horizon.
Beyond that, the superstructures and lightning towers of the twin Carrier launchpads rose like church spires. I couldn’t help but be impressed. I had no idea of what the Carrier itself looked like, but if the assembly building and towers gave any clue, it was two or even three times taller than the Soyuz launch vehicle — which seemed gigantic enough to me as I watched it roll out to the pad at Area 1.
Other than the incessant construction, the endless stream of trucks coughing their way past the facilities at Area 1, Baikonur felt the same. I had first come there in March, now I was here in December, with snow on the ground, leaden-gray skies overhead, a cold wind sweeping across the steppe.
The cold wind matched my personal life. Marina and I had barely seen each other in six months. We had met three or four times after our argument about my cosmonaut medical tests, but with my graduation and the end of her studies for the year, she went home to Orel for several weeks, while I plunged into full-time work as a flight tester for the new Soyuz spacecraft. Marina had not returned to Bauman immediately; her “translating” skills had required her to go abroad on a long-term assignment in Germany. She had sent me several letters and postcards care of the bureau’s new “postbox”—Number V-2572—so I still had hope.