The whole structure looked like an Arabian minaret, the difference being that a building couldn’t explode with the strength of an atomic bomb.
“Well, that wouldn’t have happened with Voskhod,” Saditsky joked, knowing full well that Voskhod had no such escape rocket: A disaster on the pad would have meant death to its crew.
“Grachev wants his bonus,” said another pilot. Grachev was the designer of the escape rocket. His bureau would get a financial bonus for a “flight test.”
We saw the successful parachute deployment, and began to relax when General Kamanin and one of his aides suddenly appeared in the room. “Into the hallway, now!”
“What’s the problem?” someone asked.
“Look for yourself.” Kamanin pointed to the pad.
We had been so busy watching the escape rocket and the parachute that we forgot about the vehicle itself. The escape rocket had ignited the fuel in the Soyuz propulsion module and upper stages. Flames were shooting into the sky, and more ominously, flowing down the length of the vehicle to the very large amounts of explosive fuel in the first stage.
No one needed further encouragement as we pushed out of that room with its big glass windows and into a narrow corridor. The door was not even closed when we saw a flash of light, followed three seconds later by a whump! Then another and another. I lost count of the not-so-distant explosions, which knocked plaster off the walls and tiles off the ceiling, making the lightbulbs jerk. We almost choked on the dust.
Then there was nothing.
When I was a child, living with my mother in the Crimea, where my father was stationed, we went through an earthquake. This felt very much like that — short, violent shaking, then nothing. But you feel afraid to look. Has it stopped?
Some brave soul pushed open the door to the room where we had all been standing. I don’t know which sight was more frightening — the shattered spire of the Soyuz rocket, now spewing black smoke hundreds of meters into the air, the twisted girders of the gantry (how many people had just been killed, I wondered? Artemov?), or the room itself, with the windows blown out, furniture upended, shards of glass embedded in the walls. We would have been riddled.
It turned out that only one officer was killed, a specialist who had tried to take cover behind a concrete wall when he saw the coming explosion. Several other members of the launch team were injured. Artemov was safe.
That was the end of 1966, a year of one failure after another.
18
The Opening
The commission investigating the latest Soyuz mishap quickly determined the cause — which was so odd and unexpected that Triyanov insisted on reading the final conclusion out loud to his pupils in the kindergarten, a group that included not only me and Yastrebov, but also Yeliseyev and Kubasov, the first members of Department 731 to be included in Soyuz flight crews.
“First, the cause of the shutdown was a broken fuel line in one of the first-stage strap-on boosters. Those responsible have been punished.
“Now, the question remained: What triggered the escape rocket? It was designed to fire if gryoscopes in the core stage noted a deviation in the planned trajectory, or if one of the strap-ons separated prematurely—” By this time I had seen film of just this amazing event, from early R-7 failures. “—Or if the boosters underperformed so badly that the vehicle would not reach orbit. None of those conditions applied.”
“And those responsible have been punished,” Yastrebov said, to growing amusement.
“To continue… another possible cause was a signal from the control center, which was not sent. Yet another was the possibility that moving the gantries back into place somehow jarred the rocket, but the gantries did not even touch the rocket. Yet, all of those responsible have been punished.” Now there was open laughter, from Triyanov, too. He closed up the report.
“That’s it?” Yastrebov said. “Where’s the conclusion?”
Triyanov smiled. “I’ll give you a hint. The gyroscopes were powered down, but not completely off. Anyone?”
No one seemed willing to venture a guess, so I raised my hand. “The Earth moved.”
Triyanov bowed his head. “Correct. The gyroscopes sensed the rotation of the Earth and judged that the whole vehicle was off course, igniting the escape rocket. Junior engineer Ribko escapes punishment.”
I wish I could say that my “brilliant” answer was the result of logical thinking and detailed knowledge of Soyuz guidance systems, but it was an intuitive guess: When I heard the word gyroscope, I immediately saw a spinning ball, which became the Earth itself.
I became aware that several of my colleagues were staring at me. I chose to believe some of them were simply noticing me for the first time, rather than hating me on sight.
So repairs were made to the Soyuz launcher and spacecraft, and another vehicle was targeted for launch no earlier than February 7, 1967—less than two weeks from that date. The manned twin launches would take place in April. We had to hurry: Having completed its Gemini program, America was even now getting ready to launch three astronauts into Earth orbit aboard the first manned Apollo. Their launch was scheduled for February 16. As I had been doing several days every week for the past three months, I got on the bureau’s bus heading for the Chkalov air base.
At this time my work in the department involved pressure suits and equipment for extra-vehicular activity, since the bureau’s plans for a manned lunar landing called for the pilot-cosmonaut to transfer from the Soyuz to the L-3 lunar lander using this method — an insane, impractical one I thought even then, but the construction of an internal transfer tunnel between the two vehicles was not possible because of the arrangement of the modules, and for reasons of weight.
As of January 1967, the Americans had performed ten hours of tests in open space, with results varying from the positive to the near disastrous. We had allowed Leonov to float at the end of his tether (in more ways than one) from the second Voskhod for less than ten minutes, and he had almost lost his life trying to reenter the spacecraft. His suit ballooned to rigidity, preventing him from bending enough to get back inside. He had actually let air out of his suit to make it more flexible, risking the bends as he did.
For the docking of the first two manned Soyuz craft, we had to send two men in pressure suits from one craft to the other. One cosmonaut would be launched first, alone, in the active ship, while a crew of three followed a day later in the target vehicle.
Why two and not one, as would be the case in the real lunar mission? During our very first tests with a cosmonaut wearing his bulky pressure suit and backpack, we saw that it was impossible for him to get through the exit hatch in the Soyuz orbital module. It was just too small. I know, because I was one of the bureau engineers who tried on several occasions to get through that hatch, both on the ground and, in one very unpleasant test, in our Tu-104 weightless laboratory.
How could that have happened? Well, some State decree two years back had specified that the pressure suit and backpack would be smaller than they actually turned out to be, and the hatch of the spacecraft had been designed to those outdated measurements. (Those responsible, of course, have been punished.)
Artemov and the other chiefs at the bureau had done their share of screaming at Severin, head of the organization that designed the pressure suit, but he pointed out — quite rightly — that the suit and backpack were new technology, that changes had had to be made based on lessons from Leonov’s close call, and why couldn’t the hatch be made a little wider?