First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Politburo could be very supportive towards Korolev when it suited them, although they were not particularly concerned with the subtleties of space hardware. Rocket technology fascinated them more for its glamour and potential political impact than for its hard engineering details. When Korolev’s primary missile and rocket development programme began in 1955, he asked senior members of the Politburo to inspect his work, as Khrushchev recalls in his memoirs:
Korolev came to a Politburo meeting to report on his work. I don’t want to exaggerate but I’d say we gawked at what he had to show us, as if we were a bunch of sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain to us how the rocket worked. We didn’t believe it could fly. We were like peasants in a market place, walking around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough.[4]
Korolev’s colleague Sergei Belotserkovsky (responsible for the cosmonauts’ academic studies) sums up the Politburo’s stance on space affairs. ‘The top people’s attitude to Korolev was purely that of consumers. For as long as he was indispensable, for as long as they needed him to develop missiles as a shield for the Motherland, he was allowed to do whatever was necessary, but the manned space research had to follow on the back of the military work. The point is that Korolev launched his cosmonauts on the very same missiles.’
His principal workhorse was the dual-purpose R-7 missile-space launcher, or ‘Semyorka’ (‘Little Seven’), as it was affectionately known by the men who built it or flew on it. Fuelled with liquid oxygen and kerosene, and incorporating four drop-away side-slung boosters, this was the world’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Each stage or ‘block’ of the vehicle was fitted with one of Glushko’s four-chamber engines. It has to be said that Glushko’s engines were superb – in fact, they are still in use today in the upgraded R-7 rockets that carry modern Soyuz capsules to the orbiting Mir space station. Glushko’s innovation was to design compact fuel pumps and pipework to service four combustion chambers simultaneously. The apparent thrust of twenty separate engines on the R-7 is, in fact, delivered by five.
The first two launches of the R-7 failed, but on August 3, 1957, it flew successfully in a simulated ICBM trajectory, then began its career as a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching ‘Sputnik’, the world’s first artificial satellite.
Andy Aldrin is full of admiration for the speed with which Korolev could conjure up his space triumphs. ‘He and his merry band of rocket engineers tried to go off on a vacation after Sputnik, and they’d rested for about two days when Korolev got a call from Khrushchev. “Comrade, we need you to come to the Kremlin.” Of course he went, and he sat down with the Soviet leadership, and they said, “In a month we have the Fortieth Anniversary of the glorious October Socialist Revolution. We want you to put up another satellite that will do something important.” They proposed a satellite that could broadcast the “Communist Internationale” from space, but Korolev had another idea. He wanted to put a live animal in the satellite, so that he could lay the groundwork for an eventual manned mission; and within a month, from scratch, he and his people completed the spacecraft and launched it.’
Sputnik II went up on November 3, carrying the dog Laika. This was a clear indication of where the Soviet space effort was heading. ‘Americans were shocked by Sputnik, and then Laika. This dark, mysterious, backward country on the other side of the world, that was considered to be thoroughly nasty, had jumped ahead of them.’
A small American rocket at last carried their first satellite, ‘Explorer I’, into orbit on January 31, 1958. Khrushchev disparaged it as ‘a grapefruit’ because it weighed only 14 kg against Sputnik’s 80 kg and Sputnik II’s 500 kg – although Explorer I immediately made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century when Dr Van Allen’s simple instruments detected radiation belts around the earth.[5]
When it came to selecting candidates for the manned space programme in the autumn of 1959, Korolev looked at all the most promising personal files, but it was not until June 18, 1960 that he summoned the twenty successful applicants to OKB-1 in Kaliningrad to see an actual spaceship. (The hardware had not been anywhere near completion until that time.) Alexei Leonov remembers the Chief Designer introducing himself with a little speech designed to put the cosmonauts at ease. ‘He said, “What we’re doing is really the easiest thing in the world. We invent something, find the right people to build it properly, and place lots of orders for components with the best and most experienced factories all around the country. When they at last deliver what we’ve ordered, all we have to do is put the pieces together. It’s not very complicated.” Of course we knew there was more than this to the building of a spaceship.’ But the cosmonauts were touched by Korolev’s warmth and friendliness. ‘My little eagles’ he called them.
According to Leonov, Yuri Gagarin made a good impression in Korolev’s office that day, listening intently and asking pertinent questions about space and rockets. In this formal semi-military context – young recruits being introduced to a superior for the first time – Gagarin’s curiosity might easily have been misread for impertinence, but the Chief Designer was pleased that any of the cosmonauts should ask direct questions. Leonov remembers, ‘He told Yuri to stand up, and he said, “Tell me, my little eagle, about your life and your family.” For ten or twenty minutes it was as if Korolev forgot about the rest of us, and I think he liked Yuri immediately.’
Gherman Titov, a somewhat prideful man, was not cowed by the Chief Designer’s reputation and authoritarian demeanour. ‘What did I know, a young lieutenant with eyes full of courage and scarcely a single sensible thought in my head,’ he admits ruefully. Over the coming months and years his relationship with Korolev never really developed into genuine warmth. ‘Probably, two lions couldn’t exist in the same cage. I don’t want to say I was ever the same calibre of lion as Korolev, but we did have quite a difficult relationship.’
It was Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov who emerged as firm favourites to be taken under the Chief Designer’s wing, although he would prove fiercely loyal and protective towards all the cosmonauts who flew for him and put their trust in his rockets and capsules.
After this first introduction Korolev escorted the cosmonauts into the heart of OKB-1. They went into the main construction area, while Korolev and one of his senior spacecraft designers, Oleg Ivanovsky, started to explain what they were seeing, but it was hard to take things in. There were a dozen spacecraft, lined up neatly, their positions in the rank depending on their current state of construction, from bare shell at one end to near-completion at the other. Archive footage still conveys the extraordinary scene. Each ship consisted of a silvery sphere mounted on top of a conical base covered in wires and pipes, with another reversed cone beneath it, clad in delicately grooved metal vanes. The double-cone section was a detachable equipment module, and the vanes on the lower cone were radiators. The big spheres (everybody called them ‘balls’) were cabins for the crew.[6] The machines had no aerodynamics, no control surfaces or any obvious means of propulsion; no proper landing gear, even. They could not stand on the floor properly, but had to be supported inside metal frames to keep them upright, like unstable buildings propped up with scaffolding. ‘It was something we couldn’t grasp at all,’ says Titov, ‘It was completely incomprehensible to us – a ball without wings, without anything. It wasn’t easy for a pilot to understand. Of course, as pilots, we’d never come across anything to compare it with.’
4
Khrushchev, Nikita,
5
Gatland, Kenneth,
6
Interview with Oleg Ivanovsky. The silver cladding around the ‘ball’ was just a thin layer of reflective foil designed to protect the cabin against harsh solar radiation. The atmospheric heat-shield underneath comprised a much thicker and heavier layer of resin and fibre.