It was Friedrich Tsander, in late 1931, who engineered the earliest success for the Moscow branch of the Group to Study Reaction Propulsion (GIRD), one of the first Russian “rocket clubs”. Tsander was the originator of the OR-I, a primitive rocket engine that he had built in the late 1920’s from a welding torch and a sparkplug. Much like the VfR in Germany, GIRD was a loosely based group of individuals spread across the Soviet Union. Its mandate, such as it was, involved aviation, gliding, chemical research and a host of other interests and disciplines. It formed when Tsander met Sergei Pavlovich Korolev in the summer of 1931. Since Tsander was not interested in being a manager of the organization, he left that task to his bright, young protégé. Korolev and Tsander had begun their early work in a wine-cellar, where they hosted the Moscow branch of GIRD. By May of 1932 Korolev replaced Tsander as the group’s administrative leader.
Running almost concurrently with GIRD was another group that was known as the GDL. The so-called Gas Dynamics Laboratory had evolved from a decades-old military facility whose principal work had been with solid fuel rockets, but the GDL also did research with the new liquid propellants. If GDL had any equivalent in the west it might be the U.S. Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. JPL’s earliest founders would later leave to found Aerojet, a formidable contractor and builder of rocket engines, while the GDL would do likewise when its most famous son, Valentin Glushko, would create Special Design Bureau (OKB) 456. It’s difficult to find an obvious counterpart in the west for Glushko. His direct influence on engine designs would extend through most of the 2O century, beginning in the 1920’s and culminating in the 1980’s at which point he had merged his own engine design bureau (OKB- 456) with the more illustrious OKB-1 (Korolev’s bureau) to create the almost monolithic Rocket & Space Corporation Energia. After his death, the Glushko engine division would once more leave the Energia umbrella and revert to a stand-alone organization called NPO Energomash.
Sergei Korolev
Valentin Glushko
GIRD’s first liquid fuel rocket, incidentally not designed by Korolev, was launched on August I 7 1933. Many people in the West think that Korolev was an engineer and a scientist and that he had a hand in the machinations of designing most of the hardware. This probably stems from his title, which came later in life, of Chief Designer. Korolev was certainly a capable engineer, he had built and flown his own aircraft in his youth, but his greatest strength lay in his management skills. The comparisons to Wernher von Braun are well founded in that respect. Both men were brilliant managers, both were excellent strategists (an important asset when dealing with politicians) and both had a clear vision of what they wanted. However, whereas von Braun was, first and foremost, the father of the Redstone and Saturn launch vehicles, it would be doing a disservice to Korolev to suggest that he only produced a handful of boosters. He was the spiritual father of the R-7 and the giant N-1 lunar boosters and the spacecraft that flew on them. He was also the guiding hand behind many of the Soviets’ robotic space vehicles. Another significant difference seems to be that von Braun had years of experience with engines, whereas Korolev was always at a disadvantage in that area, frequently requiring the assistance of Glushko, or of other less well-known engine designers, such as Alexei Isayev and Nikolai Kuznetsov.
Just one month after GIRD’s first successful rocket flight the group consolidated operations with its erstwhile competitor the GDL, and the new hybrid became known as RNII. Unfortunately the GDL engineers had been working with solid propellants since the early 1920’s and at first they didn’t think much of the GIRD team, or their liquid fueled rockets. However, they gradually put their differences behind them and work continued for the next six years until the sadistic and paranoid psychotics under Stalin’s command turned a baleful eye on the group. The Army officer who had helped bring GDL and GIRD together was one of the first casualties, he was tried and summarily executed on virtually no evidence of any crime. Inevitably, anyone who had spoken to him came under suspicion, including the young engineers at RNII. Two of the principal members of the group were arrested and subsequently tortured until, under great pressure, they falsely accused and denounced both Glushko and Korolev for anti-Soviet activities. Glushko was arrested in March 1938 and Korolev, hospitalized at the time, was detained three months later. Korolev was sentenced to ten years hard labor in one of the harshest prison camps in the Gulag, while Glushko was sent to serve eight years in a slightly less severe prison near Moscow.
Joseph Stalin’s regime was one of the most callous, malicious and ultimately self-destructive governments in the history of the world. Millions of mostly innocent people were imprisoned or executed during his tenure. This paranoid megalomania seems to have come directly from Stalin himself and his instructions were viciously implemented by the security forces under his command. It was during Stalin’s tenure that Soviet rocketry began to flourish, and so a cloak of secrecy and obfuscation was drawn around everything involving missiles, This mantle remained impenetrable for almost fifty years and effectively concealed from the world the true scale and scope of the Soviet space program.
Next: Soviet-Russian Space
Program Pt. 2
Prev: Intro to Soviet-Russian Space Program
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