After the end of the Cold war, and thanks to the era of glasnost, the actual structure of the Soviet space bureaucracy was finally revealed to the west, and in no better place than in the superb book Challenge to Apollo by space scholar Asif Siddiqi. In this book the intricate details of Soviet space policy are meticulously outlined and the veil of half-truths and political expediencies are removed to reveal a system completely alien to anything conceived in the West. The system which created Sputnik, Vostok, Voskhod, Lunokhod, Venera, Soyuz, Salyut and Mir and a host of other extraordinary space achievements was, like its Western counterpart, spawned by enthusiastic rocketeers in the 930’s, nourished and enriched by Nazi German plunder and then appropriated by the military establishment. But if these things sound familiar and recognizable, think again — the parallels are superficial.
Both the Soviets and the Americans recognized the military value of the astounding breakthroughs discovered in the summer of 1945 at Peenemunde, but while the different branches of the American military would briefly squabble over the use of these assets, the feuding came to an abrupt end in 1958 when President Eisenhower decreed the establishment of a civilian agency to oversee the course of America’s space program. In Stalin’s Russia no such decree was ever issued and the fledgling Soviet space program was doomed to remain under the jurisdiction of powerful military agencies. There would be no Russian equivalent to NASA (at least not until 1992 when Boris Yeltsin created the Russian Space Agency).The formation of NASA allowed Wernher von Braun to pry himself free of his military overseers and forge ahead with his lifetime goal of space exploration, but the Russian most identified as his counterpart, Sergei Korolev, would never entirely shed the yolk of Soviet military oversight. Korolev was forever besieged by competitive designers, engineers, scientists, soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats and worst of all dangerous intelligence mandarins who had literally threatened his life and made him wary of his Kremlin overseers.
In Challenge to Apollo, author Siddiqi makes a persuasive case for there being two different versions of Soviet space history. There is the version sanctioned and rubber stamped by the communist apparatus and then there is the version which came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The latter version is far more colorful and complex and undoubtedly closer to the truth. Both the “official” history and the true history share many obvious similarities and they both certainly credit Korolev with a position of pre-eminence, although that was not the case during his lifetime. In fact Korolev would get no official recognition while he was alive.
In the last year of World War II, Korolev would be partially rehabilitated. His record was not yet expunged and so technically he was still a convict. The stories intimate that it was Glushko who informed the military of Korolev’s importance, and suggested that he should be released and put to work. Even Korolev’s mother had pleaded directly to Stalin to have her son exonerated, but although he had been moved from the Gulag in Siberia back to a less harrowing prison near Moscow, it would not be until August 1944 that he would finally be released, almost exactly six years after his arrest. Glushko would be released the same day. (Coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time, Von Braun was arrested by the Gestapo and held in prison for 12 days—also with out charges.) In a clear indication of his passion for rockets, Korolev remained for another year at the same prison, working as a free man on rocket and jet assisted take off for airplanes (JATO). For a brief time he and Glushko worked together, with Korolev acting as Glushko’s deputy. Then on September 8 1945 Korolev was sent to Germany as a newly enrolled colonel in the Red Army. On his arrival he was integrated into an organization known as lnstitut Robe (Rocket Manufacturing and Development), a secret operation whose task was to track down and capture German scientists and technology. The institute comprised over 1000 staff, half German, half Russian, with 50 people from Peenemunde and one key German POW, Helmut Grottrup. Just two days before Korolev’s arrival, Valentin Glushko, who had been there since the Spring, had successfully fired his first capturedV2 engine.
Korolev and his colleagues were astonished by Von Braun’s A-4/V2 rocket, a 46 foot tall, 3 ton alcohol and oxygen propelled missile with a range of 225 miles. At the time, Russian rockets were, at best, generating a few hundred pounds of thrust, while theV2 was capable of 45,000 pounds. Despite his early work with Tsander, Korolev had shifted his enthusiasm to solid rockets — until he encountered theV2.
V2 at Cuxhaven
A month later Glushko and Korolev took a trip to Cuxhaven, a town on the North Sea about 100 km west of Hamburg, where they would be on hand to see a British launch of a captured V2 rocket. They reported what they witnessed back to Moscow and it swiftly became clear to Stalin and his sycophantic inner circle that this new rocket technology represented a formidable weapon. Stalin ordered the immediate scouring of the German countryside for every shred of equipment, paperwork or personnel, all with the intention of shipping them back to Russia. One thing in particular attracted the Soviet leader’s attention, reports of a design for a Nazi space bomber capable of reaching New York.
At this very early stage a rivalry broke out between the Soviet Air Force and the Artillery Directorate. Both wanted to take control of this new missile technology and both thought they had valid claims to do so. The Soviet artillery had used the Katushya rocket system to great effect during the war and yet the Air Force had been using early rockets to help with primitive JATO. A similar rivalry had existed in the USA but it had all but vanished with the formation of NASA. The Soviet rivalry would continue well into the 1970’s.The powerful artillery directorate would ultimately play the strongest hand and create the Soviet strategic missile infrastructure. The Air Force would take charge of the cosmonauts and rocket engine development. So in effect nothing changed, the Air Force would continue to build propulsion systems and train pilots to fly the vehicles, while the Artillery would continue to launch the rockets, it may have seemed an obvious solution at the time but it did not bode well for those who were interested in flying people on rockets.
The Artillery commanders had little comprehension of this advanced rocket technology and so they had to rely on men like Korolev and Glushko to make the technical decisions, This uneasy alliance would create a difficult organizational structure in the years ahead since it led to a sort-of cult of personalities, with each major player having his own design bureau, and each having his own benefactors within the military and the Kremlin.
An assortment of institutes and commissions were established over the next few years, all with the ultimate goal of understanding and duplicating the Ger man A-4N2. The largest of these new organizations was called Institute Nordhausen and Korolev was to be the second in command, a surprisingly elevated position for a recently released convict. Inside the labyrinth of bureaucracy at Institute Nordhausen was a veritable Who’s Who of future Soviet space leaders. Glushko, Korolev, Vasiliy Mishin, Vladimir Barmin, Boris Chertok, Nikolai Pilyugin, Mikhail Ryazaniski and the German, Helmut Grottrup.
By the summer of 946 Stalin had signed an order which would push missile development to the forefront of the Soviet military apparatus, this moment heralded the birth of the Cold War, predating the first Soviet atomic bomb by three years. The single most important figure in this early space bureaucracy was the Minister of Armaments, Dimitry Ustinov. It’s tempting to find a counterpart in the west for Ustinov, but there really isn’t one. Ustinov would wield unprecedented power over the future Soviet space program and there was no one in the west who had anything even approaching his level of influence. It’s almost as though the NASA administrator, the head of the armed services committee and a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were all rolled into one person. Such was Ustinov’s role.
Despite assurances given to the contrary, in late 1946 the Germans captured at Peenemünde, including Grottrup, were forcibly shipped back to the Soviet Union and ensconced into one small aspect of a new organization which was called NII-88. This facility had branches that had been manufacturing armaments since the early part of the 20 century and was located near Kaliningrad, a suburb about 20 km north east of Moscow. NII-88 would ultimately evolve into the most famous facility in the future Soviet space program and would be variously known as OKB-1, TsKBEM, NPO Energia, Prime Design Bureau GKB and finally today as SR Korolev RSC Energia.
The Air Force, not to be outdone, took the remnants of RNII and established their own special design bureau for research into large rocket engines, this would be the beginnings of Glushko’s empire later known variously as OKB- 456 and NPO Energomash. It was located in a north west suburb of Moscow, called Khimki. Other members of the, now subsumed, Institute Rabe would find themselves in charge of different bureaus, each with a specific task. By the end of 1946 this group would be holding meetings and would ultimately become known as the Council of Chief Designers. Korolev in charge of missiles, Glushko for engines, Barmin for launch pads, Pilyugin for automatic flight controls, Ryazinsky for radio controls and Viktor Kuznetsov, who would take care of gyroscopes.
In early 1947 Korolev had already learned as much as he could from the Ger man A4 and he was keen to push ahead with a much more advanced Russian design. The A4 assembly line was rebuilt and had been able to reconstruct IS A4s from the remaining parts captured in Germany. After about a 50% success rate with the captured German A4s, word came from above that Korolev was to start construction on an all-Russian derivative, which was to be designated the R-1.This would be an almost identical copy of the A4, complete with a replica of the German engine, but this engine would be Russian, built by Glushko, and designated the R-100.
The creation of this first large booster involved over 35 different manufacturing plants and 3 research institutes. It would make its first successful flight on October 10, 1948, almost exactly one year after the Russians had launched their first German-built A4. Working with the benefit of advice from the captured Germans, the R-1 launch infrastructure was almost identical to that used during the war by the Nazis, the R-1 was transported and elevated on a special vehicle that used an erection armature to stand the rocket vertically. It was accompanied by an armored control car, hydrogen peroxide tankers for providing fuel to the turbines, peroxide warming units, liquid oxygen and alcohol tankers, transformer trailers, a fire fighting team and various electrical and battery trucks. The launches of both the captured A4s and the newly minted R-1s were conducted at a military facility called Kapustin Yar, halfway between the town of Volgograd and the Russian-Kazakhstan border.
R-1 launch at Kapustin Yar
The R-1 was launched twelve times with only three failures, its range was only slightly more than theA4 but it served to convince Ustinov and the other military leaders that Korolev and his team were making good progress. Meanwhile, the Germans were working up their own version of an advanced A4. This inevitably caused a problem as the Russians had their own plans for a more powerful design of their own, called predictably, the R-2.A debate ensued about the merits of the two designs before it was decided to proceed with the Russian proposal.
While discussions continued, regarding the much more powerful R-2 launcher, Korolev and his team continued to fly and gradually upgrade the R-1 Variants included the R- IA which on April 21, 1949 became the first so-called geophysical rocket, as it successfully took scientific instruments to an altitude of 110 km and returned them via parachute. The R-IV took two dogs up to 101 km and returned them safely on July 22, 1951. This process continued throughout the summer and fall of 1951 with varying degrees of success and minor modifications to the payload portion of the rocket. Meanwhile, the R-2 made its first successful flight on October 26, 1950.
The R-2 was about three meters taller than the R-1, although an experimental version flown a year earlier was slightly smaller. The main improvement over the R-1 was a form of primitive staging with the singular purpose of separating the warhead from the booster. Between October and December twelve R-2s were launched and all of them failed. However, later derivatives of the R-2 would be launched right up until 1960, most of them in pursuit of basic research.
R-2 on pad at Kapustin Yar
The next booster on Korolev’s table was the R-3 and it would incorporate some of the most fundamental changes yet. Korolev designed the R-3 to use its fuel tanks as part of the structure of the rocket, in much the same way as the Americans’ Atlas missile. He also wanted to change the fuel from alcohol to kerosene, potentially adding another 20% to the rocket’s lifting power Most western preconceptions of the Soviet system would preclude the idea of encouraging bidding for contracts, but that is exactly what Korolev did with the R-3, soliciting offers to supply the new, more powerful, engines required, not only from Glushko, but also from other smaller engine builders. The new engine would have to produce over 100 tons of thrust and the R-3 would stand almost twice the height of the R-1, with a proposed range of 3000 km. Enormous pressure was being exerted by the Kremlin to get an operational ICBM system deployed. It soon became clear that the huge advances necessary for the R-3 were too much to accomplish in the short time available and so the R-3 was shelved, in favor of a smaller derivative called the R-5. Much of the advanced work done on the R-3 by Glushko and Korolev would ultimately benefit later heavy-lift vehicles but in the meantime the incremental step represented by the R-5 seemed more prudent. Only marginally larger than the R-2, the R-5 would make its first flight in March of 1953. Gone was the kerosene engine, replaced once again by alcohol, but the booster was soon co-opted from its primary purpose. Variants of the R-5 flew scientific payloads under the designations R-SA, R-5B, R-5V and R-5R. In 1958 the R-5 achieved an altitude record and as late as 1964 an R-5V was even used to test some equipment for the manned Soyuz program.
In early 1950, the promise of the R-3 had led another engineer, Mikhail Tikhonravov, to investigate the possibility of using the launcher to send a payload to orbital velocity. Tikhonravov had been speculating on such things for nearly three years and when he looked at the R-3 he realized that the rocket would be powerful enough to make his notions feasible. He mentioned these ideas to Korolev who embraced them enthusiastically. The following month Korolev persuaded Ustinov to allow him to restructure his organization, changing his department from the Nil-88 Special Design Bureau Department 3 (SKB-3) to Special Design Bureau #1( OKB-1), with Korolev in charge as chief designer of missiles. By October of 1950 the Germans were completely removed from all classified work. They were sent back to Germany incrementally between January 1952 and 1954.
R-5A on pad at Kapustin Yar
The Russian team now forged ahead independent of foreign influence, and by October of 1951 Tikhonravov was even writing about trips to the moon in the Soviet press. Just a month later the R-2 was officially deployed as a weapons system and began to be manufactured in increasing numbers, despite the fact that it required awkward fueling procedures. Problems with the R-3 delayed further progress and the decision to implement the R-5 model resulted in no new launch vehicles leaving the ground successfully until April 2, 1953. The first two launch attempts of the R-5 failed but the third flight reached its target. Over the course of 1953 fifteen R-5 launches would take place, with only two failures. For the next two years Korolev and his team began to further investigate the possibility of elaborate multi-stage boosters. Meanwhile, Glushko was having considerable difficulty with his new engine, the RD-110; the kerosene fuel generated considerably more thrust and also equivalent increases in pressures. As far back as his days with the GDL Glushko had found it difficult to work with super cold propellants such as liquid oxygen, and he was keen to drop them in favor of storable fuels.
As early as February 1953 the specifications had been nailed down for an even bigger booster than the R-3. Its range would be 7000km, the thrust would be over 270 tons and it would be an entirely original and distinct design, consisting of a central rocket section with four strap-on boosters.
Next: Part 3
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