A special cone-shaped fairing had been designed to encompass the satellite, which was a small ball, just under two feet in diameter. By replacing the larger weapons’ fairing the R-7 now took on a uniquely stunted appearance. The modified R-7 booster was transported to the launch pad on October 3 Inside the fairing the small met al sphere was mounted on a pneumatic separating device that was designed to trigger about 20 seconds after main engine shutdown. The whole stack weighed about 267,000 kilograms with the satellite making up less than half of one percent of that mass. Around ten thirty in the evening, local time, on October 4th, Glushko’s engines lit up the night with slightly less than the prescribed thrust of 400 tons, and the R-7, carrying its payload designated the PS-1, left for space. Just five and a half minutes later the transition al module fairing opened and the pneumatic piston ejected the satellite into space with about 15 kilo grams of force. Now Korolev and his team waited for confirmation that they had created the world’s first artificial satellite.
R-7 Sputnik launch October 4, 1957
The only way to know that they had succeeded would be to detect the faint radio signal emitting from the satellite as it passed overhead about ninety minutes after launch. Tracking stations in the far east had detected the signal almost immediately, but Korolev would not be satisfied until he heard it himself at Baikonur from a radio truck set up specifically to detect the signal. The space age began with the innocuous beeping of a small radio transmitter flying in a highly elliptical orbit. It was soon dubbed simply Sputnik, which variously translates as “satellite” “companion” or “traveler”.
Sputnik 1 in its fairing
It had been only six weeks since the first successful launch of the R-7. The booster was twenty times more powerful than the A4 and it had evolved in just over a decade. It was capable of throwing nearly five tons around the world but it would prove to be almost useless as a quick response weapon. The propellants took nearly five hours to load and once loaded were extremely difficult to offload. In the very near future, that amount of time in a war situation would constitute an eternity. Long before the R-7 could be fueled and fired, its launch site would be irradiated rubble. Although Korolev didn’t know it yet, time would swiftly overtake his masterpiece. The only thing the R-7 was really any use for was space flight—and for that, it was supremely well-suited.
The flight of Sputnik was a major propaganda victory for the Soviet Union. Premier Khrushchev was so delighted with the unanimously positive global response that he immediately ordered Korolev to repeat the trick in time for the impending 40 anniversary of the Russian revolution. By now most of the problems with preparing Tikhonravov’s original satellite had been overcome and the thrust deficiency in Glushko’s RD-l07 engine had also been surmounted. Nonetheless, to meet Khrushchev’s deadline it was decided to forego the large satellite one more time and use a modification of the Sputnik 1 design, this time with the addition of a small compartment to hold a passenger Korolev ordered the SOB kg satellite to be prepared for launch. This time Sputnik would have live cargo, a dog called Laika. To simplify the requirements for keeping the animal alive it was decided to keep Sputnik 2 (as it would become known) attached to the second stage of the R-7 booster once it reached orbit. On November 3 1957, not even a month after Sputnik, Laika was boosted into another highly elliptical orbit. The mass of the orbiting payload was a significant surprise to American experts, clocking in at over six tons. The dog survived for four days before excessive heat in the tiny cabin finally took its toll.
R-7 Sputnik 2 on pad at Baikonur
Sputnik 2 mockup museum display
Even before the flight of Sputnik 2 the R-7 booster was undergoing the first in a series of important modifications. It was determined that to better improve the chances of launch success, and to eliminate potential problems, the main engines would be reprogrammed. At launch the central core of the rocket, which contained the RD-108 engine, would be throttled back to 80% at launch, while the four RD-107s would also be re-tasked to drop their thrust to 75% just before stage separation. This procedure of throttling back to alleviate dynamic pressure is still common practice on most space launches today.
Less than two weeks after Sputnik 2 burned up in the atmosphere, on April 27 1958, this modified configuration was finally put to the test carrying Tikhonravov’s large satellite which was known as Object 0. Sadly, all the long work on the large satellite disintegrated just over a minute and a half into the flight, however, a fully operational back-up of Object D flew into orbit on May 15, 1958. Object D was swiftly renamed Sputnik 3. It weighed an unprecedented 1327 kg and carried an array of scientific instruments, including a magnetometer, two cosmic ray detectors and a mass spectrometer Although Sputnik 3 lost contact after only 19 days it relayed tens of thousands of measurements back to the ground and convincingly proved that the Americans were not the only ones who could bring scientific results back from space. (Explorer 1 had discovered the earth’s radiation belts the previous February.)
Sputnik 3 mockup museum display
Korolev’s rocket soon revealed its true capabilities as the world’s most practical and durable space launcher; but Glushko was not to be involved in the next upgrade. Korolev needed to add a third stage to the R-7 in order to reach escape velocity from the Earth. (In modern parlance the central core and the strap on boosters of the R-7 are considered the first two stages). An argument ensued between Korolev and Glushko over the choice of propellants that the upper stage should use. Glushko favored the highly toxic and problematic hydrazine while Korolev, always pressed for time, wanted to use the much safer and more familiar kerosene. In what turned out to be the beginnings of a major rift between the two chief designers, Korolev opted, in February 1958, to have the engine built at an independent bureau by Semyon Kosberg. By adding this small upper stage, dubbed the E-1, to the R-7, Korolev was able to begin humanity’s first robotic sorties into deep space.
Three consecutive failures of the revised booster configuration, between September and December of 1958, did little to alleviate the animosity brewing between Korolev and Glushko, but on January 2 1959 the revised three stage rocket took the first spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on its way to the moon. The extra third stage used Kosberg’s RD-0105 engine (which was the first Soviet engine with the ability to start in a vacuum) and was able to push the small 361kg sphere up to escape velocity. A minor malfunction of the booster served to interfere with the probe’s primary objective, which was to crash into the moon. Instead the Luno 1 probe became the first man-made object to be placed into solar orbit, where it made a series of important discoveries. It missed the moon on January 4 by just less than 6000 km.
Next: Part 5
Prev: Part 3
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