The sensation of Vostok 1’s flight resounded around the world, but the Mercury astronauts training so feverishly in Florida were bitterly disappointed. Preparations were urgently made to counter this important Soviet victory and so, just over three weeks later, von Braun’s team sent Alan Shepard into a 187km high arc across the Atlantic. It was a historic moment, but compared to Korolev’s achievement it seemed almost unimportant. Shepard’s spacecraft weighed 1295 kg and barely scraped space for a couple of minutes. Gagarin’s craft weighed three and a half times as much and flew around the world, only returning so quickly because it was programmed to do so. Although he didn’t know it, this moment was the zenith of Korolev’s career. Despite this amazing accomplishment, things would not get any easier for him as Glushko. Chelomei and Yangel prepared to deprive him of his space monopoly. Complicating the situation enormously was the proclamation which had been voiced by President John F. Kennedy just days after Shepard’s flight NASA was going to send men to the moon and they meant to do it in nine years. Korolev did not intend to settle for second place in that race.
Although the Vostok program seemed to be under firm control, the ambitious Molniya booster would remain problematic in its infancy. In fact out of the 26 times it flew between 1961 and 1965, about 50% failed totally while few of the remaining successful launches fulfilled their mission mandate. In early 1964 Molniya would be upgraded and would ultimately end up with an interchange able third stage. This version would fly nearly 300 flights and would become known as the Molniya-M booster.
R-7 / Nostok launch
On August ,6 1961 another R-7/E- I booster combination took Vostok 2, carrying the second Soviet cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, into orbit, This time the cosmonaut was to stay in space for one day, one hour and eighteen minutes. Once again during the final leg of the mission the instrument module failed to separate from the cabin. Despite this problem it was not quite as serious as The following February Chelomei sold the idea for the UR 500 directly to Khrushchev, who subsequently approved its development. Both the UR-200 and the UR-500 were to be built at Chelomei’s Krunichev factory. Chelomei seemed to have outmaneuvered Korolev by simply promising the Soviet leadership what they wanted; a booster that could be an effective ICBM as well as a valid space launcher. Funding had literally been pulled from Korolev and transferred to Chelomei, which in hindsight seems quite incredible since Chelomei had yet to build any kind of booster on the scale of the R-7, much less fly one that faced by Titov’s counterpart in the West. Just a month earlier America’s second astronaut, Gus Grissom, had flown a similar mission profile to Alan Shepard’s. Shortly after splashdown the hatch on Liberty Bell 7 blew prematurely and the capsule sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, almost taking Grissom with it. By comparison Titov, bailed out, parachuted down to the village of Krasniy Kut and immediately indulged in a bottle of beer!
As 1961 drew to a close there was a period of relative calm in Korolev’s launch schedule. The next manned flight was a year away and so was the next attempt at reaching the planets. Just five days prior to Titov’s flight the Soviet Central Committee had renewed their interest in Chelomei’s ideas for two ICBM/space launchers that used storable propellants. He called them the UR 200 and the UR-500. In November Chelomei approached Glushko to provide him with engines for his proposed big boosters. Glushko apparently welcomed the opportunity to assist Korolev’s competitor.
Chelomei soon returned to his ambitious plans for a space- plane which could be used, not only for manned Mars missions, but also as an answer to the American X-20/Dyna- Soar orbital bomber. He had been working quietly since 1960 drawing up the specifications for his winged space craft, and by the end of 1961, when Korolev was re-grouping, Chelomei launched his prototype aboard one of Yangel’s R-12 missiles from Kapustin Yar. The 750 kg MP-l space- plane successfully traveled a suborbital arc on December 27 1961 to an altitude of 405 km before reentering at almost 4 km per second and landing intact near Lake Balkhash. Astonishingly the vehicle was completely intact and showed only minor heat damage. The prototype spacecraft had been conceived, built, and flown, in almost total obscurity, all in the space of eighteen months.
UR 500
All through the Spring of 1962 the Americans made important strides toward catching up with the Russians. In February, and again in May, the Mercury finally made it into orbit atop the hastily retooled Atlas ICBM. Neither John Glenn’s nor Scott Carpenter’s flights were without mishap. Glenn had to re-enter with his retro-pack attached, an eerily similar problem to that faced by Gagarin and Titov, while Carpenter reentered with almost no maneuvering fuel and was believed dead by the American public for several long hours before he was recovered hundreds of miles away from his intended landing site.
Korolev was painfully aware that the Americans were developing high powered cryogenic engines for their ICBMs. In fact the use of liquid hydrogen as a propellant was now finally becoming feasible. It had been known since the end of the I 9 century that liquefied hydrogen (LH2) burned in conjunction with liquid oxygen, would provide the biggest “bang for the buck” because of the potential energy released in relation to the weight of the propellant. Up until this time it had not been believed possible to work with LH2 but an American contractor. Convair, who had built the Atlas missile, had been working painstakingly toward perfecting a hydrogen engine since 1956. In May of 1962 a first attempt had been made at flying this engine on the Centaur upper stage but the test was a failure. Korolev also knew that if he was to get the sort of thrust necessary to launch a manned lunar mission he was going to need the most efficient engines possible. However, he was fighting a losing battle because engines that used liquid oxygen with kerosene or alcohol were under siege, since they couldn’t easily be used to quickly launch an ICBM. A hydrogen engine would do nothing but complicate and delay an ICBM even further since the handling and utilization of the super-cooled liquid was considered to be much too difficult.
Korolev pleaded with Glushko to build him a high-power cryogenic engine for his proposed lunar launcher but Glushko was adamant that he was going to stick with the toxic mixtures of nitric acid and hydrazine. Korolev had no choice but to look elsewhere. However, Glushko did not want to be shut out of any large scale rocket program and so he went over Korolev’s head to try and force the use of storable propellants. Since Glushko had already commit ted to building a large engine for Chelomei’s giant UR-S00 he hoped to force Korolev to accept his position so he could use the same engine for both. The day after John Glenn’s flight, Korolev and Glushko finally argued themselves into separate corners. Korolev decided to do the job without Glushko and so he turned over the engine construction to a less experienced design bureau.
All through the Spring of 1962 Korolev and his OKB-1 team worked on refining the details of their new super booster, which was now designated the N-1. The scale of the project would totally dwarf the R-7. Unlike in America where there seemed to be a gradual evolution from smaller to larger rockets culminating with the Saturn V. the Soviets were aiming to bypass the equivalents of the Titan and Saturn IB (both of which were used for manned flights) and jump straight to a 360 foot tall behemoth. This bold decision prompted some concern amongst Korolev’s peers and so smaller variants of the N-1 were proposed, but they would never fly. By early summer Korolev was forced to defend his desire to use high energy cryogenic propellants and Glushko was there again, trying to convince the Committee otherwise. This time the cards fell in Korolev’s favor causing the rift between the two designers to grow even wider. The N-1 booster program would be the largest ever under taken in the Soviet Union and it would be mainly contracted to all of the same designers that had worked on the R-7, with one obvious and notable exception. Glushko would be replaced by Nikolai Kuznetsov’s OKB-276 bureau, which would supply the engines.
That very same summer Tikhonravov’s plans for an “upgraded” Vostok came back onto the table. It had become clear that something much bigger than the old Vostok would be necessary to send humans to the Moon or Mars and so a multi-module successor had been discussed. Korolev wrestled back and forth between an array of possible configurations that involved multiple dock ings, earth orbit rendezvous, lunar orbit rendezvous and other methods. It was assumed that whatever vehicle was chosen it would likely have to dock in earth orbit and refuel, a procedure that was also causing sleepless nights in the von Braun household. These talks ultimately gave birth to the prototype of Russia’s most successful spacecraft, the Soyuz.
While these issues were being debated the Vostok and planetary programs blossomed back to life. On August 11, the third manned Vostok raced into the sky above Baikonur to be followed just under 24 hours later by Vostok 4. Andrei Nikolayev and Pavel Popovitch spent just under four and three days, respectively, in orbit. Their joint flight seemed a brazen publicity stunt designed to remove some of the luster from the much more visible Mercury program. It did, however, have much more practical goals, Korolev now knew he could fly two ships simultaneously and that they could, with considerable care, be brought within close range of one another. This would be critical if Soyuz was to fulfill its mandate and a Russian was to walk on the moon.
The flush of success from Vostok was soon quashed when just two weeks later, on August 25, 1962, another Venera/Molniya failed to reach Earth orbit, amazingly this failure was repeated again on September 5 and again on September 12. By October 24, 1962 a third Mars probe exploded in orbit before one finally made it to Mars distance, with a launch on November 5, 1962.This stunningly poor performance by the Molniya must have been a huge burden to Korolev. Just three days after getting Mars-1 off the ground yet another Molniya failed, destroying a second Mars probe in less than eleven days. As the new year began, Korolev’s team switched their attention back to the Moon. On January 4, 1963 a Luna probe ended up stuck in Earth orbit and on February 2 one ended up spattering the Pacific ocean with debris. Finally, on April 4, a third attempt made it out of orbit but missed the moon by over 8500 km.
While this difficult string of failures continued, a group of Soviet politicians were concocting another publicity coup. It was decided that a woman should be launched into space at the earliest possible date. Considerable resistance to this idea emanated from the design bureaus and the Air Force, but the idea was sanctioned from lofty heights inside the Kremlin and so the next Vostok mission would involve another double flight, but this time one of the pilots would be chosen from a select group of highly trained female candidates.
Next: Part 8
Prev: Part 6
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