On the 14 of June 1963, just one month after the last Mercury astronaut, Gordon Cooper, had flown 22 orbits in his Faith 7 Mercury capsule, Valeri Bykovsky departed for what would be a five day flight. Two days later Korolev’s team notched up another first in the record books when they successfully placed Vostok 6 carrying 26 year-old Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova into orbit around the Earth. The flight did little to increase the Soviet’s understanding of space flight in general, but it did score another major political victory for Korolev and his team. It was a triumphant end to the Vostok program. Despite the long string of failures that the R-7/Molniya had suffered in 1962- 63, no one had been injured by an R- Tereshkova parachuted to safety no one suspected that the Vostok program would end with her flight. There were in fact extensive plans to fly several more Vostoks to higher altitudes, some with research animals. These plans were to “fill in the gap” while the next generation of spacecraft was being prepared. However, a situation developed which was very similar to that which had arisen in the USA.
Mercury had been a good beginning but the small capsule was barely capable of doing much more than flying around in circles. If anyone was to actually get to the moon it would require learning an entirely new skill set, including rendezvous, docking, space walks, ground tracking of multiple vehicles, celestial navigation procedures, and of course actually building the hardware. They would need fuel cells, spacesuits, cold-start engines even new kinds of food. It was abundantly clear that Apollo would not be ready for several years so the task was handed to NASA engineer Jim Chamberlin and his team to make an upgraded Mercury spacecraft, to be called Gemini. It was to be capable of enabling and developing all of these new technologies. In the Soviet Union, Korolev’s lunar vehicle was even further behind than Apollo and he faced the same problems as Chamberlin.
Korolev didn’t have the budget or the support to instigate an entirely new program like Gemini, and Gemini was to be launched on an ICBM using storable propellants, an option that Korolev wouldn’t even consider His rival Chelomei even started designing a spacecraft that looked a little like a cross between a Gemini and an Apollo. to be part of a military space station, and Chelomei was firmly in the dual-purpose ICBM/space launcher camp. It was rumored that pressure began to be exerted from the Kremlin to counter the Americans’ plans by launching a manned flight with, not two, but three occupants. It’s still the subject of some debate as to whether Korolev actually wanted this development to take place. He was already inundated with projects, primarily for the military, and he desperately wanted to concentrate on his lunar booster and spacecraft. but there are some who say he couldn’t stand to be upstaged by the Americans and so he embraced the plans to create a multi-man spacecraft from the shells of the remaining Vostoks.
On November 11, 1963, OKB-1 lost another Molniya / Venera probe in Earth orbit. Apart from military work this concluded Korolev’s space launches for 1963.A minor triumph occurred on 30 January 1964 when the three-stage R-7 managed to launch two Elektron science satellites simultaneously from one launcher The two small satellites were designed to examine the Earth’s radiation belts in preparation for long duration manned missions. On February 4, 1964, Korolev was formally instructed to convert the Vostok for advanced uses. Between February I 9 and March 27 a further four Molniya vehicles failed to deliver their four Venus-bound payloads. At this point any hope of making the R-7 a viable interplanetary launcher must have been seriously in question. Just six days later another Venera managed to get off the ground and on its way to Venus, this time it was renamed Zond-1. It was originally intended to deploy a lander onto Venus but the vehicle lost contact just over a month into the flight. Two weeks later, yet another unmanned Russian lunar lander failed to reach earth orbit. Meanwhile, the Americans had successfully launched the first unmanned Gemini.
The consistent failure of the Molniya four stage R-7 was somewhat offset by the successful launches of a more powerful three stage R-7 that later became known as the Voskhod launcher. The R-7 would be equipped with a third stage (I module) powered by the reliable and more potent RD- 108 engine, instead of the usual R-0109.This configuration was launched successfully for the first time in late 1963 carrying Zenit-4, a military spy satellite that Korolev had built around a Vostok shell. The next three flights of this R-7/Zenit booster were on May 18, 1964, July 11 and September 13. All carried similar Zenit satellites and all worked perfectly.
The first flight of an Apollo boilerplate atop a Saturn I booster on May 28, 1964, seemed to demand a response from the Soviets. Countering Kennedy’s lunar challenge would be a formidable undertaking, with no guarantees of political coups as a side-benefit Making it even more difficult, Korolev would find himself trying to assemble his giant N-1 lunar rocket without the benefit of Glushko’s expertise, while simultaneously staving off Yangel’s and Chelomei’s ambitious counter proposals. Chelomei had tried to continue work on his space plane concept, to fly shuttles to the moon and back, but the winged technology of the time simply couldn’t hold up to the stresses of a full lunar-return re-entry. Clocking in at around eleven km per second the heat stresses were problematic even for an ablative vehicle like Apollo. It was at this time that Chelomei decided to shift gears and change to a ballistic re-entry vehicle.
Korolev was given a fully funded green light for the N-1 lunar booster within weeks of the first Saturn/Apollo launch. Then almost immediately the plug was pulled on his plans for a circum-lunar mission, instead funding was given to Chelomei to pursue his version of a lunar orbital mission which was to be called the LK-I.
Korolev had been working towards an ambitious lunar landing for years. He was expecting to use the same method as von Braun, using many launches to build a huge vehicle in earth orbit before deploying a very large lander on the lunar surface. Lunar bases would follow. Just as von Braun had to give up on these grandiose plans, so did Korolev. Unlike the R-7 his N-1 was going to be simply too big and expensive to launch several times per month. He had even spent several years gearing the N-1 towards an industrious Mars program, again, exactly like von Braun would do with his Saturn V. But whereas von Braun was unchallenged in his domain, Korolev soon found himself running side-by-side with Chelomei who had been given the contract for the lunar- orbiting mission while Korolev was to retain the landing mission. An analogy that doesn’t even come close to the absurdity of this would be as if Boeing were told to build and fly Apollo B while Lockheed would build and fly Apollo II; neither would use the same equipment.
Before any of these wildly ambitious plans could be realized there was the problem of keeping people flying. The 100% success record of his upgraded R 7/Zenit booster during the summer of 1964 must have encouraged Korolev to employ this configuration for his most ambitious manned flight yet.
The first step had been to gut the Vostok and redesign it to accommodate three passengers. The ejection seat was removed and replaced with three couches. There was no time to completely redesign the instrumentation so the crew would be obliged to look over their shoulder to see the flight controls. Also there would be absolutely no room for space suits or election seats. On October 6 1964 Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov raced to an apogee of 336 km aboard the singularly risky Voskhod spacecraft. The Russians were flying three men at once while America’s two-seater Gemini was still awaiting its second unmanned launch. How ever. the Americans had one or two aces up their sleeve and before the end of 1964 they managed to get their second major planetary probe into the air. Mariner 2 had successfully flown past Venus in late 1962 and now on November 28, 1964, Mariner 4 was on its way to making one of the greatest planetary voyages in history. It was destined to rendezvous with Mars the following summer Meanwhile, Korolev launched another unmanned Voskhod on February 22, 1965.This time things didn’t go quite as well when two simultaneous but separate commands from the ground accidentally set off the ship’s self-destruct mechanism. It was the kind of error that could easily cause nightmares for the designers. Thankfully no one was aboard, but the accident precipitated some difficult decisions to scale back the very risky Voskhod program -- but not before one last flight.
The Voskhod that had exploded had been testing an entirely new hatch and airlock mechanism. The hatch was built directly above the left couch and it was designed to allow a cosmonaut to step out into an airlock. This revised version of the Voskhod spacecraft had a 100% failure rate when Colonel Pavel Belyayev and Lt. Colonel Aleksey Leonov climbed aboard. Just over three weeks after the catastrophic failure of its sister ship, the three-stage R-7 took flight, carrying Voskhod 2. It was March 18, 1965, and Leonov had a date with history. Korolev knew that a lot of his political power resided in his ability to beat the Americans and consistently stage publicity coups for the Soviet leadership. This may have played a part in the hurried timing of Voskhod 2. It was well known in the American press that the Gemini was being prepared to finally fly with a crew. There had been public discussions about the vehicle’s ability to open its hatches while in space, leading to the inevitable talk about when the first space walk might take place. As it turned out, that first space walk was to happen hundreds of kilometers above the Caucasus, and Gemini would have nothing to do with it.
The Voskhod airlock was a remarkable piece of engineering that had been designed and built in record time. It resembled a large concertina of fabric that extended away from the new external hatch. Almost as soon as they reached orbit the airlock was deployed and ninety-two minutes after lift-off Leonov pushed his head out through the open outer hatch of the air lock and became the first human satellite. There have been many dramatic reports written about the difficulties encountered by Leonov when he became the first human to walk in space. After a dozen minutes of free flight he encountered problems re-entering the outer hatch. The suit he was wearing had inflated because of the large pressure differential and was now almost too large to fit through the 70 cm wide opening. He had to climb in head-first which presented an entirely new problem; he now had to rotate himself in the confines of the tunnel-like airlock. By all accounts his heart rate and temperature were at dangerous levels when the hatch finally closed and the airlock repressurized. Leonov climbed back through the inner hatch but after returning to his seat it seems the inner hatch exhibited a minor leak. After it was determined that this leak would eventually become an unacceptable hazard the decision was made to de-orbit the vehicle. This procedure was to have all been automatic but when the time came, the engine didn’t fire.
Voskhod 2 with airlock projecting at left
The decision to cram several people into a Vostok would now have repercussions. Because the couches were oriented at 90 degrees from the way that the craft had originally been built, to be able to perform the necessary maneuvers manually, it would mean that Belyayev would have to lie horizontally while Leonov scrambled underneath the couches holding his copilot in place. This was especially difficult now that they couldn’t remove their space suits. Lying at right angles across the couches Belyayev was now looking forward, out of the same porthole that Gagarin’s couch would have been facing on Vostok 1. Belyayev made the adjustments using the Earth as a reference point. The two men then scrambled to get into their seats before firing the engine. Thankfully Belyayev had done his job well and, although the time to reseat themselves caused an overshoot, they both survived. In a final ignominious ending to a historic flight the two cosmonauts found themselves camping in a snow covered forest for almost 48 hours while rescue teams scrambled to reach them. Even though five more Voskhods were approved for construction, they would never fly with people aboard. More significantly it was the end of an era for Soviet manned spaceflight. From this point onward Russia’s cosmonauts would only fly in the Soyuz.
While Korolev was suffering near apoplexy at the antics of Leonov and Belyayev, his rival Vladimir Chelomei was continuing with work on his large UR-500 booster and its companion LK-1 circum-lunar spacecraft. At OKB- 586, Mikhail Yangel was building ICBMs and was also showing an interest in building a large space-faring vehicle, Yangel had been Korolev’s deputy and later had been given his own bureau. Incredible as it seems, there were now three competing plans for a Soviet lunar mission. Even the inscrutable power corridors of Washington hadn’t concocted anything so bizarre.
Next: Part 9
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