This new ocean, p.28
This New Ocean, page 28
Jules Verne could have set them straight. He had Russia contribute the “enormous sum” of 368,733 rubles to build the Columbiad. “No one need be surprised at this who bears in mind the scientific taste of the Russians,” Verne explained, “and the impetus which they have given to astronomical studies—thanks to their numerous observatories.”
The literature alone was staggering. There was a crescendo of writing about space travel in the Soviet Union after the war as the lingering utopian ideal, the techno-icon, the great scarlet angel, promised to carry Russians out of their dreary, soul-deadening conformity on wings and fins of steel. The babushkas who patiently waited in line for three hours or more for sausage and potatoes may not have known of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but in a manner of speaking, he was there with them. And he was with their husbands, sons, and daughters who trudged off to machine shops and factories all across the land to bolster the fabled forces of production and in the process protect the motherland from the newly emerging threat.
There were popular books about Russian space pioneers and about jets, rockets, and life in space. And there was a blizzard of technical material in the form of both books and journal articles. Yakov Perelman had left a rich legacy of popular books about rocketry in the 1930s, including To the Stars by Rocket, Interplanetary Travels, Flight to the Moon, and Tsiolkovsky: His Life, Inventions, and Scientific Works. Popular writing of the time ranged from the twenty-four-page pamphlet The Problem of Interplanetary Travel in the Work of Native Scientists to A. A. Kosmodemyansky’s Famous Man of Science: Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, a monumental 1,936-page paean to the master.
F. J. Krieger, a RAND analyst who did extensive (but not, he claimed, exhaustive) research on the literature of Soviet rocketry, reported that by 1957 important monographs, articles, and books on the subject numbered in the hundreds. A relatively small number of them were translations of Oberth, Sänger, Goddard, Esnault-Pelterie, Hohmann, and other foreigners. But the vast majority were distinctly homemade and ranged from specialized studies of weightlessness to a highly detailed description of a “tankette”—a caterpillar-treaded lunar roving vehicle—to flight procedures for cosmic exploration. And there were an increasing number of articles in newspapers and popular-science magazines about space, many of which were interviews with well-known scientists and engineers.
But the “indicators” (as the CIA called them) that the Soviets fully intended to go to space as soon as possible were not confined to literature. In November 1953, A. N. Nesmeyanov, president of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., told the World Peace Council in Vienna that “science has reached a state when it is feasible to send a stratoplane to the Moon, to create an artificial satellite of the Earth.”
On April 16, 1955, only six months after the satellite resolution was adopted by the IGY at a conference in Rome, the Moscow evening newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva reported Soviet plans to launch such a spacecraft. It told of the creation of an Interdepartmental Commission on Interplanetary Communication.67 If the commission’s reporting to the supremely prestigious Academy of Sciences wasn’t enough of an indication that it was serious about space, its membership roster alone would have put aside all doubts. The group’s twenty-seven members included Viktor A. Ambartsumyan, an internationally renowned astronomer; Pyotr L. Kapitsa, the physicist whose pedigree included a nine-year stint at Cambridge, where he had worked closely with the great Ernest Rutherford; and Nikolai Bogolyubov, a brilliant mathematician who specialized in atomic energy. One of the commission’s “immediate tasks,” the article continued, would be the launching of a scientific Earth satellite to study the effects of weightlessness, ultraviolet and X rays from the Sun and stars, and observation of ice floes and clouds. The reference to weightlessness was a clear indication that there were plans to send a living creature to space despite the fact that biological research was irrelevant to IGY activities. The circumspect Soviets were all but ignored.
The White House’s announcement on July 29, 1955, that the United States intended to launch a satellite during the International Geophysical Year, on the other hand, drew worldwide acclaim. It was taken for granted that America’s unquestioned leadership in science and technology, supported by the planet’s most robust economic and managerial base, would open the new frontier as it had the old one. Missing, but apparently not missed, was a steering group equivalent to the interplanetary commission.
Meanwhile, the Russians pressed on (without Khrushchev’s approval). On January 30, 1956, the Academy of Sciences quietly made a firm commitment to launch a satellite later named Sputnik—literally “Companion” (of Earth)—within two years as part of the IGY program.* Throughout the year a series of specialized conferences were held to decide what the spacecraft was to accomplish—measuring cosmic radiation and Earth’s magnetic field, for example—and what the vehicle itself would be. By November, according to Tikhonravov, he and his colleagues had begun conceptualizing a “sputnik” that would carry a man and were considering how to design one that could land on the Moon.
But the first designs were less ambitious. The primary Sputnik, the nation’s supreme contribution to the IGY, would be a scientific masterpiece: an antenna-sprouting cone that weighed almost a ton and a half and that was loaded with scientific instruments. It would carry a magnetometer, photomultipliers, a mass spectrometer, ion traps, a photon and cosmic-ray recorder, and other instruments to measure Earth’s magnetic field and the particles and energy fields through which it was to fly.
Another IGY spacecraft would carry a passenger—a dog—and instruments to measure both the canine’s vital signs and take radiation, micrometeoroid, and other readings. This “biosat” was designed to provide data on the dog’s ability to adapt to space in anticipation of manned flights, which were then in the planning stage. It would weigh 1,118 pounds and, like its heavier stablemate, be roughly conical.
A third satellite, also conceived by the all-but-anonymous Tikhonravov in 1956, was the runt of the trio. It would be classicly simple: a 184-pound sphere that carried a pair of radio transmitters and four spring-triggered antennas designed to pop out when the satellite separated from its launch vehicle’s pointed nose, or shroud. Unlike the primary spacecraft, which would be powered by sophisticated solar panels that converted the Sun’s rays into energy the way leaves do on plants and trees, the aluminum ball would carry relatively primitive silver-zinc batteries powerful enough to guarantee fourteen days of continuous transmission. Radio amateurs around the world would therefore be able to hear it on two wavelengths as it streaked overhead. The radios, batteries, equipment for recording the pressure and temperature inside the spacecraft, a thermal control system to maintain an even temperature whether it was in sunshine or night, and related hardware and wiring would be contained in two hermetically sealed hemispheres. To aid tracking the spacecraft on ground radar, its carrier rocket—the launcher’s upper stage—would be fitted with angle reflectors. The spent rocket would fly in formation with its payload, as would always be the case unless they were deliberately fired out of orbit.
The Astropound
According to the Soviet plan, dogs—the canaries of the space age—would be shot into orbit before humans. Alexei Pokrovsky, a member of the Soviet Committee for the IGY, announced at a news conference on June 18, 1957, that three dogs had already been rocketed straight up to an altitude of sixty-five miles.* Perhaps in anticipation of foreign reporters’ notorious skepticism, Pokrovsky was careful to note that the canines had been filmed in flight. And for the benefit of Englishmen with their well-known, if occasionally eccentric, humanitarian concerns, he added that they were in excellent health. “I would like the British correspondents to inform the British Society of Happy Dogs about this,” he said, “because the Society has protested to the Soviet Union against such experiments.”
Tuning In
Indicators kept coming as the desirable turned into the possible for the Russians. That same month, Academician Ivan P. Bardin, the Soviet Union’s leading metallurgist, sent a letter to the Special Committee for the International Geophysical Year in Brussels that spelled out his country’s space plans in some detail. The U.S.S.R. Rocket and Earth Satellite Program for the IGY said explicitly that 125 meteorological rockets would be launched from three different “zones”—Arctic, central U.S.S.R., and the Antarctic—as well as an unspecified number of Earth satellites, he wrote.† All would study the structure of the atmosphere, cosmic rays, the ionosphere, micrometeors and meteorites, the physical and chemical properties of the upper astrosphere and more.
Within a month, Radio, a Russian amateur radio magazine, carried two articles that gave a fairly comprehensive description of the sputnik’s intended orbit, how its appearance could be predicted, and how its twenty- and forty-megacycle transmissions could be picked up. Diagrams were provided to vividly describe Earth, its equatorial plane, the inclination in degrees of the satellite’s orbit to the Equator, and other “elements” of the mission. The July and August issues told readers how to build the right shortwave radio receiver to pick up Sputnik’s signals and a direction-finding attachment for locating it.
Late that summer, after the first successful R-7 test, Khrushchev approved the space shot. However awed he had been four years earlier by the chief designer’s briefing, Khrushchev had tended to see the space program (as opposed to the missile program) as a waste of precious resources. But a number of developments changed his mind. For one thing, he faced serious political opposition from a party elite that feared his growing power. Only adroit maneuvering, which included using the Air Force to fly loyalists into Moscow from around the country, prevented his ouster. For another, the military threat posed by the United States and its allies was real, and no amount of bluffing about missiles rolling off assembly lines could take the place of a credible deterrent. Khrushchev knew that the U-2s methodically following his country’s railroad tracks were not turning up operational “sausages” because they were not there. But a rocket that could carry nearly 3,000 pounds to space could also lob a warhead onto America or any place else, so sending one of the machines into the distant sky would prove once and for all that no place on Earth was safe from Soviet missiles. Khrushchev therefore gave Korolyov the go-ahead to proceed with the nation’s contribution to the IGY, though geophysics was entirely beside the point.
The Red Moon
A final, unmistakable signal that something was in the works came westward on August 27. That day, a TASS report in Pravda proclaimed that “successful tests of an intercontinental ballistic rocket and also explosions of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons have been carried out in conformity with the plan of scientific research work in the U.S.S.R.”74 Actually, there were two ICBM tests, both of them with R-7s that made it to Kamchatka without serious trouble.75 Both were tracked by U.S. radar. The specter that haunted Eisenhower—the catalyst for the Technological Capabilities Panel—was finally coming true.
The conference to coordinate the IGY’s final satellite and rocket plans started at the august National Academy of Sciences in Washington on September 30. The plenary meetings, attended by representatives of Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, were held in the building’s domed lecture hall, where technical papers were delivered. The Soviet delegation was led by Anatoli A. Blagonravov, a member of his own country’s Academy of Sciences and, not uncoincidentally, a lieutenant general of artillery.
In the library that adjoined the lecture hall, there was an impressive exhibit on Vanguard. The launch vehicle, as well as the tiny satellite of the same name that it was supposed to carry to space and onto the pages of history books, reflected their country’s technoculture. They were clean-lined, wholesome, eager-looking, and stridently self-confident, like a turquoise-and-white ’57 Chevy. The rocket was slim and graceful: an elongated, elegant white bullet that was supposed to carry what was then a twenty-one-pound spacecraft into orbit.
The exhibit at the National Academy reflected the optimism of the program’s team.76 Besides the models, there was a mechanized miniature of the satellite that happily circled Earth, and even a stubby telescope of the sort volunteers in something called Operation Moonwatch were supposed to use to track it under the supervision of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard. That Vanguard would be the first object made on Earth to reach space was so beyond question that no one gave it much thought. At least none of the Americans did.
Vanguard’s competitor, the smallest and lightest of the Sputniks designed by Tikhonravov, was at that moment bolted inside the shroud of an R-7 at Tyuratam, which was still under construction. The polished ball was Korolyov’s last choice as a candidate for mankind’s debut in space. But his first choice, the ton-and-a-half cone studded with antennas, carried so many science instruments and related equipment—was so complicated—that it had turned into a formidable engineering challenge. Some of the machines that constituted its complex innards did not work properly. Others simply resisted all attempts at communication. Finally, in exasperation, the big sputnik’s managers pulled it off stage like a wheezing prima donna and sent in a less sophisticated but healthier understudy. The spacecraft that was supposed to fly as Sputnik 1 would go the following year as Sputnik 3.*
If there was one discordant note that ran through the weeklong meeting in Washington, it was over the Russians’ insistence on keeping details of their satellite to themselves. The Americans gently chided them on their secrecy and they just as gently countered, saying that they considered it unseemly to “boast” about experiments until they were complete. “We will not cackle until we have laid our egg,” as one of the tight-lipped Russians put it. The disagreement still hung in the air on October 4, the last evening of the conference. But most Americans neither knew nor cared about what was happening inside the marble halls of the citadel of science on Constitution Avenue in their nation’s capital that fateful day, let alone on a launch pad on the steppes of Central Asia.
American civilization had its collective heart and mind far away from smelly rockets on that autumn afternoon. The New York Yankees were tied with the Milwaukee Braves one game apiece in the World Series after Lew Burdette, a thirty-year-old West Virginian, had pitched the Braves to a 4–2 victory in front of 65,000 disgruntled fans in Yankee Stadium the day before. Arkansas Governor “Awful” Orval Faubus, a sworn segregationist, was telling people that he reminded himself of Robert E. Lee. The House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities ended four days of hearings on alleged subversive activity in Buffalo, New York, after three government witnesses accused an optometrist named Milton Rogovin of being the region’s chief Communist. The espionage trial of Colonel Rudolf Abel, a real Soviet agent who plied his trade in Brooklyn, was postponed ten days so the KGB officer’s lawyer would have more time to prepare his defense. The freighter Santa Mercedes had the distinction of becoming the two hundred thousandth deep water ship to make it through the Panama Canal. Francis J. McCarthy of San Francisco got a patent for an “item finder” that would allow shoppers in supermarkets to find what they wanted by pressing a button that lighted its location on a diagram of the store. The season premier of Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom about a precocious but lovable kid, aired on the Columbia Broadcasting System. The Night Show, on ABC, was running Dracula.
That day, a Studebaker Silver Hawk, “factory fresh” and complete with fins and “even” directional signals, was going for $1,995. And General Electric was promoting an eleven-cubic-foot-capacity rectangular refrigerator with a zero-degree freezer that held seventy pounds of food. It also boasted automatic defrosting, magnetic safety doors with removable and adjustable shelves, fruit and vegetable compartments, a frozen concentrated juice-can dispenser, and an automatic butter conditioner. The thing could be hung on a wall, set on a counter surrounded by cabinets, or even be used as a room divider. The idea, General Electric’s advertising executives proudly explained, was to make food “easier to see and reach!” It was unquestionably the most advanced refrigerator on Earth.
On the steppes of Kazakhstan, the R-7’s twenty engines came to life with a torrent of white fire at four minutes to midnight local time. Seconds later, it rose from its launch pad over a widening cascade of thunder, flame, and rolling clouds of thick smoke. Precisely two minutes after launch, with the rocket turning to a white speck that was vanishing in the darkness, the four boosters separated and came tumbling down through the night. The sustainer’s RD-108 burned for another 150 seconds as it propelled its payload toward the northeast on an inclination of sixty-five degrees to the Equator. Moments later, the sustainer’s shroud separated, shot forward, and then split in half, exposing its cargo to the frigid blackness. Then the satellite itself sprang forward, popping out its four spring-loaded antennas on cue. The first objects made by men to circle Earth—the shroud, the sustainer, and the sphere—were soon speeding through space at more than 17,000 miles an hour. The little armada was starting a journey that would take it over every place on Earth between Iceland and Cape Horn. It was, coincidentally, the hundredth-anniversary year of Tsiolkovsky’s birth.
A Storm from Space
It was still midafternoon in Washington when Sputnik slid into orbit. Appropriately, the beeping spacecraft passed over the United States twice before anyone even realized it was there. The news was broken by Radio Moscow almost three hours after launch, followed eighteen minutes later by a dull TASS dispatch that was essentially repeated in Pravda the next morning:
