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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
'Terrific and enthralling' New Scientist Fifty years ago, in July 1969, Apollo 11 became the first manned mission to land on the Moon, and Neil Armstrong the first man to step on to its surface. He and his crewmates, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, were the latest men to risk their lives in this extraordinary scientific, engineering and human venture that would come to define the era. In Apollo 11: The Inside Story, David Whitehouse reveals the true drama behind the mission, putting it in the context of the wider space race and telling the story in the words of those who took part – based around exclusive interviews with the key players. This enthralling book takes us from the early rocket pioneers to the shock America received from the Soviets' launch of the first satellite, Sputnik; from the race to put the first person into space to the iconic Apollo 11 landing and beyond, to the agonising drama of the Apollo 13 disaster and the eventual winding-up of the Apollo program. Here is the story as told by the crew of Apollo 11 and the many others who shared in their monumental endeavour. Astronauts, engineers, politicians, NASA officials, Soviet rivals – all tell their own story of a great moment of human achievement.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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APOLLO 11
THE INSIDE STORY
DAVID WHITEHOUSE
To Jill, as well as the Moon and the stars
‘The Moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to’
—NEIL ARMSTRONG
‘We must master the highest technology or be crushed’
—VLADIMIR LENIN
Contents
Acknowledgements
It was my agent Laura Susijn who suggested I write this book. I, like many others, knew the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing was approaching, and I anticipated many books about it would be written. I was a little reluctant to be one among many. But then I looked back into my archive, by which I mean sealed cardboard boxes stored in my loft. I soon realized that it was a goldmine of information. Over the more than 40 years since I was a young man I had been collecting. As I started my career as an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank radio observatory, I began to meet astronauts, engineers and officials involved in the Apollo project. Such meetings increased as I moved to the University of London’s Space Science department. As I became involved in the media I started to be invited to receptions, press conferences and dinners with a growing number of my childhood heroes. In 1988 I joined the BBC as science correspondent and soon realized it was a job that opened doors, and that people took my calls.
Some astronauts, like Neil Armstrong, treated writers with suspicion. He disliked articles that featured him as a personality. Other astronauts, well, they could talk and talk. Often I would hear them tell the familiar story they had been giving to journalists for years; I sat through that and hoped they would open up when I showed I had a deeper knowledge than most other science journalists. I remember Alan Shepard did that, pausing with a mischievous glint in his eye when I asked him an unexpected question. Sometimes it didn’t work. More than one cosmonaut who had been involved in their Moon program pulled down the shutters when I asked something they considered awkward. Over the years I met all the moonwalkers and interviewed most of them, along with a great number of other astronauts and cosmonauts, administrators and officials. My boxes were full of tapes, notepads, press kits and much other stuff. Combined with what is available in NASA’s extensive archive, I decided there was a book to be written that put the people first and used, as far as possible, the words of those involved.
I would like to thank Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, David Scott, John Young, Alan Shepard, James Lovell, Charlie Duke, Donn Eisele, Alan Bean, Gordon Cooper, Al Worden, Walt Cunningham, Tom Stafford, Dick Gordon, John Glenn, Pete Conrad, Edgar Mitchell, Richard Gordon, James Irwin, Stu Roosa, Ron Evans, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, James Fletcher, Thomas Paine, Joe Shea, Rocco Petrone, Brainerd Holmes, Bob Gilruth, George Mueller, James Webb, John Houbolt, Robert Seamans, Max Faget, William Pickering, Sergei Khrushchev, Viktor Savinykh, Georgi Grechko, Yuri Romanenko and Pavel Popovich.
I thank Laura Susijn for believing in this book and all those at Icon Books who made it a reality; also Nick Booth, who is a constant source of advice on space matters and good writing. He knows the life of a writer. More thanks than I can ever express go to my wife Jill and my children, Christopher, Lucy and Emily.
The night of the first landing on the Moon my father initially said I had to go to bed as the first footprint was scheduled for 3 am. I eventually talked him around, and watched transfixed on our black-and-white TV. I have never gotten over that night. My parents are no longer with me, but I hope they realized what that meant to a young boy. I think they did. I am sad that my children have not seen the like.
Prologue
Spaceflight is dangerous. Everyone knew that. None more so than the astronauts, their families, and all those intimately involved in Apollo – the project to land a man on the Moon. On that evening, 20 July 1969, everyone in Mission Control in Houston knew the danger. The lives of the two men about to attempt a descent to the lunar surface depended upon single moments, the single decision any of them might have to make in a second.
Gene Kranz, 31 years old, was the Flight Director for the landing. He was confident in his abilities, though not arrogant. His job was to run the show by being able to assimilate all the information coming into Mission Control from ‘Eagle’, the Lunar Lander. Formerly a fighter pilot and an engineer, he was leading a talented group. In front of him were rows of computer screens at which sat the mission controllers, all with their individual roles and names such as Guido and EECOM. Kranz’s call sign was Flight. The average age of the men of Mission Control was only 26.
He selected a private loop only heard by the controllers. He didn’t want anyone else to listen to what he was about to say. He waited a second and spoke:
Today is our day, and the hopes and dreams of the entire world are with us. This is our time and our place, and we will remember this day and what we do here always. In the next hour we will do something that has never been done before – we will land an American on the Moon.
Less than an hour after those words were spoken, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 500 metres from the lunar surface in the region of the Sabine complex of small craters on the western shore of the Sea of Tranquillity. Armstrong was 38 and regarded as the best person to attempt the first landing. He had to put Eagle down within the next three minutes. Next to him was Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, who was 39 years old. Ahead of them stretched the dark expanse of lunar night. No one, especially Armstrong himself, knew if they were going to make it. The landing was the goal; the moonwalk was secondary. Before he left Earth, he had told close colleagues that he had only a 50:50 chance of pulling off a successful landing.
In a few seconds Armstrong would have to take over and fly Eagle manually while looking for a suitable site. It was the most difficult thing any pilot had ever been asked to do. His heart rate was 160, double normal. He flexed his right hand around the joystick that controlled Eagle’s attitude, and his left hand around the thrust controller. He knew that this was never a job for a computer. The windows on the Eagle overhung the floor and were angled downwards so that he could lean against the tethers that tied him to the floor and look downwards.
On the right side of his body was Eagle’s control panel. Dials, gauges, switches and lights concerning all aspects of the Eagle from fuel to radar, attitude to rate of descent. Two buttons stood out, the only ones with a striped surround. One was labelled ‘Abort’, which sent the Eagle back up into orbit, and the other ‘Abort Stage’, which initiated an even more dangerous manoeuvre.
They were coming in from the east across the Sea of Tranquillity – a misnomer as there were only dry rocks beneath them – and with the low Sun behind them, the shadows were long and deeply dark. They had passed over rough ground a few minutes ago and were heading towards Tranquillity’s southwestern region. They were ‘long’, or downrange. Between the lumpy gravity of the Moon and some extra speed picked up when they undocked from the Apollo Command Module, Eagle was at least a second ahead of its timeline and that translated into a mile too far. Armstrong had noticed the discrepancy immediately, Aldrin later said he hadn’t and was impressed by his crewmate’s alertness. But just one second could make all the difference. The rocks below looked terrifying and the computer was taking Eagle directly into them. Armstrong took over manual control at 150 m, not 50 m as had been planned. He needed more time to look for a smooth landing site.
There was only enough fuel for one landing attempt, and that was running out fast. They were flying for their lives. Aldrin was too busy to look out of the window – that was planned. He later said that if it wasn’t on the dials he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking upwards and to his left at the radar display with its altitude and rate of descent readings: ‘Three hundred and fifty feet; down at four. Three hundred thirty, six and a half down. You’re pegged on horizontal velocity.’
Back in Houston Mission Control, Kranz, in the centre console, knew they were close to an abort. He looked to his left where the Capcom – capsule communicator – Charlie Duke was sitting. He was the only one who spoke to the astronauts. To Duke’s left was Jim Lovell and to Lovell’s left was Fred Haise. Lovell had been the backup commander and as such if Armstrong were to have been injured just before the mission it would have been him doing the flying now. Fred Haise was Aldrin’s backup. They had the procedures, the checklists and many documents before them but most of all they had simulator experience of the landing. Lovell thought Duke was talking too much so he tapped him on the shoulder suggesting fewer words: ‘Let him do his job,’ he said. They returned Kranz’s glance. There were problems and fuel was running out. Would Armstrong and Aldrin make it? ‘So now we’re fighting,’ Kranz said later.
They had been fighting for years, ever since Sputnik shocked the world, and even before that. Fighting the technology and the timetable. Fighting the politicians and the payroll. Fighting the Russians. Fighting to land on the Moon and be able to take off again and return to Earth.
The Apollo Moon landings were not just a technical marvel, for to think of them as only a triumph of machines and men, of combustion chambers and computers, is to diminish what was achieved. Think of them as the greatest voyages possible. Think of them as a waypoint in the evolution of our curious, explorative species. Think of them as something far, far above the normality of average human life. Think of them as a hope for our survival. Think of how they will be remembered when our Sun is dying. Think of them as a time when for a moment we achieved greatness.
All three of the crew of Apollo 11 were born in 1930. All three went into aviation and felt the sky was their natural element. Yet, having faced the danger of the unknown, 386,000 km away from Earth, they did not become friends and rarely saw one another after the mission, outside ceremonies. ‘Amiable strangers’ was how one of them described their relationship.
Born near Wapakoneta, Ohio, as a boy Neil Armstrong was fascinated by flying. He was always returning to his bedroom and his model aircraft. Looking back on his childhood many years later, he said he always designed his own model aircraft and never used kits. ‘They had become, I suppose, almost an obsession with me,’ he said. Out of school he took jobs stacking shelves at 40 cents an hour, which he put towards the $9 an hour he needed for flying lessons, and he got his pilot’s licence before he could drive. It was flat country, and to him the sky seemed more important than the land. His father, Stephen Koenig Armstrong was an auditor for the Ohio state government, a stable job when the depression hit. He took Neil for an aeroplane ride when he was just ten days shy of his sixth birthday. Later Armstrong said he couldn’t remember anything about it, though it obviously made a deep impression. His mother was Viola Louise Engel, a deeply religious woman, though Armstrong said she never preached to the children (who numbered three: Neil, June, and Dean). She was a very able student and was described as inventive with qualities of concentration and perseverance. It was said she longed to be a missionary and journey to distant lands. All of these qualities she passed on to her son. At seventeen he began studying aeronautical engineering at Purdue University and joined a scheme called the Holloway Plan, which was two years of study, two years of flight training and a year of service in the US Navy. He was called up to the Navy in January 1949 and during the Korean War flew 78 combat missions in Panther jets flying off the carrier Essex. He won three air medals. He was released from active duty in August 1952 but remained in the reserves. He had decided to become an experimental test pilot.
He never said very much. His crewmate Michael Collins said he was more thoughtful than your average test pilot, a very reserved individual. When he uttered the famous words upon stepping on to the lunar surface, few were surprised he managed to say something profound – although others were surprised he said anything at all. No wonder people called him the ‘quiet aviator’. In 2000 he summed up his character: ‘I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics. Steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.’
Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr was born on 20 January 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. His parents had met in the Philippines where his father, Edwin Eugene Sr was in the Army Air Corps until he resigned on principle after his boss was court marshalled. By all accounts his father was difficult, demanding, controlling, and a major influence on Aldrin. He was the only boy in the family; hence he was called ‘brother’ – but his sister, Fay Ann, pronounced it ‘Buzzer’ and henceforth he was Buzz (he legally changed his name to Buzz in 1988). He was an athletic child and it seems he spent so much time on sports that initially he didn’t get the grades to go to West Point Military Academy. At this he knuckled down and suddenly became an ‘A’ student, whereupon he was accepted, graduating in 1951. Thence he went into the Air Force and became a fighter pilot in the Korean War, flying 66 combat missions. Eventually he flew F-100 Super Sabres – the first US jet aircraft that could go supersonic in level flight – out of a US air base in West Germany.
Aldrin’s first wife, Joan, said of him that he was ‘a curious mixture of magnificence, confidence, bordering on conceit, and humility’. He was not universally popular when he was an astronaut. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8 – the first mission to travel to the Moon (on an orbital mission) – said he was worried about him before Apollo 11. ‘I thought he had difficulty coping with life’s simpler problems,’ he said. After he returned from the Moon, fame did not wear well with him when there seemed to be none of the simpler problems, at least not for 20 years or so. The last person to walk on the Moon, Gene Cernan, said that he was called Dr Rendezvous because his thesis at MIT was on orbital rendezvous. He then added it was the only thing he could talk about, even over a cup of coffee. And then there was the squabble with Armstrong over who should step onto the Moon first …
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 crew member who stayed in the Command Module in lunar orbit while the other two descended to the surface, was born in Rome and spent most of his childhood moving: Oklahoma, Baltimore, Ohio, Texas, Puerto Rico. His father was Major General James L. Collins, a military attaché, and Michael seemed destined for the diplomatic side of military life. But he had a streak of independence and chose the Air Force after West Point in 1952. For a decade or so he was a pilot and instructor and several times came close to working alongside Neil Armstrong. He said:
Like most of the early astronauts, I was a test pilot, and it was a sort of step-by-step process. I went to the Military Academy. I went to West Point because it was a free and good education. I emphasize ‘free’. My parents were not wealthy. When I graduated from the Military Academy, there was no Air Force Academy, but we had the chance of going into the army or the air force. [The air force] seemed like a more interesting choice. Then the question was to fly or not to fly. I decided to fly. To fly little planes or big ones? I became a fighter pilot. To keep flying the same or new ones? I became a test pilot. And so, you see, I’ve stair-stepped up through five or six increments then, and it was a simple, logical thing to go on to the next increment, which was higher and faster, and become an astronaut.
Of Armstrong, Collins said that he ‘never transmits anything but the surface layer, and that only sparingly. I like him, but I don’t know what to make of him, or how to get to know him better. He doesn’t seem willing to meet anyone halfway.’ He observed that among the dozen test pilots who had flown the X-15 Armstrong had been considered one of the weaker stick-and-rudder men, but the very best when it came to understanding the machine’s design, and how it operated.
He described Aldrin as ‘more approachable than Neil: in fact, for reasons I cannot fully explain, it is me that seems to be trying to keep him at arm’s length. I have the feeling that he would probe me for weaknesses, and that makes me uncomfortable.’
But the era of these heroes in their fabulous machines was so long ago. Only 20 per cent of those alive today were around when Apollo 11 landed. Those who woke up that morning long ago feeling that the world had changed when frail humanity descended onto the Sea of Tranquillity are now an ever-diminishing minority.
The Spoils of War
There is a simple wooden house in the city of Kaluga, about 195 km southwest of Moscow, in which a deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher called Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky once lived. Born in 1857, his writings, although sometimes far-fetched, put substance to mankind’s nascent dreams of escaping our planet and journeying into space. His 1903 work, ‘Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines’ is regarded as the world’s first scientifically viable proposal to explore space with rockets. He imagined rockets fuelled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen – the same mix used on the Space Shuttle. He developed the equation, now named after him, that provides the relationship between the changing mass of a rocket as it consumes fuel, the velocity of the exhaust gases, and the rocket’s final speed. It is the foundation of astronautics. Years later he published an article on multi-stage rockets, which he said were needed to get into space. As each rocket stage used its fuel, it would break off. He predicted steering rockets, pumps to move fuel from tanks to the combustion chamber, and the need for pressurized spacesuits. Along with the later generation of rocket pioneers, the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth, he helped prepare the way for others, and while all three dreamed of space travel, only Tsiolkovsky never thought it would come to pass. ‘The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever,’ he wrote.
After the revolution, most were concerned with survival and there were initially few who dreamed of space travel. Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk was one who did – though that was not his real name. He was born in Ukraine and while in his twenties he wrote pioneering works on rocketry such as ‘The Conquest of Interplanetary Space’, in which he improved on Tsiolkovsky’s concepts. One of his most remarkable ideas was a mission profile for a lunar landing using two separate vehicles: a mother ship in lunar orbit, and another for the descent to and from the surface. When Americans did land on the Moon in 1969 their mission took this form. But his contribution to spaceflight was cut short. In 1916, he was conscripted into the Army to fight in Turkey. After the Bolsheviks rose to power he decided to leave the Army, but on his journey home, he was forcibly conscripted by the rebel White Army to fight against the communists. He escaped but was found by the White Army again in Kiev, whereupon after a second spell with them he deserted once more. Having fought on both sides he was in a difficult position after the revolution: both sides wanted to execute him. To save his life, his stepmother sent him the identity documents of a man named Yuri Vasilyevich Kondratyuk, who was born in 1900 and died in 1921; he assumed his new identity and tried to lead an inconspicuous life. Terrified of being found out, he did not join the burgeoning amateur rocketry groups of the 1920s and 1930s. His ideas were lost, as were his remains when he perished defending Moscow against the Nazis.
For historians, two men have come to exemplify the race to the Moon: Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. They were rivals, though they never met, and von Braun knew little of Korolev except by his work. They learned, by trial and error, how to tame the explosive power of rocket fuel for a few minutes, forcing it to produce thrust. Although they lived very different lives they had many things in common: in particular a passion for spaceflight and a drive that overcame the almost overwhelming engineering and political problems they faced. They both learned to cope with failure, neglect and frustration and both in different ways carried the scars of war. Standing amid the ashes and debris of the Second World War, both looked to the Moon and felt that within their lifetimes it could be reached. But only one would live to see his dreams fulfilled.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born in 1906 not far from Kiev. He came from a fractured home and was bullied at school because he was seen as a teacher’s pet, due to his ability in maths. Under the care of grandparents, his family endured the many hardships that befell the people after the revolution. As a boy he was obsessed with aeroplanes and space travel, preferring his flying machines to people. When he was twenty he moved to Moscow, living in crowded squalor with his family, and attended the Bauman Higher Technical Institute where his talents came to the attention of the famed aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, who had been one of Tsiolkovsky’s pupils.
Seeking out others who shared his interests, he joined a rocket society known as GIRD – the Group for the Study of Rocket Propulsion Systems. It was led by the space visionary Friedrikh Tsander who shared with Korolev dreams of flying in space. ‘To Mars! Onward to Mars!’ was how Tsander used to greet his fellow workers.
Tsander was born in 1887 in Riga, Latvia, where there is now a street named after him, as well as a memorial. By his twenties he wanted to make a journey into space, and in 1924 he published his landmark work entitled Flight to Other Planets, in which he described the design of rocket engines and made calculations of interplanetary trajectories. He had tried without success to get government support. Almost in desperation, he placed an advertisement in a Moscow newspaper calling for anyone interested in ‘interplanetary communications’. Over 150 people responded. Under his leadership, GIRD held public lectures and carried out small experiments in a wine cellar on 19 Sadovo-Spasskaya Street in Moscow, less than a mile from the Kremlin.
Soon Korolev replaced the ailing Tsander as leader and, with an administrative flair for which he would later become famous, established four research groups to study different rocketry problems. Now the Soviet government was impressed and soon Korolev and his colleagues were working for them. The state was already funding another small research group into solid-fuelled rockets for military use led by a young engineer called Valentin Petrovitch Glushko. He had been inspired by the works of Jules Verne and at fifteen had written a letter to Tsiolkovsky. Just three years later, in 1924, still only eighteen, he had published an article in the popular press titled ‘Conquest of the Moon by the Earth’. Glushko and Korolev became friends, but that was not to last. Their difficult relationship was to be at the heart of the Soviet Space effort, becoming both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. By the late summer of 1933 they were able to launch the Soviet Union’s first liquid-fuelled rocket, powered by jellied petroleum burning in liquid oxygen. After two failures the third attempt soared to 400 metres. Korolev wrote: ‘From this moment Soviet rockets should start flying above the Union of Republics. Soviet rockets must conquer space!’ Tsander did not see the triumph. Five months earlier, exhausted by overwork, he had contracted typhus and died.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was born in Germany just before the First World War into a family that had been famous since 1245 when they defended Prussia from Mongol invasion. From an early age he showed an interest in rockets. Germany’s foremost rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, had written a book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (‘By Rocket into Planetary Space’), in which he describes a rocket equipped to go to the Moon. A young von Braun read it and was captivated. His mother gave him a telescope as a confirmation present. He made his own ‘spaceship’ by attaching toy rockets to a wagon and igniting them on Berlin’s Tiergarten Allee.
As a young man in Hitler’s Germany, von Braun took his ideas to Colonel Karl Heinrich Becker, chief of ballistics and ammunition of the Reichswehr. Becker knew von Braun’s father, who was minister for agriculture. He was impressed: ‘We are greatly interested in rocketry, but there are a number of defects in the manner in which your organization is going about development. For our purposes, there is too much showmanship. You would do better to concentrate on scientific data than to fire toy rockets.’ In other words, he was saying to von Braun, you don’t develop a weapon like this in public. Von Braun wanted to use rockets for space flight but Becker wanted a long-range missile for mass bombardment. Von Braun’s friends were against the relationship with ‘ignorant people who would only hinder the free development of our brainchild’. Von Braun, soon to graduate from the Berlin Institute of Technology, refused. Colonel Becker made a second offer, one that would allow von Braun to work for him and continue his studies. This time he accepted.
Barely twenty years old and now working in secret, von Braun joined the Army and worked under Captain Walter Dornberger on liquid-fuel rocket engines, saying later: ‘We needed money for our experiments, and since the army was willing to give us help, we didn’t worry overmuch about the consequences in the distant future; we were interested in one thing: the exploration of space.’ To advance his career, von Braun joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937 and then the Waffen-SS, where he gained the rank of Sturmbannführer (major), the decoration awarded by Himmler himself. He told his colleagues that he had been conscripted, and started to lie to them about what he was really doing. After the war von Braun said: ‘My refusal to join the Party would have meant I would have to abandon the work of my life.’ Dornberger needed a quieter and more isolated place for the rocket tests. Von Braun remembered that his grandfather used to hunt on a pine-forested island off the Baltic coast. The sea would provide a perfect test range, so they moved to a small fishing village called Peenemunde.
While the German effort was gaining momentum, the potential of Soviet rocketry was abruptly cut short when Stalin’s purges reached their inhuman climax. In the late spring of 1937 the secret police – the NKVD – arrested Marshal Tukhachevski, head of the group where Korolev was working. He was charged with having been part of an anti-Soviet, Trotskyite conspiracy. After a short trial he was executed along with his mother, sister, and two brothers.
Terrified people became informants simply to survive, among them Valentin Glushko. By the end of 1937, the secret police had Korolev and Glushko in their sights, considering them ‘wreckers’ of the rocket group. Glushko was arrested. Inevitably, Korolev was denounced, partly on Glushko’s testimony, and was thrown into the Lubyanka – the infamous state prison in Moscow. After severe torture, he ‘confessed’ and was lucky not to be shot. He found himself in a cattle truck being taken three and a half thousand miles across Siberia to the Kolyma death camp, where it was said they squeezed everything out of a prisoner in the first three months because after that they didn’t need him anymore.
Two chance events saved his life. A close friend, the famous pilot Valentina Grizodubova, joined with another famous Soviet aviator, Mikhail Gromov, and Korolev’s mother to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party requesting a review of his case. It reached the office of Nikolai Yezhov, chairman of the secret police – who did nothing. However, his successor, the terrible Lavrenti Beriya, thought Korolev was a good example to display his leniency. The charge was altered to the less serious ‘saboteur of military technology’ and a new trial was ordered. Eventually the original verdict was thrown out. However, such was the corruption of the Soviet legal system that even though he was officially not guilty he still had to serve the remaining eight years of his sentence. He worked as a grave-digger in a gold mine off the Kolyma River.
Even by the standards of the Gulag Kolyma was brutal, claiming the lives of between 2 and 3 million people from overwork, famine, cruelty and the harsh Arctic climate. To the end of Korolev’s days his head would bear a scar, the result of a guard striking him with a shovel when he was working as a river-widener. He would return with a heart condition and none of his teeth.
Glushko had been sentenced to a far easier eight years in a prison near Moscow. Eventually, Korolev was found at Kolyma and put on a train back to Moscow. He was transferred to a newly formed aviation design bureau located in Stakhanov village near Moscow, working under Tupolev. Korolev later said: ‘We were taken to the dining room: heads turned to our direction; sudden exclamations; people ran to us. There were so many well-known, friendly faces.’
The war was not going well for Stalin. In October 1942 German artillery units were shelling Klushino, some 160 km to the west of Moscow, and soon columns of troops passed through the village. Gunfire echoed in the surrounding woodlands as partisans confronted the advancing soldiers. The Germans were unstoppable, the outcome inevitable. The Nazis terrorized the locals, subjecting them to summary execution. If ammunition was scarce they used bayonets.
Two terrified young boys, brothers, aged six and eight, crept through the woods outside Klushino. They lived dangerously, scattering broken glass on the road to burst the tires of German trucks, pouring dirt into their car batteries and petrol tanks. Once a German offered one of them some chocolate – but then strung him up on an apple tree to hang him. Their mother heard and came running to confront the rifle-brandishing German. Fortunately for her, he was called away and she rushed to the tree, praying it was not too late. Just in time, she saved her son.
The family had been evicted from their home and were living in a hole in the ground, to which she dragged the boy’s limp body. Slowly, he came back to life. Frightened, cold and hungry they huddled in the dirt. There was Alexei the father, Anna the mother, and four children: eighteen-year-old Valentin, fifteen-year-old Zorya, and the two young boys. The youngest of the boys – the one who had just been saved from hanging – was called Boris; his eight-year-old brother was Yuri. The family’s name was Gagarin. Valentin would remember how Yuri had changed as a result of the war: he became serious, introverted, withdrawn. ‘Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed during that time, during the war,’ he said.
Meanwhile, at Peenemunde a rocket stood ready for launch. Slim and tall, it had a classic shape with fins fitted to its tail, its metal sides frosted with ice and vapour around its chilled fuel tank. Suddenly, a flame appeared at its base and reddish-yellow smoke billowed in all directions. The cables fell away, the flame became more intense and the rocket started to arc over the Baltic, effortlessly surpassing the speed of sound. After one minute a cut-off signal was sent and engineers watched through binoculars as the flame vanished. The rocket was over 30 km away. Walter Dornberger wrote that at this his heart was beating wildly and that he wept with joy. Later he told the engineers that they had proved that it would be possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft that could fly at supersonic speeds. ‘Our rocket today reached a height of nearly 95 km. We have invaded space and shown that rocket propulsion is practical for space travel.’ Dornberger thought of the possibilities of space travel but this was a time of war and the rocket was a weapon – a wonder weapon for the Third Reich. They called it the A4. Later it was renamed the V-2: V for vengeance.
The V-2 faced opposition, especially after the success of the V-1, essentially a pilotless aeroplane that ran out of fuel after about 150 miles, nose-diving to the ground with 1,800 pounds of explosives. Dornberger and von Braun were worried that money would be taken away from the V-2 in its favour. Gestapo chief Himmler, Reichsmarschall Göring and Grand Admiral Dönitz each toured Peenemunde as they tried to gain a good impression. The test prepared for Himmler spun out of control. Worried that support was ebbing, in July 1943 Dornberger and von Braun visited Hitler in his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in East Prussia. They carried with them scale models of rockets, drawings, diagrams, photos. Their plan worked: Hitler was supportive.
The following month, the British Air Force pounded Peenemunde with 596 heavy bombers. Many workers were killed, though only two from von Braun’s inner circle. To try to avoid future attacks, production of the V-2 moved to an underground oil storage depot in the Harz Mountains near Nordhausen, leaving a relative few at Peenemunde, though it remained von Braun’s base. To construct the new facility the Nazis used slave labour without mercy: the underground caverns needed enlarging and prisoners set to work with pickaxes and bare hands. Most did not survive, dying from exhaustion, starvation or execution.
Over 3,000 V-2s were launched against Allied targets. The Allies were impressed with it and as the war drew to a close it became their top priority to get their hands on it: both its technology and the engineers who built it. In a letter dated 13 July 1944, Winston Churchill requested Stalin’s cooperation in locating and retrieving V-2 components that the Germans were leaving behind in their retreat. For his part, Stalin ordered the formation of a secret group to collect any rocket remains.
On 8 September 1944, two V-2s were launched from a site near The Hague in Holland intended for a site about a mile from Waterloo Station in London. One landed in Chiswick, killing three people, the youngest being three-year old Rosemary Clarke, asleep in the front bedroom of No. 1 Staveley Road. Von Braun said later: ‘it behaved perfectly, but on the wrong planet.’ But when he heard that the other V-2 had also hit London he drank champagne. ‘Let’s be honest about it,’ he said. ‘We were at war; although we weren’t Nazis, we still had a fatherland to fight for.’
By 1945 it was clear Germany would lose the war, barring some miracle weapon – which was how many saw the V-2. Behind Hitler’s back, Himmler was trying to bring all the rocket programs under his control. He tried to bribe von Braun but he was loyal to his colleagues and knew that he wouldn’t live long if he was allied to Himmler against Hitler. Shortly after his refusal, von Braun was arrested on charges that he cared more about his rockets than about winning the war and had made plans to desert. It took two weeks to get him released.
It is a common belief that the impact of the V-2 on the war was limited. But things could easily have been otherwise. Eisenhower concluded that if the V-2 had come into operation just six months before it did, the invasion of Europe might not have been possible. He said: ‘If they had made the Portsmouth–Southampton area one of their principal targets “Overlord” might have been written off.’
By the time von Braun was released, the Russian Army was approaching Peenemunde from the east. Von Braun later said: ‘I had ten orders on my desk. Five promised death by firing squad if we moved, and five said I’d be shot if we didn’t.’ In mid-January 1945 he called a meeting with the other top officials at Peenemunde. The rumour was that the path of escape might be blocked very soon. Von Braun prepared to evacuate thousands of engineers, scientists and their families to central Germany. Von Braun had seen the end coming and had already started preparing his documents and equipment so that they couldn’t be destroyed. He wrote on SS stationery about a fictional group he called V2BV; he said it was top secret and answerable only to Himmler. ‘V2BV’ was stencilled on crates of documents and equipment. General Hans Kammler ordered that he and 500 of the top scientists be separated from their families and moved to the village of Oberammergau. Von Braun feared they would be executed to deny their knowledge to the enemy. One day he pointed out to the head of the SS guard that the camp could easily be bombed by Allied aircraft. One attack could wipe out all of the Third Reich’s top rocket scientists. Any guard that allowed that to happen would surely be shot. The guard agreed to let the scientists out of the camp, and to let them dress in civilian clothing so American troops would not suspect that they were of any importance.
Everyone was after the German rocket engineers and the V-2. In March the Pentagon sent a request to Colonel Holger Toftoy, chief of Army Ordnance Technical Intelligence in Europe, for a hundred operational V-2s. Toftoy sent Robert Staver to get the V-2’s blueprints and documents and to find its engineers. Von Braun was top of Staver’s list.
Stalin may have played a role in diverting troops towards Peenemunde rather than Berlin in the final months of the war. Just days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, an infantry unit led by Major Anatole Vavilov from the Second Belorussian Front took control of Peenemunde. The place was deserted, with little in the way of retrievable intelligence. Stalin was furious and was reported as saying: ‘This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated the Nazi armies: we occupied Berlin and Peenemunde: but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?’
On 2 May von Braun fled from Oberammergau. His brother, Magnus, was with him, and when they saw an approaching soldier, Magnus approached the man on a bicycle, calling out: ‘My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender.’ The Americans were delighted. Operation Paperclip was the code name for the secret removal of scientists from Nazi Germany, undertaken not only for the direct benefit of the Americans but also to deny the USSR. Forty railway carriages containing the spoils – tons of documents, a hundred V-2s, test-firing rigs, a liquid oxygen plant and over 300 tons of other equipment – were dispatched to Antwerp and Navy cargo ships. Toftoy also smuggled out 118 members of the rocket team. When Churchill heard about it he was furious and complained to Eisenhower, who responded that it was too late to change things.
In June a group of Soviet engineers arrived at Peenemunde to see what they could salvage. Among them was Boris Chertok, 33, an expert on guidance systems, who immediately realized how far behind they had been. By the end of the war the most powerful operational Soviet rocket engine had a thrust of one and a half tons; the V-2 had a thrust of 27 tons. They obtained some sparse but significant items such as a combustion chamber and parts of propellant tanks, the pieces being sent back to Moscow to be examined by a group of engineers including Vasili Pavlovich Mishin, a specialist in control systems who, twenty years later, would lead the forlorn Soviet program to land a cosmonaut on the Moon.
The German rocket was far in advance of anything that the Russians, or anyone else, had. But they failed to see its full implications. They would eventually pay the price for thinking that long-range aircraft would be a superior weapon to the missile. At Peenemunde, Soviet soldiers dug out from the rubble a German edition of a book by Tsiolkovsky. On almost every page there were notes and comments made by von Braun. The Russians also found in the archives of the Nazi Air Ministry drawings of a missile designed by Soviet engineers in the late 1930s.
The Soviet Union needed rocket experts to make sense of what they were uncovering. Glushko and Korolev were recommended. Thus it was that in September Korolev, now a colonel in the Red Army, found himself in Germany. As he watched test flights of the reconstructed rocket it was clear to him that von Braun had gone further with rocket technology than anyone else – and that the Russians were going to need this technology. Korolev was never to meet von Braun; by the time he arrived in Germany, von Braun was already in America.
As the war in Europe drew to a close, Neil Armstrong was still dreaming of becoming an aircraft designer. He went to half a dozen schools as his family moved around Ohio. The war ended when he was fifteen and a year later he got his pilot’s licence at the youngest age possible. His first solo flight was over his home town of Wapakoneta, landing in a grass field. Soon he would enlist in the Holloway Plan, which mapped out a program of study, flight training and naval service over the next several years. Like so many young men of his generation, he had big plans.
Object D
Just outside Huntsville in Alabama, the Americans stored their greatest prize of the Second World War – the German rocket team. A few years earlier Huntsville was small with some 13,000 inhabitants. The Army purchased 35,000 acres in 1940 to build the Redstone Arsenal and a depot for chemical weapons. Twenty thousand Army personnel arrived and thousands of construction workers. Local amenities could not keep up. By the autumn, after the typical hot and humid summer, von Braun and the first wave of his engineers were collating the V-2 documents and teaching the military what they knew about rockets. They set about assembling and launching a number of V-2s from the White Sands missile base in New Mexico.
Many did not approve of von Braun’s presence in the US. In December 1946 President Truman received a letter signed by Albert Einstein and others protesting at German scientists living and working in the US. ‘We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred,’ the letter read.
They were not allowed to leave their quarters without a military escort, so von Braun and his colleagues jokingly referred to themselves as ‘Pops’ – prisoners of peace. He was soon frustrated. His progress was not as swift as he hoped it would be.
At the end of the war the USSR may have had the most powerful land force in the world, but such forces became secondary after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons. Just eighteen days after the Potsdam conference and fourteen days after Hiroshima, on 20 August 1945 a secret decree of the Soviet Central Committee and the Council of Ministers called for the formation of the Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb to direct and coordinate all efforts on the rapid development of nuclear weapons. They also needed the missiles to deliver them. Colonel General Mitrofan Nedelin and People’s Commissar of Armaments Dimitri Ustinov were appointed by Stalin to lead the USSR’s rocketry development. Nedelin, 44, was a brilliant officer who had used solid-fuelled Katyusha rockets during the war. Korolev was placed in charge of developing long-range missiles. His first task was to build a Soviet copy of the V-2 and improve on it, but it was clear to him that that would only serve as an interim measure. They needed better rockets of their own.
In early 1945, Mikhail Tikhonravov, who in 1933 had worked with Korolev on the development of the first Soviet liquid-fuelled rocket, brought together a group of engineers to work on a design for a high-altitude rocket to carry passengers to 190 km. Called the VR-190 proposal, it was the very first project in the Soviet Union for launching humans into space. The plan envisioned the use of a modified V-2 with a recoverable capsule for carrying two ‘stratonauts’. Tikhonravov tried to obtain interest from the top:
Dear Comrade Stalin! We have developed a plan for a high-altitude Soviet rocket for lifting two humans and scientific apparatus to an altitude of 190 km. The plan is based on using equipment from the captured V2 missile, and allows for realization in the shortest time.
Stalin was interested, at least for a while, writing back, ‘The proposal is interesting. Please examine for its realization.’ But Tikhonravov’s work stagnated. In 1947 it was renamed a ‘rocket probe’ and a year later a new preliminary plan was presented for approval. Further work was allowed, with one change: the launch of humans was dropped in favour of using dogs. The following year, the project was cancelled, ending the Soviet Union’s first serious investigations into manned spaceflight. The issue would not re-emerge for several years.
Frustrated, Korolev took his own rocket argument to Stalin. On 14 April 1947, he was escorted into the Kremlin to meet the Soviet leader in person for the first time. ‘I had been given the assignment to report to Stalin about the development of the new rocket,’ Korolev later recounted. ‘He listened silently at first, hardly taking his pipe out of his mouth. Sometimes he interrupted me, asking terse questions. I can’t recount all the details. I could not tell whether he approved of what I was saying or not.’
By early 1948 Tikhonravov was pushing another idea – a satellite. Again he didn’t receive much encouragement. That summer he read his report at the Academy of Artillery Sciences in the presence of a large group of prominent dignitaries from the military. The reaction of most was negative but Korolev was among those present and afterwards he approached his old friend, saying, ‘We have some serious things to talk about.’ Soon Korolev himself made plans to ask Stalin to fund the launch of an artificial satellite. The Russians now had their R-3 missile project, a rocket with a thrust of 120 tons designed to propel a three-ton warhead a distance of 3,000 km. Could it be the basis of a satellite launcher?
Meanwhile, von Braun was living in the desert at White Sands, feeling ignored and effectively doing nothing. He said, ‘We can dream about rockets and the Moon until Hell freezes over. Unless the people understand it and the man who pays the bill is behind it, no dice.’
In 1950 Tikhonravov tried once again to get official interest, this time with the first detailed Soviet analysis of the requirements for launching an artificial satellite. His paper, ‘On the Possibility of Achieving First Cosmic Velocity and Creating an Artificial Satellite with the Aid of a Multi-Stage Missile Using the Current Level of Technology’, was presented at a special session of the Academy of Artillery Sciences. The reaction to this presentation was even worse than in 1948: some were openly hostile, some sarcastic, many silent. Korolev was one of its few supporters.
Tikhonravov wrote an article, ‘Flight to the Moon’, for Pravda, describing an interplanetary spaceship. It concluded, ‘We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Tsiolkovsky will be realized within the next 10 to 15 years. All of you will become witnesses to this, and some of you may even be participants in as yet unprecedented journeys.’ Two days later the New York Times said that Dr Tikhonravov left no doubt that Soviet scientific development in the field of rockets was advancing rapidly.
In the spring of 1950, a group of American scientists led by James Van Allen of Johns Hopkins University met to discuss the possibility of an international scientific program to study the upper atmosphere and outer space using rockets, balloons, and ground observations. Soon the idea expanded into a worldwide program timed to coincide with the anticipated intense solar activity from July to December 1957. They called it the International Geophysical Year (IGY). At a subsequent meeting in Rome in 1954, Soviet scientists silently witnessed the approval of an American plan to put a satellite into orbit during the IGY. In July the following year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s press secretary James C. Hagerty said that the United States would launch ‘small Earth-circling satellites’.
That same day, at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Academician Sedov, Chairman of the Commission for the Promotion of Interplanetary Flights, USSR Academy of Sciences, called a press conference at which he announced: ‘In my opinion, it will be possible to launch an artificial Earth satellite within the next two years.’ But a sceptical Soviet leadership needed to be convinced. The same year, Korolev urged for work to begin on a satellite, but still no one was listening.
In the summer of 1951, engineers led by Korolev converged on the isolated Kapustin Yar launch site in southern Russia for the first Soviet attempt at launching a living thing into space. From an initial selection of nine dogs, two were chosen, their names Dezik and Tsygan. The launch, using the new R-4 missile, was to take place in the early morning hours so it would be illuminated by the Sun during its ascent. The launch was successful and the dogs reached a velocity of 4,200 km/h and an altitude of 101 km, officially entering space. They experienced four minutes of weightlessness. After 188 seconds the payload section separated from the main booster and went into free fall until it reached an altitude of 6 km, when the parachute deployed. Twenty minutes after lift-off, the dogs were back on the ground barking and wagging their tails – the first living things recovered after a flight into space. Two months later the United States were to achieve a similar feat.
Subsequent flights met with mixed results. Dezik and another dog, Lisa, died when their parachute failed. It was then decided that Tsygan should not fly again. Instead, in early September, engineer Anatoli Blagonravov took her back to Moscow. Russia’s first canine cosmonaut lived to a grand old age. Blagonravov and the dog would often be seen walking the streets of Moscow. In total, nine dogs were flown on six launches in those early years, three of them flying twice.
