_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [60]
The recovery was a piece of cake. The fruit of the spy’s labor was on its way to the eyes of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Look at this sonofabitch,” the CIA analyst shouted. “It’s bigger than a Saturn V, and the damned thing’s gotta have more punch.” He turned to a colleague. “You have those data reports on the N–1 ready?”
“Right here.”
The CIA analyst quickly scanned the first two pages before slapping the papers against the table. The pictures showed a monster of a rocket, standing almost as tall as the Washington Monument.
The Russians simply called it N–1, and it had one assignment: get cosmonauts to the moon’s surface, but more important, get them there and back before American astronauts. It was February 1969. The Russian space program was unraveling. Rockets rushed to their launch pads had proven unreliable. They exploded on their launch stands or, if not there, shortly after liftoff. The Zond project had been dropped after Apollo 8. No need for a circumlunar flight now. Landing on the moon was the only prize left.
“You know what this means?” the CIA analyst asked his colleague, then quickly answered his own question. “If this monster works, cosmonauts could still beat us to the lunar surface.”
Another countdown came to life at Baikonur. It was the first launch of N–1, and years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we would learn missing details.
It was eighteen minutes past midnight Moscow time on February 21, 1969. Russia’s cosmonauts watched in awe and hope as thirty rocket engines lit as one. The monster blasted from its launch pad with a roiling sea of flame larger than Times Square. It sent fire whipping across land and steel and concrete as it rose on ten million pounds of thrust, nearly twice the power of Saturn V, but as it cleared its huge support tower, engines number 12 and 14 “went dark.”
Still the monster kept climbing, right on course with twenty-eight remaining engines, and when the largest rocket ever reached Max Q, the maximum external forces on N–1’s structure, all engines throttled back to take it easy through the “shock barrier.”
That worked. And now, sixty-six second into the flight, it was time to throttle back up to full power. But instead of an expected smooth throttle back up to maximum thrust, the increased power began tearing things apart. N–1 shuddered and rattled so violently it ripped open its fuel tanks. Instantly, fire began eating the giant. Computers began shutting everything down as fire spread faster and faster, and then, the mother of all rockets tore itself into millions of burning pieces in the most gigantic explosion of any vehicle ever built.
The sky above Kazakhstan burned. The night gave way to a shimmering orange daylight over the steppes before it began raining fiery debris with blazing chunks of burning rocket tumbling earthward.
The Russian managers watching felt no need to speak of the obvious. It would now take a miracle to keep Russia in the race.
NASA’s senior managers were made aware of the N–1’s demise, and time was now surely on their side. Deke Slayton got on with the job of picking the astronauts for the first landing attempt. The normal rotation of crews was playing right in his hands. The way it was working out, Neil Armstrong would command Apollo 11 and Pete Conrad would be at the helm of Apollo 12. Deke had long ago made the decision to have either Neil or Pete land the first lunar module on the moon.
Neil was learned, experienced, and had the moxie to get out of a harrowing situation. As NASA’s own test pilot, he had survived potential tragedies time and again. Apollo 11 would get the first shot, but the odds were very