Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [112]
“We still hadn’t realized what we had done,” Sergei Khrushchev remembered. It would take the world to tell them.
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For Sergei Korolev, it would also take a while for the magnitude of his accomplishment to sink in. There had been little time to celebrate after the launch: a few rounds of vodka and congratulatory speeches in the middle of the night, followed by intensive calculations and worries as the first day of the space age wore on. PS-1, as everyone at Tyura-Tam still called the satellite, was up, but how stable was its orbit? This the anxious scientists could not immediately determine, because their tracking stations were arrayed only on Soviet territory and thus could measure only a small fraction of the satellite’s elliptical orbit. Sputnik would have to make at least a dozen full revolutions before anyone could tell with certainty whether it would stay in orbit or come crashing back to earth.
Every celestial body suffers from what is known as orbital decay, a gradual loss of speed and altitude that brings the object either closer to or farther from its center of gravity. Decay can be imperceptibly slow, as in the case of the moon, which falls a few inches away from the earth every year, or catastrophically abrupt, like a meteor getting sucked in by the pull of gravity. Sputnik could thus stay in orbit for a day, a week, a month, a year, a millennium, or a million years, depending on that all-important rate of degeneration.
From Sputnik’s first few rotations, Korolev’s team had been able to ascertain the satellite’s basic parameters: its apogee, perigee, speed, inclination, and duration of each orbit. The tiny sphere was hurtling on a 25,000-kilometer-per-hour (15,625-miles-per-hour) roller-coaster ride around the planet, crossing the equator every ninety-six minutes at a sixty-five-degree angle as it climbed to apogees (peaks) of 947 kilometers (587 miles) above sea level like a surfer on a wave and then plummeted to perigees (depths) of 228 kilometers (141 miles) as it fell to the bottom of a trough before rising again. But each time Sputnik hit a trough was like slamming on the brakes, because the atmosphere, even at that height, was still thick enough to cause friction. At such relatively low points of the orbit, fluctuations in the earth’s gravity due to differences in the shape and mineral composition of the globe, which is not a perfectly round sphere, could also adversely affect decay. Sputnik’s perigee was too low because of the malfunction during liftoff, which had resulted in an early engine cutoff. The question was, How much ground was it losing? If PS-1 fell back to earth within a few days, Korolev’s triumph would be short-lived, his record tainted, his masters in Moscow unhappy. Frantically, his mathematicians ran the numbers, trying to predict Sputnik’s life span. Finally, early in the afternoon of October 5, they came up with an estimate: two to three months. (The exact number would turn out to be ninety-two days.) Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Sputnik was safe, as far as the record books and politicians stood. Korolev and his chief designers could at last relax and go home to celebrate in earnest.
Until then, there had been no time for reflection. “We were all too focused on our jobs, concentrating on the execution of the operation, to think about the meaning of the event,” recalled Vladimir Barmin, the designer of the Tulip launchpad. Boris Chertok described feeling a similar sensation of relieved exhaustion rather than euphoric wonder on finally hearing that the space barrier was broken. “It was late. We went to bed,” he wrote, with uncharacteristic brevity, of getting the news at OKB-1 headquarters in Moscow, where he had been recovering from his illness. “We thought the satellite was just a simple device,” he added, “and that the importance of the launch had been to test the R-7 again and gather data.”
Of all the engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians,