Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [139]
“Do we have to do this in the future?” interrupted John Foster Dulles, whose “irritation” was clearly recorded in the minutes. “The Soviets kept their launches secret, why couldn’t we?”
The unfortunate Quarles, who had recommended that Eisenhower downplay Sputnik just prior to his disastrous October 9 press conference, and then compounded the error by overestimating Vanguard’s chances of success, would find little respite from the hot seat in the coming weeks. Again he tried to explain that the United States had formally committed itself to conduct satellite research as a purely peaceful, scientific pursuit, with complete openness. “It would involve fundamentally changing our policy,” he stammered.
“Well, maybe we should change our policy,” Dulles shot back. “Yesterday was a disaster for the United States.”
• • •
While America plunged into a national funk and Vice President Nixon scrambled for high ground, the man responsible for all the turmoil lay exhausted in a sanatorium in southern Russia. Sergei Korolev’s fragile health had finally caught up with him. During the marathon preparations for Sputnik II’s rushed launch, he had taxed his delicate system to the breaking point and had collapsed shortly after completing his mission. He was rushed to Moscow’s most exclusive hospital, one reserved for ranking party officials, where the Soviet Union’s leading heart specialists were summoned to his bedside. The Chief Designer was diagnosed with arrhythmia, coupled with “over-fatigue,” and the doctors prescribed thirty days of bed rest. Khrushchev himself issued the directive, since Korolev had a penchant for ignoring his physicians’ advice.
Despite the order to stay off his feet, Korolev had no intention of remaining idle. Kislovodsk, the spa he chose for his enforced recuperation, had been popularized a century earlier by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and frequented by the czarist aristocracy for the medicinal powers of its warm sulfuric springs. Nestled between the Caspian and Black seas at the foot of the snowcapped Caucasus, it was the burial site of Friedrich Tsander, Korolev’s first real mentor and the man who had opened his eyes to the possibility of space travel in the late 1920s.
With his customary zeal, Korolev had turned the peaceful sanatorium into a bustling base from which to launch a region-wide search for Tsander’s grave. Local officials, clerical administrators, archaeologists, and even experts from Moscow were summoned, cajoled, threatened, berated, and rewarded until every cemetery in the area had been scoured and the rocket pioneer’s final resting place at last found. There, Korolev ordered a monument erected in homage to the visionary who had planted the seed for the Sputniks.
In Moscow, meanwhile, Valentin Glushko and some of the Chief Designer’s other envious detractors were taking advantage of his absence to sow seeds of doubt about the R-7 within the Kremlin and the military. For all of Sputnik II’s political and propaganda achievements, the mission had not been a technical success. Pravda and its wire-service sibling, TASS, had made much of Sputnik II’s living payload, regaling readers both at home and abroad with tales of the mixed-breed terrier Laika, hurtling through space 1,000 miles above the earth’s surface at a speed of 17,600 miles per hour. Telemetry readings, the public had been told, had shown that her heart rate had jumped dramatically during liftoff, to 260 beats per minute, but she had settled down, enjoying her gelatinized treats as she paved the way for human interplanetary travel in her climate-controlled capsule. In fact Laika had died shortly after launch, when both the heat shields and the cooling systems had failed, and she had suffered a horrific fate akin to being slow-roasted alive in a convection