Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [19]
For the first time, a Soviet leader had admitted that horrible crimes had been committed in the name of communism, that terror as a tool of the state was wrong. It was still too early to tell what that meant. But as the CIA predicted, there were almost certainly going to be dire consequences.
These, and other, thoughts troubled Korolev’s distracted guests. The Chief Designer would not have known what weighty matters preoccupied his visitors because he had not been privy to the secret speech. But he was intimately acquainted with its contents. He had been among the 1,548,366 people arrested in 1938, an ordeal that began, as in the case of countless others, with a knock at the door in the middle of the night and nearly always ended in death, either by outright execution or later in the camps. “He was taken to Lefortovo prison, interrogated, beaten,” a colleague of Korolev’s would later inform the biographer James Harford. “He remembered asking for a glass of water from one [guard] who handed him the glass and then hit him in the head with the water jug. He was called an enemy of the people.”
Korolev didn’t need Khrushchev to tell him how cold it could get in Kolyma, or what it was like to sleep barefoot in the snow with a broken jaw. He had not needed to be told how it felt to lose all your teeth from malnutrition. And he didn’t need to listen to a speech to know that the prosecutions had been shams. In fact, the scientist at his side during most of the Presidium visit, the propulsion expert Valentin Glushko, had provided testimony against him at his own trial, which had ended with a ten-year sentence “for crimes in the field of a new technology” and a perfunctory “Next.”
What Korolev did need from Khrushchev that day was the green light to embark on an ambitious new project. So the Chief Designer smiled his pearly denture smile at the men who had robbed years from his life and continued his lecture. The first full-scale R-2, he explained, had been field-tested in October 1950. The launch was not a success. After tinkering throughout the harsh winter, the designers attempted another series of test firings in the spring of 1951. This time it flew 390 miles—in the right direction. “Which brings us to the present,” said Korolev, gesturing toward the largest of the three missiles. “This is the R-5,” he said, tapping the rocket with a pointer, “the first Soviet strategic rocket,” built entirely by Russians without German help.
The R-5, the Presidium members could immediately see, was radically different from its predecessors. It was longer by half than the original V-2 replica, slimmer, more fragile in appearance, and tubular in shape. The four big, graceful stabilizer fins that had made the tapered V-2 instantly recognizable had been lopped back to tiny triangle wedges on the R-5, and the nose cone had been blunted into an ungainly snout.
“The construction looked utterly incapable of flight,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, a sixty-six-foot-long pencil in need of sharpening, with an engine for a rubber eraser. “The [R-l and R-2] at least had streamlined shapes and a certain refinement in the form of stabilizers,” he would later write. “Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction, since Father looked surprised.”
Korolev, at last, had his guests’ undivided attention. Not only did the R-5 fly, he explained, but it spent most of its flight above the atmosphere. Large stabilizer fins were not necessary because of servomotors for the small aerodynamic rudders. The rocket’s tubular shell doubled as the propellant tank wall, further reducing design mass by a full ton while increasing fuel capacity by 60 percent. The engine, an RD-103 designed by Glushko, also produced 60 percent more thrust than its predecessors, and thanks to the introduction of coolant flowing through integrated solder-welded ribs around the combustion chamber, it could operate longer and more efficiently,