Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [39]
Glushko, conversely, never betrayed emotion or raised his voice in anger. But he held bitter and enduring grudges and worked mercilessly behind the scenes to exact revenge on those who crossed him. He was a formidable adversary, and like Korolev he knew how to work the system. Neither man was much for compromise. And theirs was an uneasy partnership destined to explode.
The first hurdle the pair faced in the wake of the Presidium visit was rocket power. To fling a five-ton thermonuclear warhead 5,000 miles, Korolev had calculated that he needed more than 450 tons of thrust. This represented a tenfold increase over the R-5 intermediate-range ballistic missile, whose RD-103 booster had already strained the limits of single-engine capacity. (Glushko had experimented with a mammoth 120-ton thrust engine, the RD-110, but the project had been abandoned.) To meet Korolev’s vastly increased power requirement, the R-7 would have to be powered by five separate rockets, bundled like a giant Chinese fireworks display. But that still left Glushko with combustion chamber problems. Even with five supercharged furnaces sharing the load, they would still be too big and unwieldy, subject to destabilizing power fluctuations. The solution was the RD-107, an engine with a single turbo pump that simultaneously fed fuel and oxidizer to four regular-sized combustion chambers. The combined output of the twenty combustion chambers—four in each of the five boosters—would meet Korolev’s thrust specifications. The clustering of the peripheral boosters around the central rocket would make the R-7 ungainly in appearance with a bulging thirty-five-foot-wide base that resembled the skirt of a hefty babushka, but the RD-107s were far more efficient than previous-generation motors. With recast combustion chambers, shaped like cylinders rather than the standard flared mushroom mold popularized by the V-2, they would ignite kerosene, which burned hotter than the alcohol-based propellants the Germans and Americans used.
In addition to generating more lift, the five-booster configuration solved another serious design concern. The Soviets had never designed a multistage rocket before, and Glushko refused to guarantee that the upper stages—so critical to achieving orbital velocity—would work. But if the central R-7 engine block was designed to operate longer, the four peripheral boosters could be jettisoned in flight to lighten the load, while the central core kept firing in what was effectively a one-and-a-half-stage compromise.
The solution, however, created its own new snag. Because the larger central engine now worked longer, about four minutes in total, the heat-resistant graphite steering vanes Glushko had fixed to the exhaust nozzles could not be employed. They were rated to withstand the intense heat for only two minutes before burning up, and without them the R-7 could not be steered. A pitched debate broke out over how to fix the problem. Korolev favored using small gimbaled thrusters, mini-combustion chambers on swivels to provide steerage. But Glushko was violently opposed to the idea of anyone tinkering with his engines. (This was a man who so hated outside interference that he once famously drove several hundred miles with the handbrake engaged rather than heed a passenger’s advice to release it.) Already with the R-7, he was making a significant concession by using kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant rather than his favored mix of nitric acid and dimethyl hydrazine. And now Korolev was demanding even more significant alterations. A shouting match ensued, with Glushko hotly refusing to budge. If the Chief Designer wanted the damn changes, he’d have to make them himself.
Friction was also posing serious