Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [53]
Bombers had actually scared the Kremlin into softening its stand—“mellowing,” as the agency put it. Satellites, therefore, were trivial in the superpower rivalry. Eisenhower declared that he felt no need “to compete with the Soviets in this area.” Secretary Wilson told the New York Times that he too was unconcerned about the prospect of Russia reaching space first. “I wouldn’t care if they did,” he said.
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DESERT FIRES
The R-7’s rescheduled March 1957 test-launch deadline came and went, and Sergei Korolev was still not ready. He was becoming increasingly irritable, more prone to terrorizing his staff with his infamous flare-ups, and he wielded both the stick and the carrot to motivate his engineers. Breakthroughs were rewarded with on-the-spot bonuses, wads of rubles that Korolev kept in an office safe for just such a purpose. The most significant achievements earned holidays to Black Sea resorts or even the most sought-after commodity in the entire Soviet Union: the keys to a new apartment. Like all large factories and institutes, OKB-1 was responsible for housing its employees. For young and especially newlywed scientists living in dormitories without privacy, few incentives matched the prospect of skipping to the front of the long waiting list for a place of their own.
The capitalist approach was paying dividends, as glitches were progressively ironed out. Valentin Glushko had wanted no part in making modifications to the steering thrusters, so they were completed in-house at OKB-1. The addition of the tiny directional thrusters also solved the problem of postimpulse boost; the R-7’s main engines could now be shut down a fraction of a second early to compensate for residual propellant, while the little thrusters could be fired to adjust speed and position at the critical aiming, or “sweet,” point, as guidance specialists called cutoff.
A backup radio-controlled radar guidance system was also installed to augment the accuracy of the onboard inertial gyroscopes. Boris Chertok supervised the duplicate system, which had involved building nine tracking stations deep in the Kazakh desert over the first 500 miles of the R-7’s trajectory route, and another six stations within a 90-mile approach to the target area in the Kamchatka Peninsula, 4,000 miles farther. As the missile would fly over the first nine stations, radar would pick it up, plot whether it was on course, and send back telemetry signals for any needed adjustments to trim, yaw, or pitch in what essentially was a very large and costly version of amateur modelers flying radio-controlled airplanes. But with the R-7, the action would unfold at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour and span many time zones in a matter of minutes.
With the R-7 now capable of guided flight, Korolev’s team solved the problem of how to support its crushing weight during liftoff. Their solution was ingeniously simple. A gigantic vise with collapsible jaws, pivots, and counterweights was built in Moscow and tested at a military shipyard in Leningrad—the only place with cranes big enough to lift the R-7. When the rocket was lowered into this vise, its 283-ton mass forced the jaws to squeeze shut, like the petals of a tulip. As the rocket rose after ignition, relieving the load from the clamped jaws, the hinged counterweights at the end of the petals exerted downward force, releasing the vise grip.
On the other hand, concerns about the R-7’s nose cone persisted throughout the winter and spring of 1957. After much experimentation, the warhead receptacles were blunted and shortened to reduce drag, while an ablative material that used