Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [54]
Originally known as Tyura-Tam and eventually as Baikonur (in yet another instance of Soviet misdirection), the installation was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Soviet Union. Correspondence to it was simply addressed to Moscow Post Office Box 300, and it figured on no map. The military construction crews that had built it had been rotated in short, highly compartmentalized shifts, and never told what they were doing in the middle of the broiling Kazakh desert, where temperatures soared to 135 degrees in summer and plunged to 35 below in the short, merciless winter. Dust storms clogged machinery with salty sand particles blown across the central Asian steppe from the Aral Sea. For hundreds of miles, there was not a single tree to offer shade or firewood. Soldiers slept in tents crawling with scorpions, and water had to be trucked in.
Besides the benefit of seclusion, the Tyura-Tam site had been selected because of the R-7’s guidance problems. Tracking stations could be built in the depopulated area along the route to Siberia, and rocket engineers didn’t have to worry about spent boosters falling on urban centers. A major rail spur also happened to run nearby, easing the transport of missile parts and building materials. The pace of construction at Tyura-Tam had been so frenetic, so filled with accidents and setbacks, that the young military officer responsible for erecting the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ICBM launch site had gone crazy and been carted away to a psychiatric ward. Only the rudimentary infrastructure had been completed in time for testing: a huge assembly hangar connected by rail to a fire pit the size of a large quarry to absorb the flames at liftoff; several underground propellant storage tanks; a cement bunker blockhouse; and a 15,000-square-foot launch platform erected out of sixteen massive bridge trusses. Otherwise, and in every direction, there were only shifting dunes and the shimmering heat waves of the sun reflecting off the sand. There had been no time to build housing, cafeterias, recreation halls, laboratories, or even lavatories. Scientists lived four to a compartment in train cars that had been built in East Germany after the war and equipped with special labs for the storage and testing of delicate rocket components. Showers were a rare luxury. The food was gritty and abysmal. And at night the principal form of entertainment seemed to involve watching scorpions duel to the death in empty vodka bottles.
Ill omens appeared almost from the start. During a dress rehearsal for the first launch, a fire alarm was inadvertently triggered, setting off sprinklers in the blockhouse control room that drenched everyone, including irate military representatives who had come to observe the birth of the Red Army’s latest and most lethal weapon. Later, a technician dropped a bolt inside the R-7, and for several tense hours the missile was searched for the lost object. Korolev exploded when Chertok informed him that one of the Moscow dignitaries had offered the clumsy technician a bonus of 250 rubles—about a week’s pay—for owning up to the potentially catastrophic mishap. “What the hell are you doing?” the Chief Designer roared. “You should punish him, not reward him. Rescind the bonus immediately and issue a reprimand.”
As the May 15 countdown neared, tension grew. A few hours before liftoff, Korolev blew up at another military observer, Colonel Alexander Maksimov, who he thought was sending false reports about leaky liquid oxygen feed lines to his superiors. “Get him out of here right now, or I’m aborting,” Korolev shouted. Only it turned out that Maksimov was innocent, and Korolev had to apologize publicly. Any