Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [55]
The rocket was cleared for liftoff just after 7:00 PM MOSCOW time on May 15. The massive engines fired, the Tulip launch stand worked perfectly, and the R-7 rose to the whooping cheers of assembled engineers and VIPs. But ninety-eight seconds into the flight something went terribly wrong. The missile crashed, scattering debris over a 250-mile radius.
Back in Moscow, Sergei Khrushchev recalled the phone ringing after dinner at the family’s mansion in Lenin Hills. It was the white line, the German-made phone used for important government business. “That was Korolev,” said Nikita Khrushchev, looking particularly gloomy as he hung up. “They launched the R-7 this evening. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful.”
Korolev, though, was upbeat. First launches almost always failed. That had been the rule with the R-l, the R-2, and the R-5. And he had reason to feel optimistic: for the first minute and a half, the R-7 had performed flawlessly. The trouble had been with one of the peripheral boosters, block D, which had caught fire shortly before separation. The suspected cause of the explosion was excessive vibrations, what was known as the Pogo effect. Korolev and his team would figure out exactly what had happened and fix the glitch. Next time, he was certain, his missile would make it all the way to the target zone in Kamchatka, almost 5,000 miles away on Siberia’s Pacific coast.
For a long, hot month, they tinkered. At last, on June 9, another R-7 was wedged into the Tulip launch stand. Voskresenskiy supervised all the preparations. Korolev trusted him implicitly, and on more than one occasion he had proven his loyalty and courage. Once, when a launch had misfired and the live warhead had been dislodged from its missile, dangling precariously over the pad, everyone had frozen in panic. But Voskresenskiy had calmly told Korolev, “Give me a crane, some cash, five men of my choosing, and three hours.” With wads of vodka-walking-around money bulging out of their pockets, Voskresenskiy’s men safely dismantled the one-ton warhead, after which they got royally drunk.
Like a great many test pilots and other people who push safety envelopes for a living, Voskresenskiy was deeply superstitious. So when the next R-7 failed to start, not once, not twice, but on three consecutive days before sputtering out with a smoky cough on the launchpad on June 11, Voskresenskiy decided it was cursed. “Take it away,” he ordered. “I never want to see it again.” The blighted rocket was hauled away in disgrace.
A dark, defeated mood settled over the exhausted R-7 team. They hadn’t seen their families in several months. They were working round the clock, seven days a week, and people were getting sick from the long hours and unremitting worry. Chertok came down with a strange ailment with similar symptoms to radiation poisoning. Eventually he would have to be medically evacuated to Moscow. Korolev developed strep throat and had to take frequent penicillin shots. His health had never fully recovered from the ravages of the camps, and he frequently took ill. “We are working under a great strain, both physical and emotional,” he wrote his second wife, Nina. “Everyone feels a bit sick. I want to hug you and forget about all this stress.”
Korolev had met Nina Kotenkova at OKB-1, where she served as the institute’s English-language specialist, translating Western scientific periodicals. It was through her that the Chief Designer had kept abreast of Wernher von Braun’s writings and exploits in the American media, and in the flush of lonely nights spent jointly hunched over the pages of Popular Mechanics they had