Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [56]
From his monastic hut at Tyura-Tam, a cabin without running water and only a bare lightbulb to illuminate the lonely gloom, Korolev wrote his daughter weekly, begging for her forgiveness. He tried calling on her twenty-first birthday, but she hung up on him. “It hurts me so much,” he told Nina.
Even at the best of times, Tyura-Tam was a dispiriting place. But with two consecutive failures, growing friction between the different design bureaus over responsibility for the myriad malfunctions, and Moscow becoming increasingly irritated, the atmosphere was downright foreboding as Korolev lined up a third R-7 for launch on July 12. This time the countdown went uninterrupted, the engines all fired properly, and the missile lifted off without a hitch at 3:53 PM. Thirty-three seconds later it disintegrated. The strap-on peripheral boosters had separated early.
Watching the four flaming boosters slowly sail down into the desert just four humiliating miles from the launchpad, Korolev dejectedly shook his head. “We are criminals,” he said. “We just burned away [the financial equivalent of] an entire town.”
Fear now descended on the despondent scientists. The Soviet Union was not so far removed from the Stalinist era to presume that punishment might not be meted out for the catastrophic and costly failures. “What can they do to us?” a frightened Chertok asked Konstantin Rudnev, the deputy minister of armaments. “They are not going to jail us, or send us to Kolyma?”
“No,” Rudnev reassured him. “But your rocket will be put into the hands of other people.” He reminded Chertok that Korolev was not the only designer who had caught the Kremlin’s eye. There was the talented Vladimir Chelomey over at OKB-52, where the young Sergei Khrushchev was about to go to work. “He was a brilliant scientist, but alienated people,” Sergei recalled. At OKB-586, Mikhail Yangel had just landed a commission to build the 1,200-mile-range R-12 missiles that Khrushchev would later try to ship to Cuba. Yangel, especially, was viewed by many as the complete package: a gifted engineer, an astute manager, and an effective salesman. Korolev’s main strengths were his ability to sell Khrushchev on his ideas and his hard-driving, almost maniacal management style; he was not seen as technically brilliant. In fact, there were dark rumblings that the dozen additional mini-steering thrusters that he had grafted onto Glushko’s engines were actually causing some of the malfunctions. They were “worthless,” Glushko railed, and a clear demonstration that the arrogant Korolev had overstepped his “technical competence.”
It wasn’t just Glushko’s increasingly vocal recriminations that the Chief Designer had to worry about. He also had powerful enemies in Moscow, including the ruthless Central Committee official Ivan “the Terrible” Serbin, who was jealous of his independence and status as Khrushchev’s pet designer. Many in the military were equally resentful and begrudged the vast sums Korolev’s missiles diverted from conventional forces. (One general had famously groused that if the alcohol wasted on rocket propellant were given to his soldiers instead, they could wipe out any target more effectively.) The Soviet brass was by no means enamored of rockets. “You can’t count on Malinovsky,” Rudnev warned Chertok, referring to the deputy defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky. “He only tolerates you because Khrushchev supports the rocket.”
But how long would the support last? Already there were mutterings to stop wasting money on R-7 flight tests. “The rocket will fly,” Korolev stubbornly maintained. But others were starting to have their doubts. In Moscow a whispering campaign had begun that Khrushchev had backed the wrong horse, that once more his rash decisions were endangering the empire. Without the R-7 as a deterrent,