Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [63]
By the late afternoon of June 20, forty-eight hours after the coup began, Zhukov had managed to deliver eighty-seven Central Committee members to Moscow. His bombers were landing, refueling, and taking off to pick up more Khrushchev supporters. The new arrivals demanded that the shocked Presidium plotters convene a full party plenum to discuss the leadership crisis. Lest the conspirators forget where the military stood on the matter of Bulganin versus Khrushchev, the delegates descending on the Kremlin were led by a parade of generals and marshals. By June 22, a weeklong plenum had been convened, and Kaganovich, Bulganin, and Molotov were in full retreat. It was now the war hero Zhukov, the savior of Moscow and conqueror of Berlin, who led the countercharge. The coup plotters, he said, were the very men who had been Stalin’s bloodiest henchmen, responsible for the worst of the purges. During a murderous eight-month rampage in 1938 alone, he alleged, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Malenkov had personally signed 38,679 execution orders. So had others, they protested. So had Khrushchev. But their tone was defeated. The fight in them had gone. Kaganovich, as Khrushchev noted in his memoir, no longer “roared like an African lion.”
Seated once more in the first secretary’s chair, Khrushchev could not suppress a satisfied sneer as his opponents squirmed for mercy. The attempted coup had been foiled. All that remained was for Khrushchev to decide the fate of the conspirators.
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Sergei Korolev hadn’t had reason to laugh for a long time. But he was in unusually high spirits on the August morning he visited Boris Chertok at Moscow’s Burdenko military hospital. “Okay, Boris,” he cheerfully chided Chertok. “You continue playing sick, but don’t stay out for too long.” A half dozen jubilant engineers crowded around Chertok’s bed, teasing and poking their infirm colleague. The suspected radiation poisoning had turned out to be simply an exotic Kazakh bug that manifested similar symptoms. “This is the best medication,” assured Leonid Voskresenskiy, the daredevil chief of testing, pulling a bottle of cognac out of a bag. “So,” he said, once Korolev had finished his pep talk and excused himself on the grounds of an important meeting. “Here’s the pickle we’re in. Everyone congratulates us, but nobody other than us knows what’s really going on.”
The rocket, as Chertok already knew, had finally worked. Korolev had been given one final chance to prove himself, and at 3:15 PM on August 21, the R-7 had flown all the way to Kamchatka, landing dead on target next to the Pacific Ocean. Korolev had been so relieved, so euphoric, that he had stayed up till 3:00 AM the next morning, jabbering away excitedly about the barrier they had just broken. There was a slight hitch, however. The heat shield had failed, and the dummy warhead had been incinerated on reentry. Apparently, the nose cone dilemma hadn’t been solved after all. And without thermal protection, the R-7 was not an ICBM, just a very large and expensive rocket. That was why Korolev had just rushed off to meet with a group of aerodynamic specialists: to see if they had any solutions to what Voskresenskiy called “Problem Number One.”
Telemetry readings had shown that not only had the dummy warhead completely burned up ten miles over its intended target; it had also been rammed from behind in outer space by the main stage on separation. The bumping could be easily solved by venting some of the compressed