Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [80]
All at once, the room burst into a chorus of competing protests. In the hue and cry, the smiles vanished, Glushko suddenly sneered, and voices were raised. “This proposal was a big surprise,” General K. V. Gerchik, the Tyura-Tam deputy base commander, recalled decades later. “There were objections.”
Rather heated objections, according to the sparse historical record, which, in typical Soviet fashion, whitewashed the unseemly bickering in bland bureaucratic terms. Apparently Korolev’s fellow commission members had seen through his transparent ploy to distract Khrushchev from the warhead reentry problems by orbiting a satellite instead, and they wanted no part of the scheme. For their own reasons, the different factions on the commission rallied against Korolev’s rush to orbit. There wasn’t time, Glushko and the other design bureau heads objected, reminding the Chief Designer that the string of test failures had depleted the available stock of R-7s. They simply didn’t have the component parts to build more rockets to keep pace with Korolev’s frenetic schedule.
The six military representatives on the commission complained that a satellite was a waste of time and resources. The R-7 was a weapon, not a toy for silly scientific competitions. “All these space projects will simply distract us from the main objective of a nuclear ICBM,” said General Aleksander Mrykin, reiterating the military’s long-held position. “We should delay the development of a satellite until the R-7 is fully operational.”
Major General Oleg Shishkin, the nuclear ordnance chief, was particularly irate. It was his dummy warheads that were being incinerated by the faulty thermal shields, and until Korolev fixed the problem he couldn’t risk testing the R-7 with a live weapon. General Ivan Bulychev, the deputy communications commander, had equally pressing and practical reasons to oppose the satellite. It was Bulychev’s ground stations that would need to be reconfigured to track a completely new orbital trajectory, and the impatient Chief Designer wanted the upgrades ready by early October—an unrealistic time frame. Colonel Yuri Mozzhorin recalled, “The Directorate of Missile Weapons was sharply against the participation of the Ministry of Defense in the tracking of satellites . . . because it would harm the defensive capabilities of the country.”
Korolev had anticipated such rumblings from the armed forces. Soldiers were inherently conservative, and every major modern military innovation from the Gatling gun to the aircraft had been viewed with extreme skepticism by general staffs. Khrushchev had foisted missiles on his reluctant generals, had taken billions of rubles from their budgets to finance his gamble, and now the scheming Korolev was trying to bamboozle them with this sudden urgency to orbit a man-made moon. To deflect the criticism, the Chief Designer had already petitioned the government to issue a decree ordering his subordinate design bureaus to begin “development of an artificial satellite for photographing the earth’s surface.” Like von Braun three years earlier, he had hoped that the potential military applications of spacecraft as targeting and espionage vehicles would generate enthusiasm.
But the military men were unmoved. The Soviet Union did not have the same urgent need for aerial reconnaissance as the United States. America was a far more open society, ridiculously easy to penetrate. Its Congress publicly debated minute details of defense budgets. Astonishingly accurate road maps that would be highly classified in the USSR were sold at every gas station. Security was so incredibly lax that Korolev had been able to read a translation of U.S. newspaper accounts of Atlas’s latest test,