Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [81]
Korolev’s satellite surprise had also encountered resistance from another, entirely unexpected quarter: from Mstislav Keldysh, a legend in the ranks of Soviet academia, who had been awarded three Hero of Soviet Labor gold stars, the USSR’s equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Korolev’s junior by four years, Keldysh was a handsome Latvian mathematical genius, a child prodigy both as a theoretician and as an applied aviation engineer, who had been the youngest member ever elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences. In Soviet scholarly circles, Keldysh’s name carried the same awe-inspiring weight as that of Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi. The suave Balt, a master at bureaucratic maneuvering, had used his status and unique position as the Presidium’s science adviser to become the USSR’s earliest advocate of space exploration. Long before Korolev’s breakthrough with the R-5 intermediate-range missile, it had been Keldysh’s political clout that had nudged the satellite proposal gradually up the government ladder.
But now the man who had once been Korolev’s greatest proponent was openly skeptical. This flimsy “simple satellite” that Korolev wanted to launch was nothing more than a political stunt, Keldysh complained. They should wait until Object OD-1, the mammoth orbiting laboratory bristling with sophisticated sensors, was ready. That way the Soviet Union could score a real scientific coup. Object OD-1 would perform invaluable research such as measuring the density, pressure, and ion composition of the atmosphere at altitudes from 200 to 500 kilometers (124 to 310 miles). It would measure magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and the corpuscular radiation of the sun. Ultraviolet and X-ray spectrums, inherent electric charges, and positive ion concentrations could be determined—in short, everything scientists needed to know before attempting to send a living being into space. The PS-1 Simple Satellite that Korolev now proposed launching instead was so small that the only real task it could perform was to send short bursts of a low-frequency signal back to amateur ham radio operators on earth. As a research tool, it had no real value.
Keldysh now charged that Korolev was more interested in the personal prestige of breaking the space barrier than in the collective data the mission would bring back. This was all about the Chief Designer’s ego, not the advancement of science, and he would be damned if he was going to tie up the Soviet Union’s most powerful computer for Korolev’s little vanity project. Russia had virtually no computers in 1957 because Stalin had viewed cybernetics as a “faulty science,” not applicable to a dialectical society. By the time the military applications of the machines had become obvious, the USSR lagged hopelessly behind the West, and Keldysh, as the head of the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics, controlled access to the only civilian supercomputer in Moscow.
Without access to Keldysh’s computer, Korolev would be stopped in his tracks because it could take months using manual six-digit trigonometry tables just to plug in all the variables needed to plot the parameters of an orbital trajectory. His engineers needed to calculate the exact speed of the rotation of the earth at the point of launch, which, at Tyura-Tam, was just over 1,000 feet per second. The direction of the launch, the azimuth, had to be factored in, since the earth rotates on a west-to-east axis and launching westward would be like swimming against a tide. The precise shape of the earth at the point