Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [87]
Was it true? he asked, when the call was patched through. Were the Americans really about to launch a satellite? The duty officer at KGB headquarters did not know. A series of coded messages was exchanged between Moscow and the resident spies at the Soviet embassy in Washington. No, came the final answer. There were no early indications that the United States was planning any sort of launch.
Korolev, though, was far from relieved. What if the spooks were wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time Soviet intelligence had missed signals. Korolev couldn’t chance it. I’m moving up the launch date to October 4, he informed Vassily Ryabikov, chair of the R-7 State Commission.
This time he didn’t bother to wait for an answer from Moscow.
• • •
The rocket was rolled out of its hangar the following morning. An overhead crane lifted the twenty-seven-ton empty shell—light and eminently more manageable without its warhead and full complement of fuel—and gingerly deposited it on a giant green erector-transporter that waited on rail tracks at the hangar door. Korolev, apparently still feeling the emotional pinch of the previous day’s panic, patted his missile sentimentally. “Well,” he told the assembled dignitaries, “shall we see off our first-born?”
A solemn procession began along the sandy mile-and-a-half-long berm that connected the assembly hangar to the launchpad, a tradition that would be repeated for every subsequent space launch and continues to this day. Heads bowed in silence, hands clasped behind their backs, the scientists, soldiers, and technocrats followed the locomotive that slowly, painstakingly pushed the R-7 on its transporter to the fire pit. A grainy and undated Soviet video captured the scene. In the front row, Korolev in a black leather jacket walked next to Voskresenskiy, his trusted chief of flight testing, looking like a portly French painter in the black beret that he used to seal liquid oxygen leaks with frozen urine. Farther back, the bemedaled generals, their olive green uniforms matching the military paint job on the 150-foot-long transporter. Behind them, Glushko, Ryabikov, and Rudnev, the deputy minister for military-industrial works. Then, bringing up the rear, the rest of the bureaucrats and lesser designers. In the video, no one is talking, and faces seem grim. The camera pans away to reveal a tableau of windswept dunes and a pair of camels on a ridge—though these have almost certainly been spliced in for exotic effect since it was highly unlikely that Kazakh herders were permitted to wander freely around Tyura-Tam.
Fifty minutes elapsed before the R-7 reached the launchpad, and the huge hydraulic boom on the transporter began to inch upward. Slowly, over the next hour and ten minutes, the rocket was raised into the waiting arms of the Tulip launch stand. When at last it had been fully righted, the transporter boom lowered it and the Tulip’s petals closed around its waist like a vice. The R-7 was now suspended in midair, its thrusters hanging just below ground level over the 120-foot-deep, five-football-fields-wide concrete apron of the fire pit. But before fueling could begin, it still had to be tested one last time. It was a shortcoming of horizontal assembly, a time-consuming extra step that the Americans had skipped by building their towering new hangar at Cape Canaveral several dozen stories high so that U.S. missiles could roll out already tested and in the vertical position.
Marshal Nedelin, in particular, was unhappy with the Soviet arrangement. He was going to head the Strategic Rocket Forces, and in the event of a nuclear attack, precious time would be lost running unnecessary diagnostics. An ICBM’s retaliatory value depended largely on how quickly it could be fired, and the R-7 was proving painfully slow to get off the ground. Nor could problems be fixed once the missile