Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [90]
In the eight seconds it took the 280-ton missile to climb the first 1,000 feet, an alarm indicator had silenced the cheers in the control room. The engine of one of the peripheral blocs, the same side booster that had registered low liquid oxygen levels, had been late achieving full power. The rocket had still taken off normally, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a sign of trouble to come; the problematic booster might still suffer a critical failure before it separated. The seconds were ticking by quickly, though, and there was nothing anyone could do now but monitor the display panels and stopwatches and hope for the best. At sixteen seconds, another alarm indicator began winking. The Tank Depletion System, which ensured that propellant flowed evenly to all the combustion chambers, had malfunctioned. The engines weren’t burning fuel uniformly, which could affect the rocket’s course and, more important, its speed and preprogrammed cutoff time. Now everyone was seriously worried. The glitches were piling up fast, and no one had forgotten the disaster that had occurred at the ninety-eighth second of the first R-7 flight.
At 116 seconds a fiery cross appeared thirty miles above the Tyura-Tam test range. The four side boosters had jettisoned, creating the biblical effect, and miraculously the separation had occurred exactly on schedule. Relief swept through the control room. Only the central sustainer core was now firing, which meant that fewer things could go wrong. Glushko’s reconfigured engine had enough fuel for two more minutes of flight. Then they would know.
The control bunker was subdued; there were too many generals and colonels and deputy ministers present for the young lieutenants in the launch crew to display their emotions. But in the assembly hangar, where most of the civilian scientists and engineers listened to the action on a loudspeaker, it was a different story. There, emotions ran high; whoops and cheers greeted milestones, while announcements of glitches were met with moans and groans.
For the next two minutes, all eyes were riveted on the clock. Then the loudspeaker sounded. “Main engine shut down.” A distressed murmur reverberated through the hall. The engines had run out of fuel at 295.4 seconds. That was more than a full second early, a result of the Tank Depletion System malfunction. Slide rules were whipped out and calculations hastily performed. Would the early cutoff affect escape velocity? The R-7 was supposed to be traveling at just over 8,000 meters per second—roughly 18,000 miles an hour—but it was making only 7,780 meters per second. It was also five miles lower than it should be, at 142 miles in altitude instead of 147 miles. Would it be enough to orbit? Another 19.9 seconds passed before the next announcement. Meanwhile, momentum had carried the missile, still traveling at twenty-three times the speed of sound, another one hundred miles higher. “Separation Achieved.” Inside the R-7’s nose cone, pneumatic pistons rammed PS-l’s steel cradle, pushing it away from the spent booster. A spring-loaded mechanism popped off PS-l’s conical cover, and the sphere hurtled into the blackness of space.
At 325.44 seconds into the flight, Nosov issued his last command. “Open the reflectors.” A plate on the central booster jettisoned, exposing prismlike mirrors on the rocket’s casing. Korolev had installed the reflective material, knowing that the ninety-foot central stage would follow PS-l’s celestial path like the blazing trail of a meteor, and he wanted to ensure that it too