Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [21]
An unsurpassable desire. The cosmonauts had it, and the world sang their praises. The testers had it, but they could not speak of it – except to Gagarin, who took the time to understand when a young lad volunteering for an insanely dangerous run of explosive decompressions tried, for a few moments, inarticulately, to share the reasons why he was doing it.
In fact, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to volunteer for the most dangerous kind of work. Vladimir Yazdovsky, a senior manager closely involved with all aspects of the early Soviet space effort, recalls, ‘After the dog Laika’s flight in the second Sputnik, there were nearly 3,500 applications to the Academy of Sciences from people in prison, from abroad and from many organizations, saying, “You don’t have to save me, just send me into space.” Of course we couldn’t reply to everyone, and as long as we didn’t know how to bring someone back at the end of a flight, we weren’t going to send anyone up.’
3
THE CHIEF DESIGNER
There was one man who, more than any other, dominated Gagarin’s life from now on, at first behind the scenes, and later as a friend and powerful protector. This man was not a cosmonaut, though he had learned to fly long ago in his youth. He was a shadowy figure somewhere in the very highest echelons of space management. Most people within the Soviet aerospace industry called him ‘The King’ or the ‘Boss of Bosses’, or affectionately used his first two initials, ‘S. P.’ His full name was never spoken in public because the authorities had declared his identity an absolute State secret. In the many press and radio reports of Soviet rocket achievements broadcast over the years, he was referred to only as the ‘Chief Designer’.
Born in 1907 in the Ukraine and educated in Moscow, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev began his career as an aircraft designer in 1930, before developing a fascination with rockets. At first he saw them as a useful power source for his aircraft, but by the late 1930s he recognized that rockets had a special potential as vehicles in their own right.1
Pre-war military strategists showed a keen interest in the work performed by the early rocket pioneers. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky sponsored a new research centre, the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, hidden away behind the heavy ramparts of the Petropavlovskaya Fortress in St Petersburg (scorchmarks in the masonry can still be seen), while another laboratory in central Moscow, the Reaction Propulsion Laboratory, worked on similar problems. From these parallel efforts Korolev’s rival, Valentin Glushko, emerged as the most promising designer of rocket thrust chambers and fuel pumps, while Korolev himself thought in broader terms about how to combine the engines with fuel tanks, guidance equipment and a payload, to create rocket vehicles that could perform some kind of useful work – delivering bombs, making weather measurements in the upper atmosphere and, one day, exploring space.
Marshal Tukhachevsky was primarily interested in winged rocket bombs and other useful armaments for the Red Army. In 1933 he began a major consolidation of the various rocket programmes into a unified military programme. Unfortunately Stalin was terrified of intelligent soldiers, and by 1938 he had initiated a wide-ranging purge of the officer class as part of his general regime of terror throughout all levels of Soviet society. Tukhachevsky was arrested on June 11, and was shot dead that same night.2 Immediately all the rocket engineers he had assembled and sponsored came under suspicion of harbouring anti-Stalinist sentiments and were arrested. Korolev was dragged away on June 27 and was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia: essentially a death sentence.
In June 1941 the invading Nazis achieved devastating victories against a thoroughly unprepared Red Army. Stalin soon had