Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [23]
By far the most serious challenge to Korolev’s autonomy came from high-ranking military officers based in and around the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defence, who were concerned that his space projects were blocking the development of necessary weapons systems. He outflanked them by creating a dual-purpose missile-space launcher, and then proving that his design for a manned spaceship could be adapted as an unmanned spy satellite. By satisfying significant military goals in tandem with his own, Korolev out-manoeuvred both Yangel and Chelomei, and maintained a firm grip on most of the important Soviet space programmes up until his death in 1966. His genius, unmatched by the engineers at NASA, was to standardize many of his principal spacecraft components so that a dazzling succession of manned and unmanned vehicles could be assembled around similar hardware.
American space analyst Andy Aldrin (son of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin) explains Korolev’s cunning. ‘The people who were running the military missile programmes had been with him since the war. To a large extent they owed their careers to him, so they were unwilling to take him on frontally. At the same time, the military didn’t really understand his technology, and they implicitly trusted him. So when Korolev said, “Spy satellites won’t work yet, we have to [lay the groundwork and] develop manned capsules first,” they had little choice but to take him at his word. You could say, he conned them . . . He really understood how to work the political system.’
Academician Mtislav Keldysh was one of the Chief Designer’s most powerful allies, consistently supportive of new space missions and scientific experiments in orbit. He was an expert in the mathematics of missile and rocket trajectories, and had established a power base in Moscow centred on his huge custom-built computing facility. Like Korolev, he possessed indispensable skills, with political cunning to match. While Korolev built the rockets, Keldysh plotted the routes they would fly.
The most irritating problem for Korolev was that he still had to rely on the Red Army’s unintelligent cooperation during space launches, because his work with rockets and missiles was so intimately linked with military areas. He could subvert military equipment to his own ends, but he could not make the jealous generals vanish. However, if one of them blocked him, he was quite unafraid to treat the man as an inferior. A senior engineer in Korolev’s bureau, Oleg Ivanovsky, recalls, ‘On one occasion a very high-ranking commander refused access to an important radio communications link during a space flight. Korolev spoke to him on an open phone line and shouted, “You don’t know how to do your job! Give me the link, or I’ll have you demoted to sergeant!” We were amazed that he could be so insolent to a superior.’
First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Politburo could be very supportive towards Korolev when it suited them, although they were not particularly concerned with the subtleties of space hardware. Rocket technology fascinated them more for its glamour and potential political impact than for its hard engineering details. When Korolev’s primary missile and rocket development programme began in 1955, he asked senior members of the Politburo to inspect his work, as Khrushchev recalls in his memoirs:
Korolev came to a Politburo meeting to report on his work. I don’t want to exaggerate but I’d say we gawked at what he had to show us, as if we were a bunch of sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain to us how the rocket worked. We didn’t believe it could fly. We were like peasants in a market place, walking around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough.4
Korolev’s colleague Sergei Belotserkovsky (responsible