Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [24]
His principal workhorse was the dual-purpose R-7 missile-space launcher, or ‘Semyorka’ (‘Little Seven’), as it was affectionately known by the men who built it or flew on it. Fuelled with liquid oxygen and kerosene, and incorporating four drop-away side-slung boosters, this was the world’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Each stage or ‘block’ of the vehicle was fitted with one of Glushko’s four-chamber engines. It has to be said that Glushko’s engines were superb – in fact, they are still in use today in the upgraded R-7 rockets that carry modern Soyuz capsules to the orbiting Mir space station. Glushko’s innovation was to design compact fuel pumps and pipework to service four combustion chambers simultaneously. The apparent thrust of twenty separate engines on the R-7 is, in fact, delivered by five.
The first two launches of the R-7 failed, but on August 3, 1957, it flew successfully in a simulated ICBM trajectory, then began its career as a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching ‘Sputnik’, the world’s first artificial satellite.
Andy Aldrin is full of admiration for the speed with which Korolev could conjure up his space triumphs. ‘He and his merry band of rocket engineers tried to go off on a vacation after Sputnik, and they’d rested for about two days when Korolev got a call from Khrushchev. “Comrade, we need you to come to the Kremlin.” Of course he went, and he sat down with the Soviet leadership, and they said, “In a month we have the Fortieth Anniversary of the glorious October Socialist Revolution. We want you to put up another satellite that will do something important.” They proposed a satellite that could broadcast the “Communist Internationale” from space, but Korolev had another idea. He wanted to put a live animal in the satellite, so that he could lay the groundwork for an eventual manned mission; and within a month, from scratch, he and his people completed the spacecraft and launched it.’
Sputnik II went up on November 3, carrying the dog Laika. This was a clear indication of where the Soviet space effort was heading. ‘Americans were shocked by Sputnik, and then Laika. This dark, mysterious, backward country on the other side of the world, that was considered to be thoroughly nasty, had jumped ahead of them.’
A small American rocket at last carried their first satellite, ‘Explorer I’, into orbit on January 31, 1958. Khrushchev disparaged it as ‘a grapefruit’ because it weighed only 14 kg against Sputnik’s 80 kg and Sputnik II’s 500 kg – although Explorer I immediately made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century when Dr Van Allen’s simple instruments detected radiation belts around the earth.5
When it came to selecting candidates for the manned space programme in the autumn of 1959, Korolev looked at all the most promising personal files, but it was not until June 18, 1960 that he summoned the twenty successful applicants to OKB-1 in Kaliningrad to see an actual spaceship. (The hardware had not been anywhere near completion until that time.) Alexei Leonov remembers the Chief Designer introducing himself with a little speech designed to put the cosmonauts at ease. ‘He said, “What we’re doing is really the easiest thing in the world. We invent something, find the right people to build it properly, and place lots of orders for components with the best and most experienced factories all around the country. When they at last deliver what we’ve ordered, all we have to do is put the pieces together. It’s not very complicated.” Of course we knew there