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Other launch pads soon followed, and over the next decade Baikonur’s various facilities sprawled across hundreds of square kilometres of the steppe. Until 1973 no American had ever seen this place, except as a vague pattern of rectangles, lines and shadows in high-altitude reconnaissance photos, taken at great risk by spy planes flying out of Turkey. In fact one of the worst embarrassments in the history of US reconnaissance occurred on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 aircraft was shot down over the Ural mountains. Its mission was to overfly Baikonur and photograph the launch pads. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and put on trial in Moscow, much to Khrushchev’s glee. The US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his last months of office, made empty protests about an unprovoked attack on ‘an American weather research aircraft flying from a base in Turkey’, which had ‘inadvertently strayed off-course’.2 Immediately Eisenhower banned any further U-2 overflights of Soviet territory.

In the wake of this humiliation, one of the most costly, secret and technologically sophisticated space efforts was born: the US spy-satellite programme, run largely by the CIA and the Department of Defense. Their projects came to be known as ‘black’, because nobody ever knew very much about them, despite budgets that matched, or even exceeded, the funds allocated to NASA’s more visible space exploration projects.3

No longer a secret, the first R-7 launch pads at Baikonur are still in operation today. Stars painted onto the metal gantries denote the number of launches – one star for every fifty launches. One gantry is decorated with six stars . . . This is the facility from which the world’s first manned space mission was launched. Today it despatches Soyuz crew-ferries to the orbiting Russian space station Mir.

Baikonur’s modern launch record is good, but the early years of the complex were dogged by failure. In particular, the six months prior to Vostok’s first manned launch were extremely discouraging. On October 10, 1960, Korolev’s robot probe Mars I reached a paltry 120 kilometres into the sky before falling back to earth like a damp squib. The base blocks of the R-7 booster fired according to plan, but the uppermost interplanetary stage, designed too hurriedly, failed to push the probe clear of the earth’s gravity. Four days later, a second probe fell back in the same way. At the time Nikita Khrushchev was attending a United Nations conference in New York. He had looked forward to boasting about the Mars project, but an urgent coded telegram from Moscow changed his mind. He was most upset.

In mid-October a new prototype rocket, the R-16, was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur. This was one of Mikhail Yangel’s military machines, designed as a replacement for Korolev’s R-7, which was proving somewhat frisky for space exploration and even worse as a strategic missile. If the Soviets were ever to deploy a truly credible force of ICBMs, they had to find a rocket capable of firing at much shorter notice. The R-7 was fine as it went, but it took at least five hours to fuel and prepare. The problem was its use of liquid oxygen, which was a highly efficient chemical when it was actually burning inside an engine, but would not keep for very long prior to launch. Inevitably, after a few hours it warmed up and turned from liquid to gas. The pressure in the tanks climbed towards bursting point and the accumulating gas had to be vented, then replaced with fresh supercold liquid. The longer an R-7 stood on the pad, the more the greedy creature needed replenishment.

The R-16 was designed to need far less preparation before launch, in keeping with the military’s need for a fast-response missile. It could be fuelled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because Yangel had disowned supercold liquid oxygen and kerosene in favour of nitric acid and hydrazine. These chemicals could be stored for long periods inside the rocket at normal pressures