Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [30]
Thwarted by the Mars probe failures in October, Nikita Khrushchev remained quite determined to come up with a bold gesture for the United Nations conference, so he focused on Soviet military superiority. ‘We’re turning out missiles like sausages from a machine!’ he crowed. On his return to Moscow he pressured his Chief of Missile Deployment, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, to come up with a tangible demonstration of strength. Khrushchev wanted no damp squibs this time. Nedelin flew to Baikonur straight away to supervise the début launch of Yangel’s R-16 on October 23.
As zero-hour approached, the missile began to drip nitric acid from its base. What does a cosmodrome commander do when a fully fuelled rocket springs a leak? He drains its fuel away carefully and then pumps non-flammable nitrogen through the tanks to get rid of any lingering vapours. Next day he might send in a couple of brave technicians in heavy fire-suits to ‘safe’ the rocket, so that it can be taken down and checked. Instead, Nedelin sent dozens of ground staff to the pad straight away, to see if they could tighten up some valves, stop the leaks, and get the R-16 up in the air. His instructions seemed so insane that the crews were at a loss how to proceed. In the firing blockhouse, the proper thing to do was to reset all the electronic sequencers and disarm them, before they could send any further ignition signals to the rocket. Nedelin ordered the firing sequences to be revised and delayed, but not cancelled. Somehow, a wrong command was transmitted to the R-16’s upper stage. Its engine fired, straight away burning a hole in the top of the stage beneath it. This lower stage exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage then crashed to the ground, spilling fuel and flame. The new tarmac aprons and roadways around the gantry melted in the heat, then caught fire. Ground staff fleeing for their lives were trapped in the viscous tar as it burned all around them. The conflagration spread for thousands of metres, a wave of fire engulfing everything and everyone in its path. More than 190 people were killed, including Nedelin, perched on his chair near the gantry, as a wall of blazing chemicals swept towards him.4
For thirty years the West knew little of this, although it was apparent from various Intelligence reports that something had gone awry. In particular, an American Discoverer spy satellite photographed Baikonur the day before and the CIA noted with interest the stacking of a new missile. On October 24, the Discoverer in its predetermined orbit overflew the site once again and recorded no gantry and no rocket, just a very large dark smudge despoiling the landscape. The rocket had exploded, but so what? American rockets also blew up from time to time. One had to expect the occasional bad day. The scale of the disaster was not immediately apparent because all news of it was suppressed. All of Soviet Russia was saddened to hear (eventually) that Marshal Nedelin and several other senior missile officers had been killed in an ‘aircraft accident’. Of course the absence of many familiar faces became obvious to thousands of space workers beyond Baikonur, but such unpleasant and difficult matters could be discussed only in private. The sudden disappearance of dozens of young military technicians from Yangel’s squad – most of them just nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old – was not so immediately apparent, except to their mothers.
Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts were told that a prototype missile – not one of Sergei Pavlovich’s ‘Little Sevens’ – had blown up and several technicians had been injured. No doubt they knew better, but for the time being they remained closeted from the worst of the horror in