Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [94]
The tragedy was reminiscent of Valentin Bondarenko’s death in the isolation chamber back in 1960, but NASA could not draw any lessons from that because of the obsessive secrecy that always surrounded the Soviet space effort.
NASA entered a two-year hiatus, a period of self-doubt, its technical and political reputation severely tarnished by the deaths. The Soviet cosmonauts grieved for their US counterparts, and were permitted to send official expressions of condolence to the dead men’s families, even as Leonid Brezhnev and Vasily Mishin speculated about the window of opportunity that had arisen for the Soviet space effort to take advantage of NASA’s enforced slow-down.
The Soviets’ gigantic N-1 lunar superbooster was running badly behind schedule, and even the demoralized Americans knew that it did not present a serious threat. According to a National Intelligence Estimate document of March 2, 1967, their appraisal of the N-1 was that:
Several factors militate against the Soviets being able to compete with the Apollo timetable . . . Their lunar launch vehicle will probably not be ready for test until mid-1968, and even then we would expect to see a series of unmanned tests lasting about a year to qualify the system before a lunar landing might be attempted. In the meantime they still have to test rendezvous and docking techniques.3
The landing and return of a man on the moon seemed very far off yet for Mishin and his beleaguered team at OKB-1; but a much simpler circumlunar flight, Jules Verne-style, might be achievable without the need for the colossal and as yet unflown N-1 booster. Korolev’s old rivals in the aerospace community, Glushko and Chelomei, were developing a rocket called Proton, which was larger and more powerful than the R-7 but not quite powerful enough to carry a lunar landing module as well as a crew return capsule. Mishin faced a difficult choice: if he opted for the circumlunar flight aboard Chelomei’s Proton, he would have to sacrifice some development work on the N-1 and the bug-like landing craft; but if he could achieve a fairly basic ‘once-around-the-moon’ flight while NASA was still preoccupied with recovering from the Apollo fire, any subsequent walkabout on the lunar surface by American astronauts would come across as yet another second-best. With this tantalizing prize in mind, work on the new Soyuz capsule was accelerated, while the N-1 was allowed to fall further behind and Korolev’s old enemies dug their claws deeper into OKB-1.
The cosmonaut team was affected by all these complications. Leonov began training a squad for a touchdown mission with the N-1, which would include the use of the tiny one-man lunar landing pod, while another team of astronauts was prepared for circumlunar flights aboard the Proton, using an elongated Soyuz variant known as a ‘Zond’. Meanwhile, yet another group, including Gagarin, was training for the first basic earth-orbital test of the Soyuz mated to a standard R-7. In contrast to the overall NASA effort, with Apollo as its privileged centrepiece, the Soviet lunar programmes were divided, confused and contradictory, especially in the absence of Korolev’s managerial discipline.
By the spring of 1967, development of the Soyuz was moving towards that crucial first flight. On April 22 the Soviet propaganda departments felt confident enough to let slip some rumours to the international press agency, UPI. ‘The up-coming mission will include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history – an attempted in-flight hook-up between two ships and a transfer of crews.’ But some doubts seemed to be preying on Nikolai