Stranger Than We Can Imagine (23 page)

The NKVD promptly arrived, ransacked the apartment, and took Korolev from his family. Two days later, after torture and threats against his family, he signed a confession to the Commissar of Internal Affairs admitting his involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation and to committing acts of sabotage against the Motherland. He confirmed allegations against him made by two of his senior colleagues, who had since been shot. He had no trial, but was given a ten-year sentence in the notorious Kolyma Gulag in Siberia, at the fringes of the Arctic Circle.

It probably doesn’t need saying, but there was no counter-revolutionary organisation, no act of sabotage, and Korolev was entirely innocent. Many people were innocent during the Great Purge. Reason and justice played no part in that terror.

It was a miracle he survived. Thousands died every month at Kolyma. Korolev was starved and beaten, his teeth were knocked out and his jaw broken. The bitter cold was unbearable, and the malnutrition led to scurvy. He was, ultimately, rescued by far-off events. The appointment of a new head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had resulted in a number of his predecessor’s cases being reopened. Korolev was told to leave the gulag and report to Moscow, where he would be retried on lesser charges.

There was no transport available, so he was forced to hitch his way home. A lorry driver took him a hundred miles to the port town of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, but they arrived too late to catch the last boat of the year. In payment, the lorry driver took his coat. Korolev was left to survive as best he could, malnourished and with thin clothing that froze to the floor when he slept.

Korolev remained in Magadan for the winter, while temperatures fell as low as minus fifty degrees Celsius. In the spring he was able
to sail to the mainland and catch a train to Moscow, but he was removed from the train at Khabarovsk for being too ill to travel. Korolev would have died shortly afterwards had he not been found by an old man who took pity on him and nursed him better. A few weeks later he was lying under a tree feeling the warmth of spring on his skin. Korolev opened his eyes and saw an exquisitely beautiful butterfly fluttering in front of him. That was the moment when he realised he was going to live.

On 13 May 1946 Stalin, reacting to the American use of the atomic bomb in Japan, issued a decree that ordered the creation of a scientific research institution called NII-88. This was a rebirth for Soviet rocket research, which had ground to a halt following the purges of the 1930s. Korolev found himself once again working in the field that, like Parsons and von Neumann, he had been driven to by childhood dreams of space flight.

The first order of business was for the Russians to learn what they could from the Nazis. Sergei Korolev arrived in Berlin one day after Wernher von Braun left Germany for good. The Americans had stripped the Nazi rocket factories at Mittelwerk and Peenemünde of anything that they thought would benefit the Russians, but they did not reckon on the tenacity of the Soviets or the brilliance of Korolev. The workings of the V-2 were painstakingly pieced together from scraps and clues. Korolev was able to see how the V-2 worked. More importantly, he was also able to see its faults. Korolev looked at von Braun’s great achievement, and thought that he could improve it.

During the 1950s distrust between East and West became institutionalised. Anti-communist paranoia in America led to the inquests of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy. The McCarthy ‘witchhunt’, which led to smears, blacklists and book-burning, greatly troubled Einstein. He had lived through the rise of the Nazis and it looked to him as if history was starting to repeat itself. Liberal democracy has the ability to correct its excesses in a manner that did not happen during the Weimar Republic, but Einstein did not live to see this. He died in Princeton hospital in 1955 at the age of seventy-six, much
loved and admired, but troubled by the complicated global politics his theories had in part created.

During these years von Braun became increasingly frustrated by the way the United States Army kept him and his team treading water. They had no interest in funding the expensive development needed for von Braun to achieve his dreams of leaving the planet. His collaboration with Walt Disney in the mid-1950s came about due to his desire to increase interest in space research, in the hope that public support would translate into research money. His TV programmes made him the public face of space travel, but there was no love for this ex-Nazi in army or government. Research projects that he would have been ideally suited for were given to the Navy or the Air Force, or to other American engineers in the army.

Korolev, meanwhile, worked hard. He regained the trust of Stalin, and convinced him of the importance of long-range rocket technology. By 1947 he had built and tested copies of the V-2. In 1948 he began work on a rocket of his own design, the R-2, which was more accurate and had twice the range. He successfully tested this in 1950. In 1953 he convinced the Kremlin to back his plans for an even larger rocket, the R-7, which would be powerful enough to launch a satellite into orbit. All this was achieved while he was under extreme pressure for results, in a country devastated by war, and in an economy organised under Stalin’s unworkable state-controlled ‘Five-year Plans’. Korolev’s time in the Gulag had taught him to survive, but he was working himself to death.

Both von Braun and Korolev began framing the conquest of space in a way that spoke to the paranoid military mind. The nation that first controlled space would be all-powerful, they argued. Permanent orbiting space stations could spy on every aspect of the enemy, and even drop bombs on any point of the globe. If we didn’t develop this technology, they said, then surely the other side would. Korolev convinced Stalin and his successor Khrushchev that rocket development had reached the point where all this was feasible, but von Braun was still viewed with some suspicion by the US government, despite his growing public fame.

America officially entered the space race in 1955, when Eisenhower announced plans to mark 1957’s International Geophysics year by launching a satellite into orbit like ‘a second moon’. But Eisenhower wanted Americans to achieve this landmark, not Germans. To von Braun’s frustration, the task of launching the satellite was given to the United States Navy.

Korolev also planned to launch a satellite in 1957. His satellite was a metal ball 23 inches in diameter, which had four elongated trailing radio aerials. It was made from a polished metal that made this simple shape look exciting and futuristic. It is, strangely, a remarkably beautiful object. Korolev recognised this, and insisted that it had to be displayed on velvet. Its name was Sputnik 1.

Sputnik was technically very simple. Apart from a few systems to monitor temperature and pressure, it consisted of little more than a radio transmitter that made regular pulses on two separate frequencies. The original plan of launching a more sophisticated machine was scrapped due to overwhelming pressure from the Kremlin to get something in orbit before the United States. A more elaborate satellite had been designed and built, but it could not be made to function reliably in time. It did not help that the driver who transported that satellite across Russia drank a substantial amount of industrial alcohol and crashed the truck into a tree.

On 4 October 1957 Sputnik 1, a metal ball that did little but go bip-bip-bip and the last-minute replacement for a proper satellite, became the first object the human race launched into orbit. All over America, indeed all over the world, people could tune their short-wave receivers into the correct frequency and hear the pulses it broadcast as it flew overhead. Most of the world congratulated the Soviet Union on its historic achievement, but for the American public this was a terrifying, unexpected shock. The Russians were above them.

The gloves were off. Suddenly there was no shortage of political will to back the space programme. Unfortunately for the Americans Korolev had no intention of slowing down, despite signs of heart problems. Sputnik 2 launched less than a month after Sputnik 1. It
contained a dog called Laika, who became the first living creature launched into space. The satellite’s cooling system failed and Laika was cooked to death during the flight, but this was not announced at the time and Laika became a folk hero to the Soviet people. The first spacecraft to land on another celestial body was Luna 2, which reached the moon on 14 September 1959. It is probably fairer to say that it crashed into the moon rather than landed on it, but that was sufficient to achieve its aim of delivering an engraving of the Soviet coat of arms to the moon’s surface. Khrushchev gave Eisenhower a copy of this pennant as a deliberately tactless gift. A further Luna probe in October 1959 sent back the first pictures of the dark side of the moon. On 19 August 1960, two dogs named Belka and Strelka became the first living things to journey into space and, crucially, return alive. Then, on 12 April 1961, a farm boy from war-ravaged western Russia, the son of a carpenter and a milkmaid, became the first person in space. His name was Yuri Gagarin.

The Soviet Union had won the space race.

‘I am watching the earth … I am feeling well,’ he reported from orbit. ‘The feeling of weightlessness is interesting. Everything is floating! Beautiful. Interesting … I can see the earth’s horizon. It is such a pretty halo … I am watching the earth, flying over the sea …’

Gagarin was unflappable and good-natured with a handsome, boyish face. He was the ideal poster boy for a country still traumatised by the losses it suffered during the German invasion, and he helped restore Russian confidence and pride. He became a global celebrity overnight.

Before the flight, Korolev and his team realised that they needed a word to describe the capsule, Vostok 1, which Gagarin would pilot. After much debate they decided to use the word ‘spaceship’. All this occurred before the development of modern digital computers and only twenty-two years after the first flight of a jet-engine-powered plane.

The American space programme was not going well. The Navy’s attempts to launch a satellite in 1957 failed, so von Braun suddenly
found himself in favour. Wasting no time, he was able to place the first American satellite in orbit in January 1958, but this was just one small success in a humiliating string of disasters. The rush to catch up meant that many American rockets either failed to launch or exploded spectacularly. It did not help that every American failure occurred in the full glare of the public gaze, while Russian failures were routinely hushed up. The newspapers were quick to headline such failures with terms like ‘Kaputnik!’ A rocket that only succeeded in reaching four inches off the ground was a particular embarrassment. When news of Gagarin’s flight broke, an American reporter rang the newly established American space agency NASA for their reaction. It was 5:30 a.m., and the phone was answered by a PR man who had worked long into the night and slept in his office. ‘Go away,’ he told the reporter. ‘We are all asleep.’ The reporter’s headline became:
‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS U.S. ASLEEP.’
When America did succeed in placing their first man in space, on 5 May 1961, it was notable that they could only achieve suborbital flight. Unlike Yuri Gagarin, who flew around the entire planet, the American astronaut Alan Shepard went straight up and, fifteen minutes later, came straight back down again.

In December 1960 Sergei Korolev suffered his first heart attack. He recovered and returned to work, where he continued to push himself far beyond the boundaries that his health could stand. His health deteriorated, and internal bleeding and intestinal problems joined his cardiac arrhythmia. He had faced death before, during his time in the Gulag, and he refused to let it interfere with his work. He was able to notch up further historic achievements, such as launching the first woman into space in June 1963 and the first spacewalk, in March 1965. But in January 1966 he died, and the Russian space programme collapsed around him. The era of Russian space ‘firsts’ came to an abrupt halt.

Korolev was unknown during his lifetime. His identity was kept secret, for fear of American assassination, and he was known to the public only by the anonymous title ‘Chief Designer’. With death,
however, came fame. His ashes were interred with state honours in the Kremlin Wall, and history now recognises him as the architect of mankind’s first steps into the cosmos. In time, if mankind does have a future out among the stars, he may well come to be remembered as one of the most important people of the twentieth century.

On 25 May 1961, barely six weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, the new American president, John F. Kennedy, addressed Congress: ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth,’ he said. ‘No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to achieve.’

This project was the Apollo programme. It was, in many ways, a crazy idea. The space race had already been lost. Kennedy was correct in recognising how ‘difficult and expensive’ the project would be, but he should also have mentioned ‘dangerous’. Three crew members of Apollo 1 would burn to death in a cabin fire in January 1967.

If the aim of the project had been to collect moon samples for scientific study, then the Russian approach was more sensible. They sent an unmanned probe called Luna 16 to the moon, which drilled down, collected rocks, and returned them to earth. If the aim of the project was to drive around the surface in a little buggy taking pictures, then the Russians did this too, with the unmanned Luna 17. The American manned approach was so dangerous and expensive that it seemed impossible to justify.

But the aim of the Apollo programme was not simply scientific. It was an expression of the American character, which would come to typify the second half of the twentieth century. So what if the space race had been lost? If the public could think of that race in radically different terms, then it could still be won. The goal posts could be moved.