Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (8 page)

When Korolev was designing the
R-7, Old Number Seven, the goal was to hurl a fusion warhead from one continent
to the next. Sergei Pavlovich was working from an early set of specifications
from Academician Kurchatov. And because Kurchatov was having a hard time
reducing the size of his designs, he was planning on large warheads, so Korolev
had to build a large rocket. To get it done quickly he focused on simplicity
and reliability. So it was a steel beast, so solid that the technicians could
walk around on it when it was lying on its side being assembled. (Quite unlike
the elegantly engineered American rockets—those were so thinly designed that
they crumple unless they’re full of fuel!)

Because Korolev had to design to
such robust specifications, he realized he’d be able to do other things with
Old Number Seven. Things he’d been dreaming of. Launching satellites, and
people. And because he was succeeding with his strategic rocket testing, he was
allowed to do these other things. The currency of bureaucracy: not just
funding, but decrees and permissions, and successes, which make those who
issued the decrees look good, which leads in turn to more decrees and more
permissions.

So it all started with strategic
rockets. Stalin had gotten Korolev going, after he’d rehabilitated him. (You
might not know about Korolev’s ordeal; I’ll perhaps discuss it more later.)
Stalin knew what the fascists had done with rockets, and he knew what was
possible, and though he died in 1953, he had set it all in motion.

And we had great successes,
indeed! While I was off in Saratov learning to fly, and later passing lonely
hours patrolling near the Arctic Circle, Korolev was building rockets for the
state. He gave them the means to destroy London, and then New York, so they
gave him permission to put a satellite in space. (“If the main task doesn’t
suffer, then do it,” Khrushchev had said.) And because that was such a
propaganda coup, they let Korolev put a man in space.

But there was a problem with
Korolev’s strategic rockets. They worked as promised, but because they were
fueled with liquid oxygen and kerosene, they could not be launched quickly, nor
could they stay in an advanced state of readiness for very long. Liquid oxygen
boils off quickly, so it must be pumped in during the hours before launch, and
if the launch is delayed, it must be topped off. But Korolev was fixated on using
it, and his bureau suffered because of it. (Engineers gather data, of course,
but design is also a matter of emotion. Everyone has their preferences and
their aversions, and those can lead them down the wrong path for quite a ways,
especially when getting started on a project.)

In engineering, as in parenting,
changes in direction often take place from generation to generation. In your
family, you see the things you didn’t like about how your parents raised you,
and you do things differently with your children; you may make mistakes, but
they’re yours, and you’ve avoided the problems of the past generation. Then
your children can choose to go in yet another direction. So, too, with design.
Others like Chelomey (and Yangel, who had worked under Korolev but had started
his own bureau in 1954) did not have the same biases as Korolev. So for the
next generation, they started developing rockets based on hypergolics:
chemicals with a high boiling point that could be stored for much longer
periods. These chemicals have their own issues; they’re corrosive and toxic, to
the point that Korolev had started referring to them as “Devil’s Venom.” But
for purposes of strategic rocketry, they’re much better: if your rockets take
an hour to launch, and the other side’s rockets take a day, you can destroy
them at leisure and win a nuclear war without taking too many casualties. (I
should emphasize that none of us wanted such a war. We were survivors, after
all, of the most destructive portion of the greatest war in human history. But
surely the best way to prevent a war is to convince your opponent you can win
one, and the second best way—almost as good—is to convince him he will face
unendurable pain if he wins.)

So in 1960, the rush was on to
develop and test this new generation of rockets. Yangel’s R-16 was the leading
contender, and Marshal Nedelin was leading the development program. And of
course there was pressure to get things done by the anniversary of the October
Revolution.

Rocket testing is a demanding
enterprise—long days out on the firing range inspecting components, watching
technicians remove panels and replace parts, testing electrical systems and
subsystems, developing fueling procedures. And failures have a cascading
effect: a circuit fails, a hard-to-reach component must be replaced, a test is
delayed, another test cannot take place. And there are other tests—humans, too,
are put to the test; tempers flare; decisions must be made to delay or to take
shortcuts. And Nedelin was a good military man. And those of us in the military
know that plans must be executed on time, and for that one must sometimes take
shortcuts.

The rocket was put out on the pad
on the 23
^rd
of October, and it was fueled and was being made ready,
but there was a problem with a sequencer. And the safe thing would have been to
drain the rocket. But the safe thing is never the shortcut. The State
Commission decided to make repairs without draining it, and Nedelin concurred.
And the next day, while the launch complex was still full of people, the
engines of the second stage ignited.

(The survivors and witnesses were
strictly forbidden to discuss the incident. But Sergei Pavlovich knew about it
almost immediately. One of his engineers had a brother in Yangel’s bureau, and
Nedelin himself had been on the State Commission for East-1, which was then
about six months from launch. So Korolev knew the rough magnitude of the
disaster as soon as it happened, and he heard details from the survivors
afterwards: the official reports, and the drunken late-night stories of horror
and remorse. And not long before his death, Korolev, in turn, got drunk at a
party and told me.)

The engines ignited with a roar
that everyone described as the most unexpected and frightening sound they’d
ever heard. Within seconds, the second-stage engines had burned through the
first stage’s propellant tanks. And these exploded in a hellish inferno, a
bright brown-yellow cloud and a tower of flame.

The images from this must have
been truly horrifying, for they remained clear in the retelling, from others to
Korolev, from Korolev to me: burning people running from the pad before
succumbing to the toxic fumes, and others shattering legs and backs jumping
from concrete landings to escape the inferno.

Nedelin was dead. So, too, were
many others. Some were disintegrated, or burned into piles of ash; Nedelin’s
remains were only identified by the remnants of the medals on his uniform. Even
years later when he told me the story, Korolev did not know the final tally,
but he had heard some numbers: 74, and 78, and 126.

Yangel had survived. He’d
survived by the slimmest of chances; he’d survived because of a cigarette.

Nedelin’s deputy Myrkin wanted to
quit smoking, and he’d decided that that day, October 24
^th
, would be
his last cigarette. So he’d wanted one final smoke break a half hour before
launch. And of course all smokers want someone to smoke with, so he’d grabbed
Yangel, and they’d gone into one of the concrete blockhouses to smoke.

I do not know all the details of
Yangel’s actions; Korolev did not know, and because Yangel and I were never
close, he never told me, and anyhow only the worst sort of person goes about
asking another human being to describe the worst day of their life. But I
imagine it here and there: Yangel in the blockhouse, hearing the noise, his
heart instantly racing—he surely knew right away what was happening. And the
normal human impulse is to help, so he and Myrkin surely could have rushed
instantly out of the blockhouse, but I imagine Yangel was too smart to do that;
I imagine him waiting at least a few minutes, until the flames had burned down
and the fumes from the hypergolics had dissipated. So perhaps they just raced
to the viewing slits to see it; perhaps they saw the rocket topple and explode,
all their plans turning to catastrophe. And that’s how I imagine it—Yangel at
the viewing slit, looking out at the running burning people, standing in
helpless horror. (Not that I blame him! I might well have done the same. I only
know that in such situations, one wonders endlessly whether one has done
everything possible, and even if the answer is “Yes,” one feels guilty
afterwards. I’m glad I wasn’t faced with that choice!) I keep imagining the
scene, and wondering if the reality was in line with my mental imagery. This is
the power of such events, and the stories they spawn—they stay alive in your
imagination, in your dreams; you create your own visions and scenes.

Afterwards, Khrushchev appointed
Brezhnev to head the commission to investigate the catastrophe. (Brezhnev at
the time was of course already chairman of the Presidium, and he had much
experience supervising the defense ministry.) And it might surprise you to
know, depending on your perceptions and prejudices about our country, but
Brezhnev insisted that there be no punishments. Investigations and answers,
yes, but no punishments. The guilty, Brezhnev said, have already been punished.

The moral of the story, as far as
the state was concerned, was to drain rockets during such work, and to install
safeguard circuits to prevent spurious signals from igniting the engines before
launch. Myrkin reportedly drew an additional lesson: don’t ever stop smoking,
because it might save your life. And I came to my own conclusion when I learned
that the cottage in which Titov and I slept the night before East-1, the little
white cottage that everyone referred to as “Korolev’s cottage” had, in fact,
been Nedelin’s cottage before his death: So much for lucky rituals.

Yangel had been hoping to take a
leading role in rocketry, but after that he was busy making up lost ground and
getting the R-16 deployed in a timely fashion. Chelomey’s bureau ultimately
gained on both Yangel and Korolev, at least for a while; Chelomey was
developing his own hypergolic strategic rockets. (And of course he had hired
Khrushchev’s son, which certainly didn’t hurt, at least not until Khrushchev
was deposed.) There are of course no needles or indicators or gauges for such
things, but everyone can sense how power shifts from one design bureau to
others in the wake of such calamities. OKB-586 loses, OKB-1 holds steady,
OKB-52 gains. New decrees, new directives, and funds and people to go with. No
one wants to be guilty of standing in the way of a decree.

As for Nedelin, there was no
mention of the catastrophe in our press. Just a brief story, a single sentence:
“Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, 57, Chief of Strategic Rockets, died in a
plane crash in an
undisclosed
location.”

Why am I sharing this secret with
you? Chelomey’s period of advance allowed him to develop the Proton, of course,
which gave him a part in this mission, but there’s more to it than that. I
bring it up because it’s indicative of the way we have done things. For unlike
the Americans, we don’t go blathering away about every mistake, every misstep.
We have launched probes to Venus and Mars; we do not announce them as such when
they fail in their assigned objectives. If they fail, they get innocuous names
– Cosmos, and a number—and only if they succeed do they get a name indicative
of their mission. There is no need to look foolish.

There have been some secondary
effects to these tendencies, of course, just as there are unintended additional
consequences to every course of action. Our discretion regarding launch
failures has spawned rumors regarding our space program, absurd stories that
would perhaps not otherwise exist. On my travels, I’ve heard fanciful tales of
lost cosmonauts, people like Tupolev’s son who were supposedly launched before
me but then failed to come back successfully, and who were consequently never
discussed because such stories would embarrass the state. I know how ridiculous
such stories are! But can I convince anyone else? Of course not. They feel I
have an interest in maintaining the deception.

Still, I can’t say I have any
problem with our judgment and discretion in such matters, especially regarding
something like the Nedelin catastrophe, with such obvious implications for our
nation’s security. Again, can anyone who survived the Great Patriotic War think
ill of such behavior? For we have been facing a new enemy, an enemy of
tremendous resources, tremendous strength. And against such an enemy, one must
also appear strong, just as animals puff themselves up to dissuade aggressors.
It’s natural to do what we’ve done! And so: before the hypergolic rockets were
fielded, we held May Day parades with rows of rockets rolling through Red
Square and Khrushchev looking on, and soldiers driving those same rockets down
the side streets and around and back to parade them through Red Square again,
to make us look stronger, as if we could build an unending succession of
rockets. And bombers, flights of bombers flying over, then taking a loop around
the outer city and getting in line to fly over again. A conveyor belt of
military hardware. The illusion of infinite strength. And no mention of
failures and catastrophes, particularly regarding the development of strategic
rockets. So we have lied, perhaps, but these are lies that prevent war. Surely
there is nobility in such lies!

•••

In my morning I pull my paper
covers from the broken porthole and raise the shades on the others. Sunlight
scrapes my tired eyes. I barely eat.

Even now, I am not yet at the
moon. Today is the last full day of the trip there, and it promises to be a day
of troubleshooting the engine failure. As always in these situations, we must
determine the answers to the three key questions: What went wrong? Who is to
blame? And (most importantly): What do we do now?