One Small Step Read online

  New York • London

  © 2009 by David Whitehouse

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  ISBN 978-1-62365-205-0

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  www.quercus.com

  For my late father-in-law Bernard Carey. With thanks.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  “Soviet rockets must conquer space!”

  REALIZING THE DREAM

  1903–1957

  “Man will conquer space soon”

  THE FIRST SPACE TRAVELERS

  1957–1958

  “I can see the clouds, everything. It’s beautiful”

  ASTRONAUTS RACE COSMONAUTS

  1959–1961

  “Let’s go and get the job done”

  AMERICA REACHES SPACE

  1961–1962

  “Gagarin in a skirt”

  THE FEMALE FACE OF THE COSMOS

  1962–1963

  “Friends! Before us is the Moon”

  TEMPTING FATE

  1964–1965

  “They want you to get back in”

  FLYING IN PAIRS

  1964–1965

  “They’re in a roll and it won’t stop”

  EMERGENCY IN SPACE

  1965–1966

  “We’re on fire! Get us out of here!”

  DEATH AND THE ASTRONAUT

  1967–1968

  “That was a real kick in the pants”

  RETURN TO FLIGHT

  1968

  “Apollo 8, you’re go for TLI”

  LEAVING THE CRADLE

  1968

  “We’re actually going to fly something like this?”

  DANGEROUS AND UNPLEASANT MISSIONS

  1969

  “We is down among ’em Charlie”

  REHEARSAL FOR A MOON LANDING

  1969

  “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”

  FIRST LANDING ON THE MOON

  1969

  “Houston—we’ve had a problem”

  SUCCESS AND SUCCESSFUL FAILURE

  1969

  “I cried a little”

  THE RETURN OF ALAN SHEPARD

  1970–1971

  Ten to 15 seconds of agonizing consciousness

  DEATH IN SPACE

  1971 AND 1973

  “Their majesty overwhelmed me”

  BRINGING BACK MOONBEAMS

  1971–1972

  “There’s something on the telemetry that doesn’t look quite right”

  THE FIRST AMERICAN SPACE STATION

  1973–1974

  “We actually came to have a very close relationship with the Soviet crew”

  EAST MEETS WEST IN ORBIT

  1975

  “Hey, there’s some tiles missing back there”

  THE MOST DANGEROUS MISSION OF ALL

  1981

  “It marks our entrance into a new era”

  LAUNCH OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM

  1982–1983

  “You could see the Sun lighting the desert way up ahead”

  FIRST COMMERCIAL SHUTTLE FLIGHTS

  1984

  “The most important thing for us was to dock”

  RESCUE OF A CRIPPLED SPACE STATION

  1985–1986

  “Uh oh”

  THE CHALLENGER DISASTER

  1986

  “My God, that’s a lot of damage”

  FREQUENT SHUTTLE DAMAGE

  1988 AND BEYOND

  “It’s serious. It’s serious”

  FIRE AND COLLISION

  1994–2001

  “Off-scale low”

  END OF AN ERA

  2003

  Largest structure in space

  LIVING IN ORBIT

  1998–

  “The flight was spectacular”

  A TICKET TO RIDE

  2004

  INDEX

  Introduction

  An American president lays down a challenge to his nation that he will never live to see fulfilled. A Russian despot curses his rocket engineers and urges them to greater effort. A giant rocket explodes in a deadly fireball seconds after liftoff, ending the lives of those on board and the dreams of those watching on the ground. One moonwalker takes mankind’s first steps on another world, while another writes his daughter’s name in the lunar dust. A German SS soldier dreams of space, while at the same time a prisoner digs a grave in a Soviet death camp, never thinking that he will ever see space travel—let alone be one of its key pioneers. A crew of astronauts come close to a lonely death on their journey to the Moon. Another crew, at another time, know they will never reach home again.

  These are just a few of the multitude of momentous events that have come to symbolize our enduring fascination with space travel and space exploration. When do such events become legends? When does our history turn to something more than merely moments in time? How long does it take for us to appreciate the true significance of the times we have lived through? Without doubt, when the history of the 20th century is written, one of its the major landmarks will be the journey into space. In many years to come, when much of today’s modern history will be footnotes, Sputnik, Gagarin, Armstrong and his “one small step” will still be headlines. Across the growing centuries future historians will look upon the 20th century as the time when things changed forever, the time when mankind left its home planet and ventured out but a short distance into space. When, for a while, we achieved greatness.

  Strange then that it is a story so few know in any detail. In schools we teach the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo and Amundsen, but seldom the greater voyages of Gagarin, Borman, Lovell or Anders, or even those of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

  There are many threads that can be drawn through the story of the astronauts, and each time the story is told, it is a slightly different weave. This is one story about the great things spacemen and space women have done for us; of the way they wrote history. Dreams and tragedies, pride and mourning, conflict and immortality—all are intertwined in the story of mankind’s steps in space. It is not just a technological tale of rockets, satellites and spaceships. It is much more a story of special human beings overcoming all obstacles and setbacks to fulfill their dreams and the dreams of others. It is, I believe, our greatest story, and it is best told in the words of those who were there.

  Over the years I have been fortunate enough to meet many astronauts, cosmonauts and others involved in this great adventure, and they have been kind enough to share their stories with me. I am also indebted to NASA for its extensive history program that is a rich source of interviews, analysis and technical data.

  David Whitehouse

  “Soviet rockets must conquer space!”

  REALIZING THE DREAM

  WERNHER VON BRAUN AND SERGEI KOROLEV


  1903–1957

  In the 20th century it finally began to seem that Mankind’s long-held vision of traveling in space could become a reality. Yet despite the peaceful ambitions of the early pioneers of rocketry and space flight, the technology needed for such an event was developed initially to produce weapons of war.

  First there were the dreamers, then came the practical men and women, and finally the voyagers themselves. The origin of the space programs of the 20th century can perhaps be traced back to the late 1800s and the ideas of a deaf, self-educated Russian school teacher called Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Born in 1857, his writings, frequently visionary if sometimes far-fetched, put substance to mankind’s nascent dreams of escaping from our planet and journeying into the cosmos. He wrote of multistage rocket boosters and space stations orbiting the Earth. It was Tsiolkovsky, along with the later generation of rocket pioneers, the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth, who prepared the way for what followed. But while all three dreamed of space travel, only Tsiolkovsky thought it would never come to pass.

  Driving the Space Age Forward

  Two men have become synonymous with the start of the Space Age. Both were fortunate to survive the Second World War. Separated by the Iron Curtain, they never met, but they dreamed the same dreams, were both victims and beneficiaries of politics and both achieved remarkable things.

  The first of these great pioneers was Wernher von Braun, who was born in Germany just before the First World War. The von Braun family had been famous since 1245, when they defended Prussia from Mongol invasion. Wernher von Braun had showed an interest in rockets from an early age; when Hermann Oberth, Germany’s foremost rocket scientist, had written a book entitled Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space), in which he describes a rocket designed to go to the Moon. A young von Braun read it and was captivated.

  German spaceflight society members in 1930. Standing immediately to the right of the large rocket is Hermann Oberth. Wernher von Braun is on the far right of the picture.

  While the young von Braun dreamed, a Russian called Fredrikh Tsander would greet his fellow workers with the phrase: “To Mars! Onward to Mars!” Tsander was born in 1887 in Riga, Latvia. By his late twenties he had decided he wanted to make a journey into space. In 1924 he published his landmark work entitled Flight to Other Planets, in which he described the design of rocket engines and made calculations for interplanetary trajectories. But perhaps his most significant contribution was his untiring popularization of spaceflight through his lecturing on the topic across the Soviet Union. Small rocketry societies were formed in Moscow and Leningrad by enthusiasts who wanted to build short-range, liquid-fueled rockets. Among them was the other person whose story is synonymous with spaceflight: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.

  Korolev, who was born in 1906, in the town of Zhitomir in the Ukraine, did not go to school until he was 14. He dreamed of flight, voraciously reading the exploits of aviation pioneers, and at 17 he joined a glider club in Odessa. Two years later he enrolled in the Moscow Higher Technical School in the Department of Aerodynamics, where he came into contact with famous Soviet aeronautical designers such as Andrei Tupolev. Upon graduation, he was employed as an engineer to work on aircraft engine design at the Menzhinski Central Design Bureau. After a few months he was transferred to the prestigious Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute in Moscow.

  A Momentous Meeting

  It appears that Korolev would have had a sound career ahead of him designing aircraft. But then he met Fredrikh Tsander. Tsander had tried to secure government support for his rocketry experiments, but had met with no success. Almost in desperation he placed an advertisement in a Moscow newspaper inviting contact from anyone interested in “interplanetary communications.” Over 150 people responded. So it was that in July 1931 some of them formed the Bureau for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight, later changing its name to the Group for the Investigation of Reactive Engines and Reactive Flight (GIRD). Korolev was a key member.

  Sergei Korolev in 1954 with a dog that had been sent in a rocket to an altitude of 62 miles (100 km).

  Under Tsander’s leadership, GIRD held public lectures and carried out small experiments in a wine cellar on Sadovo-Spasskiy Street in Moscow. Soon Korolev replaced the ailing Tsander as leader and, using his administrative flair, established four research groups to study different problems associated with rocketry. Money started to flow from the government, and by the late summer of 1933 they were able to launch the Soviet Union’s first liquid-fueled rocket powered by jellied petroleum burning in liquid oxygen. After two failures the third attempt soared to 400 meters (1,312 ft.). Korolev wrote:

  From this moment Soviet rockets should start flying above the Union of Republics. Soviet rockets must conquer space!

  Tsander did not live to see the triumph. Five months earlier, exhausted by overwork, he had contracted typhus and died.

  The Soviet government was impressed by the rocket launch, and soon Korolev and his colleagues were working for it. The government was already funding another small research group investigating solid-fueled rockets for military use, led by a young engineer called Valentin Petrovich Glushko. He had been inspired by the works of Jules Verne, and at 15 he had written a letter to Tsiolkovsky. Just three years later in 1924, when still only 18, he had published an article in the popular press entitled Conquest of the Moon by the Earth. Glushko and Korolev became friends, but that was not to last. Their difficult relationship was to be at the heart of the Soviet space effort, becoming both its greatest strength and weakness.

  Military Backing

  In Hitler’s Germany a young Wernher von Braun showed his rocketry ideas to Colonel Karl Becker, chief of ballistics and ammunition of the Reichswehr (National Defense). Becker responded:

  We are greatly interested in rocketry, but there are a number of defects in the manner in which your organization is going about development. For our purposes, there is too much showmanship. You would do better to concentrate on scientific data than to fire toy rockets.

  Wernher von Braun was interested in using rockets for space flight, but Becker wanted a long-range missile. Von Braun nevertheless joined the army and worked under Captain Walter Dornberger on liquid-fueled rocket engines, saying later:

  We needed money for our experiments, and since the army was willing to give us help, we didn’t worry overmuch about the consequences in the distant future. We were interested in one thing, the exploration of space.

  Because the army was the only organization developing rockets in Germany, and also to advance his own career, von Braun joined first the Nazi Party and then the Waffen-SS. He told his fellow amateur rocket enthusiasts that he had been conscripted, and then started to lie to them about what he was really doing. In the meantime Dornberger decided that a quiet and isolated place was needed for the rocket tests, so the program was moved to a small fishing village called Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.

  The Rule of Terror

  The promise and potential of the Soviet rocketry effort was cut short abruptly in 1937 when Joseph Stalin’s purges reached their inhuman climax. His plan—the complete terrorization of society—was put into effect by the hated People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police force responsible for political repression). An entire generation, and more, of Soviet society was murdered. No one was safe, and nor was there any defense. People simply disappeared, often picked up off the street for completely arbitrary reasons. Millions faced the threat of execution or being sent to labor camps. Terrified people became informants simply to survive—among them Valentin Glushko.

  By the end of 1937 the NKVD had Korolev and Glushko in their sights. Glushko was arrested first. Inevitably, the NKVD denounced Korolev and he was thrown into the Lubyanka. Shortly afterward, following severe torture, he “confessed” and was fortunate not to be shot. Instead, he found himself in a cattle truck being taken to the Kolyma death camp in Siberia
.

  Two chance events saved his life. A close friend, the famous pilot Valentina Grizodubova, joined forces with another famous Soviet aviator, Mikhail Gromov, and with Korolev’s mother to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party requesting a review of his case. It reached the office of Nikolai Yezhov, chairman of the NKVD, and his successor, the tyrannical Lavrenti Beriya. Prosecutor Vasily Ulrikh also wrote to the NKVD to protest at Korolev’s sentence. Beriya thought he could use Korolev’s case to demonstrate his powers of leniency. So at a special meeting of the Plenum of the High Court the NKVD agreed to Ulrikh’s request and altered the charge from a “member of an anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary organization” to the less serious “saboteur of military technology,” and ordered a new trial.

  For Korolev, working as a grave digger in a gold mine off the Kolyma river, it was almost too late. Among all the gulags Kolyma was the most brutal, claiming the lives of between two and three million people from overwork, famine, cruelty and the harsh Arctic climate. Eventually Korolev was found at Kolyma before his inevitable death and put on a train back to Moscow. Of the 600 individuals who had been at the camp when he had arrived, only 200 were still alive when he left. Soon after, under Beriya’s watchful eye, the NKVD undertook an investigation into Korolev’s case, which concluded that he would be deprived of his freedoms for the next eight years. Although the verdict saved him from a return trip to the death camps, it was another cruel blow.

  Tupolev had also been imprisoned during the purges, but because of the impending war Stalin took an interest in those who had worked or studied under him, and he ordered Tupolev to prepare a list of those who could be useful for work in the aeronautical industries. On that list was Korolev. He was transferred to an aviation design bureau located in Stakhanov village near Moscow, where he was assigned to work under Tupolev. Korolev later said:

  We were taken to the dining room, heads turned to our direction, sudden exclamations, people ran to us. There were so many well-known, friendly faces.