Soviet space program

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 4th of October 1957, a metal sphere smaller than a beach ball began transmitting a radio beep from Earth orbit. Sputnik 1 weighed just 83.6 kilograms and carried no scientific instruments beyond a thermometer. Its signal lasted about three weeks. But the Soviet space program had just declared itself to a stunned world. How did a nation that had imprisoned its best rocket engineers in Stalinist labor camps manage to beat the United States to orbit, to the Moon's surface, to Venus, and to Mars? Why did it fracture under the weight of competing bureaucracies even as it accumulated firsts? And what explains the strange paradox at the center of the whole enterprise: a program that announced its triumphs with fanfare, yet systematically hid its failures, its dead, and even its own name?

• 2. Theoretical Roots

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  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, published the foundational papers on astronautic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He derived the rocket equation and, in 1929, introduced the concept of the multistaged rocket. His influence on Korolev was direct enough that in the early 1960s Korolev's program still drew on Tsiolkovsky's writings, including Tsiolkovsky's conviction that Mars was the most important goal for space travel. Yuri Kondratyuk, a Ukrainian and Soviet engineer and mathematician, developed the first known design for lunar orbit rendezvous, the technique of docking in Moon orbit rather than descending directly from Earth. That concept was later used to plot the actual crewed lunar landings. Friedrich Zander, a Latvian pioneer, argued in a 1925 paper that a spacecraft could use a planet's moon as a gravitational slingshot to accelerate at the start of a trajectory and decelerate at its end. NASA translated that paper in 1964 as Technical Translation F-147. These three thinkers gave Soviet engineers a conceptual toolkit that their American rivals spent years independently reconstructing.

• 3. From Lab to Labor Camp

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  Nikolai Tikhomirov had been studying solid and liquid-fueled rockets since 1894 and filed a patent in 1915 for self-propelled aerial and water-surface mines. In 1921 the Soviet military sanctioned a small research lab under his leadership to explore solid fuel rockets. The first test-firing took place in March 1928, flying roughly 1,300 meters. On the 18th of August 1933, the Leningrad branch of GIRD launched the first Soviet hybrid propellant rocket. On the 25th of November 1933, they flew the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket. That same year the government merged GIRD with the Gas Dynamics Laboratory to form RNII, concentrating the country's best rocket engineers in one institution. Sergei Korolev, who had become interested in liquid-fueled engines while working on the Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber in 1930, was among them. RNII produced the RS-82 and RS-132 missiles and, from 1940-1941, serial production of the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher. Then came the Great Purge. In November 1937, Ivan Kleymyonov and Georgy Langemak were arrested and later executed. Glushko and many other engineers went to the Gulag. Korolev was arrested in June 1938, sent to a forced labor camp at Kolyma in June 1939, and relocated to a prison for scientists only in September 1940, after his mentor Tupolev intervened. The damage to the program was severe at exactly the moment Germany was racing ahead.

• 4. A House Divided

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  On the 22nd of October 1946, Operation Osoaviakhim deported 302 German rocket scientists and engineers to the Soviet Union, including 198 from the Zentralwerke, totaling 495 persons with family members. German expertise was invaluable through 1947 in mastering the V-2 and establishing production of the R-1. After 1947, German influence on the Soviet program became marginal. Korolev re-emerged to lead the program while publicly known only as the anonymous Chief Designer of Rocket-Space Systems. He was, according to the source, single-mindedly driven by the dream of space travel, but kept that dream secret while building missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to the United States. NASA was directed by a single administrator, James Webb, through most of the 1960s. The Soviet program had no equivalent. Mikhail Yangel, who had been Korolev's assistant, received his own design bureau in 1954 with military backing. Vladimir Chelomey gained Khrushchev's personal patronage and in 1960 was given the job of developing a rocket to send a crewed vehicle around the Moon. Glushko, the chief rocket engine designer, refused on personal grounds to build the large single-chamber cryogenic engines Korolev needed for his N-1 heavy booster. That refusal would eventually doom the lunar program. Khrushchev himself emphasized missiles rather than space exploration and was not interested in competing with Apollo. Despite Western assumptions to the contrary, systematic missions driven by political goals were rare. The one acknowledged exception was Valentina Tereshkova's Vostok 6 flight in 1963. In February 1962, the government abruptly ordered a dual-spacecraft mission to eclipse John Glenn's flight, demanding it launch in ten days. The program could not manage it until August, when Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 finally flew.

• 5. Collapse of the Lunar Dream

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  Korolev died in January 1966 from complications of heart disease and severe hemorrhaging during what was supposed to be a routine operation. The surgery uncovered colon cancer. Leadership of OKB-1 passed to Vasily Mishin, who lacked the political standing to force competing bureaus into line. Under pressure, Mishin approved the Soyuz 1 launch in 1967 even though the craft had never completed a successful uncrewed test flight. The mission launched with known design problems and ended with the vehicle crashing into the ground, killing Vladimir Komarov. It was the first in-flight fatality in the history of spaceflight. Apollo 8 circled the Moon in 1968 before any Soviet crewed vehicle reached lunar distance. The N-1 heavy booster exploded on each of its four uncrewed test launches. The decision to compete for a lunar landing had not been made until August 1964, more than three years after the United States declared its intention. The Soviet goal was set for 1967, the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, or 1968. It was already too late. After four N-1 failures and Apollo 11's landing on the 20th of July 1969, the program was suspended for two years and then canceled in 1974. The abandoned program had planned a multipurpose Moon base called Zvezda, with developed mockups of expedition vehicles and surface modules. Plans from the early 1960s had also envisioned crewed Mars missions as early as 1968-1970, using electric rocket engines and closed-loop life support launched from large orbiting stations. Kerim Kerimov, who became Chairman of the State Commission on Piloted Flights after Korolev's death, supervised every crewed and uncrewed interplanetary mission for the next 25 years, through to 1991.

• 6. Robots on Other Worlds

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  Luna 1, in 1959, was the first man-made object to escape Earth's gravity. It discovered that the Moon has no magnetic field and detected what the source describes as a strong flow of ionized plasma emanating from the Sun. Luna 2 impacted the Moon east of Mare Imbrium, the first man-made object to contact a celestial body. Luna 3's photographs revealed two dark far-side regions named Mare Moscoviense and Mare Desiderii. In 1966, Luna 9 achieved the first soft landing on the Moon and transmitted surface photographs. By 1970, Luna 16 had drilled 35 centimeters into the lunar soil, extracted a sample, and returned it to Earth without a crew, the first robotic sample return from another world. The Luna program ran 24 total missions; 15 were counted successful. On Venus, Venera 3 impacted the planet on the 1st of March 1966, the first man-made object to reach the surface of another planet. Venera 7, in 1970, recorded a surface temperature of 475 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 92 bar. The probe hit the surface at 17 meters per second, apparently bounced, and came to rest on its side. Analysis of post-landing radio signals showed it continued transmitting for another 23 minutes. Venera 13, in 1981, became the first probe to drill into the surface of another planet. Its color photographs showed an orange-brown flat bedrock surface with loose regolith and small flat thin angular rocks. Venera 13 also took an audio sample of the Venusian environment, capturing background wind estimated at around 0.5 meters per second. Mars 3, in 1971, achieved the first soft landing on Mars but transmitted data for only up to 20 seconds before going silent. The Vega program of 1984 deployed balloons into the Venusian atmosphere from two spacecraft launched six days apart, the first time that had been done anywhere.

• 7. The Machinery of Silence

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  When Sputnik was first approved, the Politburo's immediate response was to consider what to announce to the world. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union set all official precedents for program communications. The public release contained no photograph of the satellite, no explanation of who built it, and no statement of purpose. A contemporary observer described the text as offering an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data, as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object. Cosmonaut names were withheld until after flights. Launches were not announced in advance. Mission failures were not reported. Korolev's bureau, OKB-1, was subordinated to the Ministry of General Machine-Building, the agency responsible for ballistic missiles. The Vostok spacecraft was referred to internally as object IIF63; its launch rocket was object 8K72K. Soviet defense factories had carried numbers instead of names since 1927. Employees used a separate set of special post-office numbers to refer to those factories publicly. Historian James Andrews concluded that with almost no exceptions, Soviet space coverage omitted reports of failure or trouble. Cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died on the 23rd of March 1961 in a fire during an endurance experiment in a high-oxygen chamber. The Soviet Union covered up his death. In August 1981, when Kosmos 434, launched in 1971, was about to reenter the atmosphere, a Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson told the Australian government it was an experimental lunar cabin. That quiet disclosure was among the first Soviet acknowledgments that a crewed lunar program had ever existed. The Buran spaceplane flew one uncrewed orbital mission on the 15th of November 1988, completing two orbits in three hours and gliding to a landing near Baikonur. Its Ministry of Defense canceled the program as redundant after strategic arms reduction treaties removed its rationale. The Polyus orbital weapons platform, designed to destroy Strategic Defense Initiative satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser, failed on its single test when the guidance system rotated it a full 360 degrees instead of 180. The program that registered more space firsts than any other left behind an equally long archive of missions that never flew and deaths it never admitted.