- Siddiqi, Asif A.
Challenge to Apollo.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000.
NASA SP-2000-4408.
-
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union,
accounts of the Soviet space program were a mix of legend,
propaganda, speculations by Western analysts, all
based upon a scanty collection of documented facts. The
1990s saw a wealth of previously secret information come
to light (although many primary sources remain unavailable),
making it possible for the first time to write an
authoritative scholarly history of Soviet space exploration
from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s; this book,
published by the NASA History Division in 2000, is that
history.
Whew! Many readers are likely to find that reading
this massive (1011 7×14 cm pages, 1.9 kg)
book cover to cover tells them far, far more about the
Soviet space effort than they ever wanted to know. I
bought the book from the U.S. Government Printing Office
when it was published in 2000 and have been using it as
a reference since then, but decided finally, as the
bloggers say, to “read the whole thing”. It was
a chore (it took me almost three weeks to chew through
it), but ultimately rewarding and enlightening.
Back in the 1960s, when observers in the West pointed out
the failure of the communist system to feed its own
people or provide them with the most basic necessities,
apologists would point to the successes of the Soviet
space program as evidence that central planning and
national mobilisation in a military-like fashion could
accomplish great tasks more efficiently than the chaotic,
consumer-driven market economies of the West. Indeed,
with the first satellite, the first man in space, long
duration piloted flights, two simultaneous piloted
missions, the first spacecraft with a crew of more than one,
and the first spacewalk, the Soviets racked up an impressive
list of firsts. The achievements were real, but based upon
what we now know from documents released in the post-Soviet
era which form the foundation of this history, the interpretation
of these events in the West was a stunning propaganda success
by the Soviet Union backed by remarkably little substance.
Indeed, in the 1945–1974 time period covered here,
one might almost say that the Soviet Union never actually had
a space program at all, in the sense one uses those words to
describe the contemporary activities of NASA. The early Soviet space
achievements were all spin-offs of ballistic missile
technology driven by Army artillery officers become rocket
men. Space projects, and especially piloted flight, interested
the military very little, and the space spectaculars were sold
to senior political figures for their propaganda value, especially
after the unanticipated impact of Sputnik on world opinion.
But there was never a roadmap for the progressive development
of space capability, such as NASA had for projects
Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Instead, in most cases, it
was only after a public success that designers and politicians
would begin to think of what they could do next to top that.
Not only did this supposedly centrally planned economy
not have a plan, the execution of its space projects was
anything but centralised. Throughout the 1960s, there were
constant battles among independent design bureaux run by
autocratic chief designers, each angling for political support
and funding at the expense of the others. The absurdity of this
is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that on November
17th, 1967, six days after the first flight of NASA's
Saturn V, the Central Committee issued a decree giving
the go-ahead to the Chelomey design bureau to develop the
UR-700
booster and
LK-700
lunar spacecraft to land two cosmonauts
on the Moon, notwithstanding having already spent millions
of rubles on Korolev's already-underway
N1-L3
project, which had not yet
performed its first test flight. Thus, while NASA was checking
off items in its Apollo schedule, developed years before,
the Soviet Union, spending less than half of NASA's budget,
found itself committed to two completely independent and
incompatible lunar landing programs, with a piloted
circumlunar project based on still different hardware
simultaneously under development (p. 645).
The catastrophes which ensued from this chaotic situation are well
documented, as well as how effective the Soviets were in concealing
all of this from analysts in the West. Numerous “out
there” proposed projects are described, including Chelomey's
monster
UR-700M
booster (45 million pounds of liftoff thrust, compared
to 7.5 million for the Saturn V), which would send a crew
of two cosmonauts on a two-year flyby of Mars in an
MK-700
spacecraft with a single launch. The little-known
Soviet spaceplane projects are documented in detail.
This book is written in the same style as NASA's own institutional
histories, which is to say that much of it is heroically boring and
dry as the lunar regolith. Unless you're really into
reorganisations, priority shifts, power grabs, and other manifestations of
gigantic bureaucracies doing what they do best, you may find this
tedious. This is not the fault of the author, but of the material he
so assiduously presents. Regrettably, the text is set in a light
sans-serif font in which (at least to my eyes) the letter
“l” and the digit “1” are indistinguishable,
and differ from the letter “I” in a detail I can spot only
with a magnifier. This, in a book bristling with near-meaningless
Soviet institutional names such as the Ministry of General Machine
Building and impenetrable acronyms such as NII-1, TsKBEM (not to be
confused with TsKBM) and 11F615, only compounds the reader's
confusion. There are a few typographical errors, but none are
serious.
This NASA publication was never assigned an ISBN, so looking it up
on online booksellers will generally only find used copies.
You can order new copies from the
NASA
Information Center at US$79 each. As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and a
scanned
online edition (PDF) is available. This is a 64 megabyte download,
so unless you have a fast Internet connection, you'll need to
be patient. Be sure to download it to a local file as opposed
to viewing it in your browser, because otherwise you'll have
to download the whole thing each time you open the document.
April 2008 