- Chertok, Boris E.
Rockets and People. Vol. 3.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2009.
ISBN 978-1-4700-1437-7 NASA SP-2009-4110.
-
This is the third book of the author's
four-volume autobiographical history of the Soviet missile
and space program.
Boris Chertok
was a survivor, living through the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian
civil war, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, all of the
postwar conflict between chief designers and their bureaux and rival
politicians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in Poland in
1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. After retiring from the RKK Energia
organisation in 1992 at the age of 80, he wrote this work between 1994
and 1999. Originally published in Russian in 1999, this annotated
English translation was prepared by the NASA History Office under the
direction of Asif A. Siddiqi, author of
Challenge to Apollo (April 2008),
the definitive Western history of the Soviet space
program.
Volume 2 of this memoir chronicled the achievements which thrust
the Soviet Union's missile and space program into the consciousness
of people world-wide and sparked the space race with the
United States: the development of the
R-7 ICBM,
Sputnik and its successors, and the first flights
which photographed the far side of the Moon and impacted on its
surface. In this volume, the author describes the projects
and accomplishments which built upon this base and persuaded
many observers of the supremacy of Soviet space technology.
Since the author's speciality was control systems and radio
technology, he had an almost unique perspective upon these
events: unlike other designers who focussed upon one or a few
projects, he was involved in almost all of the principal efforts, from
intermediate range, intercontinental, and submarine-launched ballistic
missiles; air and anti-missile defence; piloted spaceflight;
reconnaissance, weather, and navigation satellites; communication
satellites; deep space missions and the ground support for them; soft
landing on the Moon; and automatic rendezvous and docking. He was
present when it looked like the rudimentary R-7 ICBM might be launched
in anger during the Cuban missile crisis, at the table as chief designers
battled over whether combat missiles should use cryogenic or storable
liquid propellants or solid fuel, and sat on endless boards of inquiry
after mission failures—the first eleven attempts to soft-land
on the Moon failed, and Chertok was there for each launch, subsequent
tracking, and sorting through what went wrong.
This was a time of triumph for the Soviet space program: the first
manned flight, endurance record after endurance record, dual flights,
the first woman in space, the first flight with a crew of more than one,
and the first spacewalk. But from Chertok's perspective inside the
programs, and the freedom he had to write candidly in the 1990s about his
experiences, it is clear that the seeds of tragedy
were being sown. With the quest for one spectacular after another,
each surpassing the last, the Soviets became inoculated with what
NASA came to call “go fever”—a willingness to brush
anomalies under the rug and normalise the abnormal because you'd
gotten away with it before.
One of the most stunning examples of this is
Gagarin's flight. The
Vostok
spacecraft consisted of a spherical descent module (basically a
cannonball covered with ablative thermal protection material) and an
instrument compartment containing the retro-rocket, attitude control
system, and antennas. After firing the retro-rocket, the instrument
compartment was supposed to separate, allowing the descent module's
heat shield to protect it through atmospheric re-entry. (The Vostok
performed a purely ballistic re-entry, and had no attitude control
thrusters in the descent module; stability was maintained exclusively
by an offset centre of gravity.) In the two unmanned test flights
which preceded Garagin's mission, the instrument module had failed to
cleanly separate from the descent module, but the connection burned
through during re-entry and the descent module survived. Gagarin was
launched in a spacecraft with the same design, and the same thing
happened: there were wild oscillations, but after the link burned
through his spacecraft stabilised. Astonishingly,
Vostok 2 was
launched with Gherman Titov on board with precisely the same
flaw, and suffered the same failure during re-entry. Once
again, the cosmonaut won this orbital game of
Russian roulette.
One wonders what lessons were learned from this. In this
narrative, Chertok is simply aghast at the decision making here, but
one gets the sense that you had to be there, then, to appreciate what
was going through people's heads.
The author was extensively involved in the development of the
first Soviet communications satellite,
Molniya,
and provides extensive insights into its design, testing, and
early operations. It is often said that the
Molniya orbit
was chosen because it made the satellite visible from the
Soviet
far North
where geostationary satellites would be too
close to the horizon for reliable communication. It is certainly
true that today this orbit continues to be used for communications with Russian
arctic territories, but its adoption for the first Soviet
communications satellite had an entirely different motivation.
Due to the high latitude of the
Soviet launch site
in Kazakhstan,
Korolev's
R-7 derived booster could place only about 100 kilograms
into a geostationary orbit, which was far too little for a communication
satellite with the technology of the time, but it could loft 1,600 kilograms
into a high-inclination Molniya orbit. The only alternative would have
been for Korolev to have approached
Chelomey
to launch a geostationary
satellite on his
UR-500 (Proton)
booster, which was unthinkable because at the time the two were bitter
rivals. So much for the frictionless efficiency of central planning!
In engineering, one learns that every corner cut will eventually
come back to cut you. Korolev died at just the time he was most
needed by the Soviet space program due to a botched operation for
a routine condition performed by a surgeon who had spent most of
his time as a Minister of the Soviet Union and not in the operating
room. Gagarin died in a jet fighter training accident which has
been the subject of such an extensive and multi-layered cover-up
and spin that the author simply cites various accounts and leaves it
to the reader to judge. Komarov died in
Soyuz 1
due to a parachute problem which would have been discovered
had an unmanned flight preceded his. He was a victim of
“go fever”.
There is so much insight and wisdom here I cannot possibly summarise it
all; you'll have to read this book to fully appreciate it, ideally
after having first read
Volume 1 (May 2012)
and
Volume 2 (August 2012).
Apart from the unique insider's perspective on the Soviet missile and
space program, as a person elected a corresponding member of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1968 and a full member (academician)
of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000, he provides a candid
view of the politics of selection of members of the Academy and
how they influence policy and projects at the national level.
Chertok believes that, even as one who survived Stalin's purges,
there were merits to the Soviet system which have been lost in the
“new Russia”. His observations are worth pondering by
those who instinctively believe the market will always converge upon
the optimal solution.
As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and an
online
edition in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats is available.
A commercial Kindle edition is available which
is perfectly readable but rather cheaply produced. Footnotes simply
appear in the text in-line somewhere after the reference, set in small
red type. The index references page numbers from the print edition
which are not included in the Kindle version, and hence are completely
useless. If you have a suitable application on your reading device
for one of the electronic book formats provided by NASA, I'd opt for
it. They are not only better formatted but free.
The
original
Russian edition is available online.
December 2012 