FTV: The Space Race

   Back in 2021, I shared the story of the Chief Designer of the Soviet Union’s Manned Rocket program, Sergei Korolev, also known as ‘The King’. (FTV:  The King, Part 1 (7-14-21) & Part 2 (7-21-21)).  Korolev’s name was so top secret that there were very few people even in Russia who even knew about his contributions to putting the first man in space.  He was particularly fond of the cosmonauts he prepared and often referred to them as his ‘little eagles’.  Though he professed to not have a favorite cosmonaut to put forward as the first man in space, it became obvious that it was a two horse race right up to the final days.  Gherman Titov would later say that Yuri Gagaran was the right choice at the time.  It took some time and Gagarin’s death to help Titov shake off the bitterness he felt when he was pegged for the second manned flight.

     While the United States ran their Manned Space Program under the glare of the media spotlight, information about the Russian program was highly classified.  The KGB controlled all of the reports that were released and much of what we know about their early program only came to light 35 years after the fact.  In their excellent book, Starman – The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (1998, updated in 2011 – Walker Publishing), authors Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony were able to dig deeper into the secretive world of the Soviet Union than previous researchers had been able to do.  Some of the ‘old ways’ that Russia dealt with their internal politics took some time to melt away, but when the USSR began to dissolve in the era of Regan and Gorbachev, people became more willing to talk about the old days.  Doran and Bizony stated they were lucky their work could be conducted in the shadow of that time as the rise of Vladamir Putin has revived much of the Russian narrative from the old days;  rule by fear and control.

     Much of Starman is devoted to Yuri Gagarin’s path to become ‘the first one’ and the impact becoming a Russian hero had on his life.  The part of the story we will concentrate on here is what became known as ‘the Space Race’.  The Russians were not actually racing to do anything and the fact that Gagarin made it to space before Alan Shepard was more of a collision of circumstances than anything else.  Once Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the effect Gagarin’s flight had on Russia, the United States, and the world, he pushed for more of the same.  It didn’t take much for the Russians to stay a step ahead of the U.S. – all they had to do was watch the evening news or read the American papers to know exactly what was going to happen in NASA’s near future.  They took whatever shortcuts they needed to take to stay one step ahead.

          The first indication that there was a burgeoning ‘Space Race’ came about because Gagarin’s flight had a big impact on the American psyche.  There had been a bit of alarm from the American public when the Russians launched the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, but it had died down (some).  According to Dr. John Logsdon, the head of the Space Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. and an advisor to many presidents, Gagarin’s flight was different:  “It was a sudden rebalancing of our power relationship with the Soviet Union, because of the clear demonstration that – if they wanted to – they could send a nuclear warhead across intercontinental distances, right into the heart of ‘Fortress America’.  There was an uproar:  how did we get beaten by this supposedly backward country?”

     President Kennedy was one of the most concerned Americans.  He paced his office and demanded to know how the United States could answer this challenge.  JFK rebuffed Jerome Wiesner’s suggestion they make a three month study of the problem.  Kennedy told  his science advisor, “If somebody can just tell me now to catch up.  Let’s find somebody – anybody.  I don’t care if it is the janitor over there, if he knows how.”  If the president was feeling panicky about Gagarin, the failure of the CIA trained force of Cuban refugees to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs three days later certainly didn’t calm his fears about countering the Communist threat.  With his administration faltering in its first 100 days, he sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson a pivotal memo on April 20 asking him to do a thorough assessment of the United States rocket program.  The five points outlined by the President may have been a brilliant political move or a desperate attempt to right the ship by a panicked captain.  Either way, Doran and Bizony state, “Without a doubt, it laid the foundations for the largest technological endeavor since the ‘Manhattan’ (Project) development of the atomic bomb:  [The memo ignited] the Apollo lunar landing program.”

     Twenty three days after Gagarin’s single orbit flight, Alan Shepard’s suborbital hop of 15 minutes duration was just the start for the American program.  NASA’s Redstone Rocket only generated one third of the Russian’s R-7 booster, but it was enough to get the United States off square one.  NASA administrator James Webb told Kennedy and Johnson that the Soviets were certainly capable of beating the US in the short term, but he encouraged them to pursue longer range goals.  He convinced them that the amount of resources and technological development this country could put into a Moon landing program would far eclipse the Russian’s ability to match America’s program.  Right after Shepard’s hop, Webb’s advisors wanted him to keep the cost estimates of a Moon program as low as possible so Congress wouldn’t be scared off when asked to fund the program.  Webb, in a stroke of genius, doubled the estimate they had come up with and presented it to Kennedy:  $20 billion spread over eight years!

     The figure stunned Kennedy, but he laid it out for Congress and the American people in his famous speech of April 25, 1961:  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.  No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important to the long-term exploration of space, and none will be more difficult or expensive to accomplish.”  The race was now officially on and Congress was all in.  Over the next four years, NASA’s budget would make up 5 percent of the entire federal budget and the space agency would employ 250,000 people to make Kennedy’s promise come true.

     Logsdon raised an interesting question:  The last chimp-onaut flight before Shepard flew had a glitch (that sent Ham higher, faster, and farther downrange than they intended).  This problem alarmed the rocket designers enough that it slipped Shepard’s flight far enough back to allow for one more chimp flight.  It was this delay that allowed the Russians to get Gagarin into space first.  Logsdon wonders, “If Shepard had been able to fly when he was originally scheduled (and beat Gagarin into space), would history have been different?  Would there have been a reason to even start the so-called ‘Space Race’?”  The point is obviously moot – Gagarin was the first and his flight did indeed fire the starting gun for the ‘Space Race’..  

     The other part of Kennedy’s ‘Moon Speech’ was a challenge to the American people.  He said, “We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  JFK told the story of two boys running across the Irish farm lands and when they came to a wall that seemed too high, one would throw the other’s cap over the top so they would have no choice but to follow it:  “We have thrown our cap over the wall of space,” is how Kennedy put it.

      To show how desperate the Soviets were to keep one upping the Americans, they took risks the Mercury – Gemini – Apollo program didn’t.  To get a multi-man crew in space before Apollo flew, Korolev modified their next generation capsule to accommodate three cosmonauts.  The space in the capsule was so tight they had to not only do away with the ejection seats, but also with their space suits.  NASA rules said astronauts must wear their pressurized suits upon re-entry in case the capsule lost pressure.  The Russians took a chance they wouldn’t have any problems.  NASA lost some of three astronauts when they lost their focus on quality while developing the Apollo spacecraft.  The pause in their program would have given Russia ample time to also improve their new craft, but they pushed to stay ahead of NASA to their own detriment.  

      When Gagarin, and later Titov, encountered problems with their one-man Vostok capsule, one would have to wonder why they didn’t address these issues.  On Gagarin’s return, the electrical umbilical connecting his cabin and the service module to the rear failed to disconnect, giving him a bumpy ride home.  The two spheres kept banging into each other which finally stopped when the cables burned through.  Even though they knew this was a problem before Titov’s flight, no steps were taken to ensure a smooth separation so they could get him in orbit as soon as possible.  The second flight experienced the same trouble.  Adding his nausea and almost freezing due to a broken cabin heater to Titov’s list of problems made for an uncomfortable flight.  Titov was lucky to miss a train by some fifty meters as he parachuted from his returning capsule.  Unfortunately, his troubles didn’t end when he hit the ground.  After rolling over three times, the wind caught his chute and dragged him across the fields with his open faceplate scooping up soil.  “You know, the farmers in Saratov had done their ploughing quite well that season, otherwise my landing would have been even harder,”  he commented later. 

     A week after Titov landed, construction of the Berlin Wall began.  Before this escalation of East – West tensions came to a head, there were internal talks about the two countries cooperating on a joint space exploration initiative.  Bobby Kennedy was sent to make back door overtures to the Russians about such a program but neither the President or the First Premier would be around to see it through.  Kennedy, of course, was struck down in Dallas and Khruschev was pushed from power.  It would be decades before any semblance of international space cooperation would gain any traction.    

      Further tensions involving the Space Race occurred in the middle of the Cuban Missile crisis.   Kennedy and Khrushchev played a dangerous game of chicken over the Russian rocket installations spotted in Cuba by high flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft.  In the middle of all the kerfuffle, Korolev had a Mars probe set up and ready to be launched for another ‘space first’.  Fearing a showdown, the Russian military ordered the on-site rocket engineers to replace the probe with a nuclear warhead.  The head engineer flew to Moscow to alert Korolev (who was battling a cold) and he in turn talked to Khrushchev to belay the switch.  Ironically, the Mars probe booster exploded during the launch attempt, causing an ultra-alert in the American Ballistic Early Warning System.  The BEWS tracking computers shut down any counterstrike when no inbound missiles were detected.  Kennedy got the Russians to blink over the Cuban missiles ending the standoff.  Could there have been a worse time for a space launch rocket failure?

     As both sides jockeyed for space supremacy, Yuri Gagarin was tiring of his role as a hero.  He made some poor personal decisions but few noticed.  No one wanted to be accused of tarnishing his image even though he seemed to be doing a pretty good job on his own.  He kept getting promoted and with each step up the ladder, he was pushed further away from the one thing he desired the most:  to fly in space again.  He particularly wanted to be the first man to walk on the Moon.  As the director of cosmonaut training at Baikonur, Gagarin was not even allowed to pilot a jet aircraft solo.  The new cosmonaut recruits had been training in new state of the art jet aircraft.  What little time Yuri got in the air, it was in an antiquated two seat MiG -15UTI.  To increase his chances of getting another space flight, he had returned to school to catch up to the new hotshot pilots.  A thesis concerning reusable winged spacecraft showed he was thinking about the future of space travel even as the Soviets were now running as fast as they could but still losing ground to NASA.

     Proof of the widening gap between the two countries came when the Russian program suffered the loss of their first cosmonaut during a mission.  Vladimir Komarov was scheduled to fly the first manned test flight of the new Soyuz craft with Gagarin slated to be his backup.  His launch would be followed the next day by a three man crew.  The plan called for them to rendezvous in orbit and transfer two of them to Komarov’s ship.  They were supposedly rehearsing for a future moon mission but more likely it was designed to be another Russian ‘first’.  There was a list of 203 hardware problems with the ship but politics prevented a letter concerning these defects (drafted by the cosmonauts) from being seen in the chain of command.  It seems those pulling the strings felt it was more important to get the ship aloft in time to celebrate the fiftieth Anniversary of the 1917 revolution.

     Komarov told his comrades that he would not survive this flight.  As soon as he reached orbit, problems began to pop up:  One of the two solar-power panels failed to deploy causing his guidance computer to run short of power.  The second craft was not launched as the ground control team tried to iron out Komarov’s problems in orbit.  When this second mission was scrubbed, Komarov’s flight was terminated and he was instructed to return to Earth.  He had great difficulty getting his capsule lined up for re-entry and he radioed, “This devil ship!  Nothing I lay my hands on works properly.”  The ship would not remain stable so the cosmonaut resorted to firing his thrusters to regain control.  The thrusters were mounted too close to the navigation sensors and the lenses on those units could not tell the difference between guide starts and random reflections.  Komarov’s only choice was to use the Moon as a reference point while trying to keep the ship in the proper attitude.

     Two hours before the re-entry drama began, everyone, including the cosmonaut, knew he was in serious trouble.  Premier Kosygin talked to him and promised him a hero’s burial.  Komarov  talked to his wife and told her how to settle his affairs.  Just when it appeared he might survive reentry, his drogue parachute failed to pull the larger canopy from its storage bay.  The back up parachute was released but it became entangled with the first drogue and when the capsule slammed into the steppe near Orenburg, the retro-rockets at the base exploded and burned what was left of the smashed spaceship.

      When the Apollo 1 astronauts died in a flash fire during a ground test of their own flawed space capsule, the Russian government sent condolences to NASA and their families.  As Doran and Bizony put it, “This time it was NASA’s turn to send letters of condolence.  Both sides in the superpower divide had learned that the space environment showed no concern for nationalities or flags, but treated all trespassers – Russian and American alike – to the same set of risks.”  The space race would continue, but the Russian’s were no longer seen as America’s technological equal.  Even their Space Shuttle clone, Buran, only flew once without a crew and its shell ended up as a diner in a Moscow park.

     As far as Yuri Gagarin, he continued his request to return to space after Komarov’s death.  On March 12, 1968, he and co-pilot Vladimir Serugin were completing one of Gagarin’s recertification flights in a two-seater MiG-15UTI jet.  Radio traffic released later indicated they had to fly lower than they normally would have to find clear air to run their test patterns.  The cause of their crash was never revealed but recent research indicates they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It is probable that wake turbulence from a more advanced fighter caught them unaware and they were flying too low to recover.  Both Gagarin and Serguin were cremated and laid to rest in the wall of the Kremlin.  Information about their fate would remain unreported so even in death, Gagarin could continue to be a symbol of Russia’s leading the early Space Race. 

Top Piece Video:   Rocketman Live from Madison Square Garden in 2000.