Source: James J. Harford, "Korolev's Triple Play: Sputniks 1, 2, and 3," adapted from James J. Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (John Wiley: New York, 1997).



---





The paper deals with the politics, planning and technology of

the period 1946-1958, spanning the development of the R-7 ICBM

technology which made possible the launching of an artificial

satellite; the strategy used by Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, with

the support of Mystislav Keldysh, in bringing the satellite from

conceptualization by Mikhail Tikhonravov to actuality; the early

work on Sputnik 3, which was planned to be Sputnik 1; the hurried

development of Sputnik 1 when Sputnik 3 was not ready; the even

more hurried development of Sputnik 2 (the Laika carrier) at Khrushchev's

behest; the actual launches; the failure to map the radiation

belts; the casual reaction, at first, by Kremlin officialdom to

Sputnik 1's success; and then the quick switch to braggadocio

when the world impact was realized. 1

#### Initial Soviet Reaction to Sputnik 1 Launch

While it jolted the rest of the world, the successful launch of

Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, received casual treatment, at first,

in Moscow. Korolev's former colleague, Academician Boris Rauschenbakh,

told me, some 35 years later, "Look up the pages of Pravda

for the first day after the launch. It got only a few paragraphs.

Then look at the next day's issue, when the Kremlin realized what

the world impact was." 2

The article in the October 5 Pravda was, indeed, tersely phrased.

Positioned modestly in a right hand column part way down on the

first page, it did not even mention the satellite in its head.

Titled routinely, "Tass Report," it gave the facts of

the launch clinically, and the editors apparently felt obliged

from the very first sentence to educate the readers on what it

was all about:

In the course of the last years in the Soviet Union scientific

research and experimental construction work on the creation of

artificial satellites of the Earth has been going on.

As already reported in the press, the first launches of satellites

in the USSR were planned for implementation in accordance with

the program of scientific research for the International Geophysical

Year.

As the result of a large, dedicated effort by scientific-research

institutes and construction bureaus the world's first artificial

satellite of the Earthhas been created. On 4 October, 1957

in the USSR the first successful satellite launch has been achieved.

According to preliminary data, the rocket launcher carried the

satellite to the necessary orbital speed of about 8,000 meters

per second. At the present time the satellite is moving in an

elliptical trajectory around the Earth and its flight can be observed

in the rays of the eastern and western Sun with the help of simple

optical instruments (binoculars, spyglasses, etc.). 3

The article went on to give the basic information--size, weight,

orbital inclination, radio frequency on which the beep could be

heard--and it credited the great Tsiolkovsky with having established

the feasibility of artificial Earth satellites decades earlier. 4

#### The Next Day's Turnabout

The next day's Pravda was something else. 5 "World's First

Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Nation" stretched

across the top of page one, which was devoted almost entirely

to the achievement. But the lead story in the right hand column

did not recount the feat itself, with first hand reports from

the Soviet protagonists--their names were top secret, after all,

so they could not even be contacted. Instead, the column was datelined

New York, and it quoted in detail the congratulations of Russia's

fiercest Cold War rival, the USA. The words, generous in their

praise, were from Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. National

Committee for the International Geophysical Year. Both the Soviet

and American satellite programs were carried out under IGY auspices,

with the results available to the world's scientists. Below the

Kaplan item were congratulatory bulletins from A. C. B. Lovell,

the British astronomer, and from a member of the USSR's political

family, Pavel Novatsky of the Polish Academy of Sciences--the

latter headed "Big Victory."

Big victory it certainly was. Poems lyricized the event, like

"Leap into the Future" and "Scouting the Celestial

Deep." An ephemeris, showing the times when the carrier rocket

would be visible over cities in the USSR, as well as Detroit and

Washington, was printed like a train timetable. It was the moment

to cash in on the performance of a feat that Nikita Khrushchev

could never have dreamed would have so powerful an effect. He,

after all, had been apathetic about "just another Korolev

rocket launch," as Rauschenbakh described the attitude of

the Soviet premier and his claque on first hearing the news.

In the days to come, though, Pravda was delighted to print the

praises of friends and enemies. Reactions from Peking and Shanghai

(that friendship would dissolve only a few years hence), Warsaw,

Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, and an especially long one from New

York, ran under a big headline that ran across the page, "Russians

Won the Competition." 6

#### The US Muffed the Chance to be First

It was a competition which the Americans should have won hands

down. The concept of putting up a satellite had been known to

the world's space enthusiasts for many years. In America serious

proposals to launch a spacecraft into Earth orbit had been discussed

since the mid-1940's. Robert P. Haviland recalls that when he

was working in the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics in 1945, motivated

by a report on space rockets in a document captured from the Peenemunde

Germans, he "wrote a 4-5 page memo proposing a Navy satellite

development but it was scorned." 7

In February, 1946, the US Army Air Corps asked the major air frame

companies to submit secret proposals for the design of an "earth

orbiting satellite." Douglas Aircraft was notified on July

l that its design was judged the winner. Today's aerospace companies

will find it hard to believe that the Air Corps evaluation was

completed in less than four months! What's more, Douglas was funded

for the study at the "unheard of amount in those days"

of $1 million but their contract was switched to the newly-formed

Project RAND (for Research and Development) in Santa Monica, California. 8

RAND's eventual report on "Preliminary Design of an Experimental

World-Circling Spaceship" predicted, with keen perception,

that "The achievement of a satellite craft by the United

States would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably

produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion

of the atomic bomb." 9 Alas, nothing followed the study, and

so it would not be a US satellite that would generate those repercussions.

#### Tsiolkovsky Showed in 1903 That a Satellite Could

be Orbited

In Russia, as mentioned earlier, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had shown

mathematically in 1903 how a device launched at a certain velocity

would achieve Earth orbit. Then in 1948, forty-five years later,

the visionary Mikhail Tikhonravov had made the case to Korolev

for developing just such a device. At first he was unable to get

support for the concept. His presentation to a meeting of the

Academy of Artillery Sciences was treated skeptically. Golovanov

quotes the remarks of the Academy president, Anatoli Blagonravov,

at the meeting: "The topic is interesting. But we cannot

include your report. Nobody would understand why...They would

accuse us of getting involved in things we do not need to get

involved in..." However, what Blagonravov said officially

was not what he thought instinctively. This courteous, mild-mannered,

chain-smoking, white-haired former general, who would become in

later years one of the chief spokesmen for the Soviet Union in

the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,

was bothered by the wary reception of Tikhonravov's ideas. "There

was no way he could escape the thought that this ridiculous report

was in fact not very ridiculous at all." Blagonravov, risking

the derision of his colleagues, put the report back on the agenda,

thereby giving Tikhonravov--and Korolev--license to study possible

satellite designs. 10

#### The R-7 ICBM Carrier Made a Sputnik Launch Feasible

Some five years later, towards the end of 1953, having redesigned

the R-7 rocket to carry a heavier payload, Korolev had drafted

a proposed decree for the Central Committee of the Communist Party

which included the possibility of using the vehicle to launch

a satellite. However, while the draft "was making its way

to the top" mention of the satellite was struck out. 11  Not

until May 26, 1954 did Korolev formally propose the satellite

launch to Dimitri Ustinov, Minister of Armaments. 12  By then the

R-7 was capable of propelling an H-bomb warhead of 5 tons--the

actual size had not yet been determined--over an intercontinental

ballistic trajectory. It could easily orbit a satellite of some

1.5 tons. According to Korolev's deputy, Vassily Mishin, Korolev

had to propose a Sputnik launch as part of the test program of

the ICBM program. 13  In any case, Korolev's proposal to Ustinov is

so delicately phrased that R-7 is not mentioned at all, but merely

referred to as the

...new article which permits speaking about the possibility of

designing an artificial Earth satellite within the next few years.

By a certain reduction of the weight of the payload it will be

possible for the satellite to achieve the necessary velocity of

8,000 m/sec. 14

As Roald Sagdeev, longtime head of the USSR Space Research Institute,

put it, "Korolev and his colleagues could have only had a

vague idea of how heavy the final reentry vehicle (for the ICBM

warhead) should be. Sakharov <Andrei> was still far from

knowing how to make this deadly weapon relatively compact and

easily portable. Since rapid progress was required, rocket designers

adopted a worst-case strategy and started to develop an ICBM that,

as it was discovered later, had a substantial excess of launch

capability, or throw weight." 15

#### US Vanguard Chosen Over Project Orbiter

Meanwhile more substantive thinking on possible satellite designs

had been resumed in the U.S. The most expedient design approach

came from Von Braun's team at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville,

Alabama. Starting with a meeting in early 1954 with George Hoover

of the Office of Naval Research, von Braun and his colleagues

eventually came up with Project Orbiter, which would have been

an Army-Navy-Air Force design using already-developed Army Ordnance

weapons technology to put a small satellite into orbit. 16 But the

Eisenhower administration had reasons to choose a different approach.

Eisenhower wanted to keep the military out of the IGY program,

which was dedicated to scientific purposes. That was the surface

reason. The other one, more telling, was--ironically--based on

military strategy. He wanted to be consistent with his well-publicized

"Open Skies" stance at a time when U-2's and spy satellites

were being developed to begin reconnoitering the USSR. Eisenhower

reasoned that a satellite put up as part of the IGY program would

strengthen the freedom of the skies policy and would be less likely

to disturb Nikita Khrushchev's sensibilities about overflight

than one sponsored by three military services. Also, Soviets were

likely to launch an IGY satellite themselves. And so a project

named Vanguard--which proved to be an embarrassing choice of names--was

chosen to carry the US banner into the space age. Based on a sounding

rocket developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, but under the

auspices of the National Science Foundation, it was going to be

a riskier venture than Orbiter because it called for substantially

modified first and second stages, a new third stage, and new rocket

engines and guidance technology.

#### Sedov Reveals Soviet Satellite Plan at IAF

On July 29, 1955, the Eisenhower Administration announced that

the U.S. would launch Vanguard for scientific purposes during

the 1957-58 IGY. A few days later, at the Sixth Congress of the

International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, a delegation

of Soviet scientists, appearing at IAF for the first time, revealed

at a press conference that the USSR, too, might be in the game.

Leonid Sedov, head of the Soviet delegation, and the newly appointed

chairman of an Academy of Sciences Commission on Interplanetary

Communications, 17  choosing his words carefully, said:

From a technical point of view, it is possible to create a satellite

of larger dimensions than that reported in the newspapers which

we had the opportunity of scanning today. The realization of the

Soviet project can be expected in the comparatively near future.

I won't take it upon myself to name the date more precisely. 18

But, Sedov, it seems, was speculating, since no official decision

had yet been made that there would be a Soviet satellite in IGY.

In fact, not until January 30, 1956 would the Council of Ministers

issue a decree authorizing its development.

#### Tikhonravov Transferred to Korolev Bureau

It was at this time that Korolev was able to arrange for Mikhail

Tikhonravov and his team, which had been working on a satellite

concept at Special Design Bureau #385 in the Ural Mountains, to

join him. One of the members of that team, Konstantin Feoktistov,

recalled:

We wanted to build a satellite but Korolev had that responsibility.

Tikhonravov was transferred to Korolev's bureau in early 1956

after the Party and the Goverment had authorized Korolev to proceed

with the development of a satellite. But the rest of us in the

group had to apply to Korolev individually. However, Korolev relied

on the advice of Tikhnoravov, his old friend and, by the end of

1957 I was chosen, although it was difficult to leave #385. 19

#### Sputnik Plans Lag, Keldysh Criticizes Industry

Even the January decision, however, was not followed by sufficiently

aggressive support for the satellite development in the opinion

of Korolev and his close ally, Mstislav Keldysh. Time to beat

the Americans had flown by and the Soviet establishment was not

yet revved up. Nine months later, on September 14, in what must

have been exasperation, and probably with Korolev's prodding,

Keldysh appeared before the presidium of the Soviet Academy of

Sciences to state his case. 20  He first reviewed patiently, like

a good teacher, the physics of placing a satellite in orbit. Then

he covered the pioneering scientific measurements which the Soviet

satellite would make--the Earth's magnetic fields, the "ionic

composition of the upper layers of the atmosphere," the "corpuscular

radiation of the Sun," cosmic radiation, possible micrometeorites.

He must have caused eyes to widen a bit when he said "...we

are considering placing a live organism in the satellite--a dog.

It turns out that the perception of a dog is the most similar

to the perception of a man--biologists so consider it. The dog

will live there in the absence of a gravitational field, in conditions

of irradiation, of cosmic radiation. The dog will be undergoing

all sorts of dangers, because if the satellite is hit by a large

meteoric particle, it will broach the satellite..."

By then he surely had their full attention, but he went on. "We,

of course, can't stop at the task of creating an Earth satellite.

We, naturally, are thinking of further tasks--of space flight.

The first project along these lines, I believe, will be to fly

around the Moon and photograph it from the side which is always

hidden to us." Then came hard criticism: "We have come

up short in a whole series of tasks in the Academy of Sciences,

and are lagging now. Back in August we were to turn in the dimensions

of the equipment and their mode of attachment to the rocket...We

delayed this work, which resulted in a notable delay in the planning

and development of the satellite itself."

He called out specific industry laggards: "In general, the

radiotechnological industry isn't helping us enough...They are

sluggishly regarding the creation of this satellite...We have

already committed one breach in delaying the delivery of size

specifications and other information to the Korolev Design Bureau."

Finally, the ultimate motivation came out baldly: "...it

would be good if the Presidium were to turn the serious attention

of all its institutions to the necessity of doing this work on

time...we all want our satellite to fly earlier than the Americans'." 21

Keldysh and Korolev had not only the Academy of Sciences and industry

to motivate, they had to deal with the objections of the military

generals, who feared that the satellite project would slow down

the development of the R-7 ICBM. The fear was understandable since

R-7's first five launch attempts had failed. 22  But foot-dragging

by the support institutions was only one of Korolev's problems.

In spite of Keldysh's speech, the satellite which was supposed

to have the honor of being first continued to fall behind schedule.

In fact, it would lag so badly that it would become Sputnik 3--a

huge, sophisticated satellite, eventually launched on May 15,

1958. Sputnik 3's 1,327 kg payload included virtually all of the

instruments called out in Keldysh's speech.

#### "Simplest" Sputnik Moves Ahead of Big Science

Satellite

"But," said Gyorgi Grechko, one of the engineers who

worked at the Korolev design bureau during those days, and who

later became a cosmonaut, "these devices were not reliable

enough so the scientists who created them asked us to delay the

launch month by month. We thought that if we postponed and postponed

we would be second to the US in the space race so we made the

simplest satellite, called just that--Prostreishiy Sputnik, or

'PS'. We made it in one month, with only one reason, to be first

in space." 23

It was at this time, on August 21, 1957, that the R-7, in its

sixth attempt, propelled a dummy H-bomb warhead all the way to

Kamchatka, some 6,000 km. With that success the confident Korolev

made his move to beat the Americans with his PS. His next obstacle

was a skeptical State Commission for the R-7 ICBM. Discussion

of Korolev's satellite proposal before that body, according to

a 1992 report by a journalist in a Moscow magazine, was "sharp,

the opponents arguing primarily about the tight timing,"

and "complete agreement was not achieved." Korolev had

to go back to the Commission a second time. This time he tried

a different ploy. Why not, he challenged the members, put the

question of authorization to the Presidium of the Central Committee

of the Communist Party--in the context of whether or not the USSR

should try to be the first country in the world to launch a satellite?

The Commission blanched. "Nobody wanted to be scapegoat."

And so the project proceeded. 24

With the Commission's nervous acquiescence, Korolev bulldozed

the development, in a little more than a month, of a plain, polished

83.6 kg sphere containing only a radio transmitter, batteries

and temperature measuring instruments, with the intent to place

it in orbit on a rocket which had failed in five of its first

six launch attempts. It was a very hectic month, and while the

satellite was simple, the attention given to its manufacture was

unsparing, especially by Korolev, himself.

"I coordinated the production, testing, launch preparations

and the launch itself," recalled Oleg Ivanovsky, looking

back 36 years during a 1993 interview. Ivanovsky had been deputy

to Mikhail Khomyakov, Sputnik 1's principal designer. He recalled

that there were problems:

For example, there were two peculiarities which satellites had

that missiles did not. One was that the satellite required precise

thermal control and the other was that vacuum sealing was used

to assure reliable performance. We had to find new techniques

of manufacturing the surfaces in order to achieve the necessary

optical and thermal qualities. We had no experience in this work.

We needed vacuum chambers. I recall one episode when we had to

persuade the production shop that the satellite was a new item,

not a missile.

Korolev, with his iron character, was able to influence the attitude

of people. The Party directed that new paint be put on the factory

walls. Korolev put the satellite on a special stand, draped in

velvet, in order that the workers would show reverence towards

it. He supervised the carrying out of the production schedule

every day personally. 25

One of the metalworkers who was assigned to the Sputnik 1 manufacture

was Gennadi Strekalov, later to become a cosmonaut. "My teacher

in metalworking did the finishing," he told me. "Two

half spheres were stamped, then machined, then the masters did

the finishing." 26Strekalov, who, in 1995,

flew to the Mir space station with American astronaut Norman Thagard

and then participated in the first Mir-Shuttle rendezvous, is

as proud of his work on Sputnik 1 as he is of his four orbital

flights. 27

"Korolev came over to the shop and insisted that both halves

of the sputnik's metallic sphere be polished until they shone,

that they be spotlessly clean," recalled Konstantin Feoktistov,

who would be the first engineer-cosmonaut to go into orbit in

the three-man Voskhod 1 seven years later. "The people who

developed the radio equipment were actually the ones demanding

this. They were afraid of the system overheating, and they wanted

the orbiting sphere to reflect as many rays of the Sun as possible." 28

An idea of how intense were the preparations for the launch of

the "simplest satellite," and how sensitive Korolev

was to the event's historical importance, comes from the recollections,

on the 30th anniversary of the launch, of one of the design team,

Mikhail Floriansky:

The jettisoning of the nose cone and the process of separation

of the sputnik from its carrier was being tested at the assembly

shop late in August, 1957. It is not a complex procedure, but

fraught with possible surprises. Everything was going on normally--or

so it seemed--when Korolev all of a sudden subjected the plant's

chief engineer to a terrible dressing down. Korolev was berating

him--what for!--for the poor quality of the surface of the mockup

of the sputnik! The quality of the surface is really important

in flight because the heat conditions of the sputnik depend on

it, but why the dressing down now, when quite a different process

was being tested?

Korolev said angrily:

"This ball will be exhibited in museums!" 29

It was Korolev's aesthetic as well as engineering sense that had

led him to insist on the ball shape for Sputnik 1, although one

of the early designs proposed was for a cone-shaped structure.

"Today, after decades have passed," recalled colleague

Mark Gallai in a 1980's interview, "we simply cannot imagine

the first sputnik to be anything other than what it was: an elegant

ball...with an antenna thrown back like a galloping horse." 30

There were two flight-ready spheres built, one for the launch

and another one for ground testing, developing the welding and

other fabrication techniques. The second one would later be launched

too, with the carrier for the dog Laika on Sputnik 2.

#### Rebrov Recalls the Launch Preparations

A recollection of the preparations for Sputnik 1, and the launch

itself from Baikonur, comes from Colonel Mikhail Rebrov:

People in the "space room" worked in white smocks, performing

each operation with the greatest thoroughness. The rocket was

assembled in the big hangar. Silence fell when the Chief Designer

appeared. At the time Sergei Korolev was exacting and more strict

than ever...

Only two days were left. The carrier rocket was rolled out to

the launch pad in the early morning of October 2, 1957. Korolev

walked in front, together with all the other chief designers.

They walked in silence the entire 1.5 km long way from the assembly-testing

building to the pad. No one will ever know what was going through

Sergei Korolev's mind at the time. Later on, when the sputnik

was installed in orbit, and its call sign was heard over the globe,

he said:

"I've been waiting all my life for this day!"

The moment of the blast-off has been described many times. Then

the rocket got out of the radio zone. The communication with the

sputnik ended. The small room where the radio receivers were was

overcrowded. Time dragged on slowly. Waiting built up the stress.

Everyone stopped talking. There was absolute silence. All that

could be heard was the breathing of the people and the quiet static

in the loudspeaker...And then from very far-off there appeared,

at first very quietly and then louder and louder, those "bleep-bleeps"

which confirmed that it was in orbit and in operation.

Once again everyone rejoiced. There were kisses, hugs and cries

of "Hurrah!" The austere men, who were greeted out of

space by the messenger they had made, had tears in their eyes. 31

#### Americans Shocked But Determined to Respond

Hardly tearful, more like rueful, was the reaction of the American

space community. Even though the possibility that the Soviets

had been making plans for launching a satellite was known in the

US, and not only to government insiders, the fact of the launch

was a deep jolt to the space professionals. 32

At that time, I was Executive Secretary of the professional society

for space engineers--the American Rocket Society (ARS). Astronautics

magazine, the main ARS publication, could not resist reminding

its readers that, "A little over two years ago, when the

government's guided missile policy committee decided against the

Von Braun-Medaris33  satellite proposal in favor of Project Vanguard,

there were four dissenters who voted to send the idea on to the

National Security Council for further consideration. One of them

was the 'Lone Eagle,' Charles A. Lindbergh, the last one to make

aviation headlines of the same magnitude as 'Sputnik.'" 34

Grim determination characterized the American rocketeers. "They

<the Russians> must not be allowed to win this game--a game

with far-reaching political, social and economic consequences,"

Astronautics editorialized. 35

In the same issue, a very insightful interpretation of the technological

significance of the Russian feat by Martin Summerfield of Princeton

University had an upbeat aspect, but was somber in its reflection

on the advanced state of Soviet space technology.

The success of the Russian "Sputnik" was convincing

and dramatic proof to people around the world of the real prospects

of space travel in the not distant future. The fact that a 23-in.

sphere weighing 184 lb has been placed in an almost precise circular

orbit indicates that a number of important technological problems

such as high thrust rocket engines, lightweight missile structures,

accurate guidance, stable autopilot control, and large scale launching

methods have been solved, at least to the degree required for

a satellite project. 36

I got a phone call at my home in Princeton about 7:00PM on Friday

evening, October 4, from the New York Times aeronautics

reporter, Richard Witkin. Had I heard? What is the reaction of

the US rocket community? My response is not even in my memory.

But the impact of the launch on the US, as well as on my own career,

would be powerful, indeed. ARS at the time had a membership of

about 5,000 engineers and scientists, most of them working on

missile programs, although a few dozen were on Project Vanguard.

By 1962, just seven years later, the membership quadrupled to

20,000, a growth so rapid that industry and government pressures

caused a merger of ARS with the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences,

the society for aeronautical engineers, into what is today the

40,000 member American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

(AIAA).

#### World Reaction

The news of the launch in the world's leading newspapers got Second

Coming treatment. The New York Times, receiving the story

in the late afternoon of Friday, October 4, printed the next morning

a rarely used three-line head in half-inch capital letters, running

full length across the front page:



IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.;

SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.



French reaction was equally ebullient. "Myth has become reality:

Earth's gravity conquered," bannered Le Figaro, and

went on to report the "disillusion and bitter reflections"

of "The Americans (who) have had little experience with humiliation

in the technical domain." 37  For three weeks the world could

hear the beeping of Sputnik 1 before the radio died out, and it

orbited more than 1,400 times before burning up in the atmosphere

after three months in space.

Much has been written about the effect of the Sputnik 1 launch

on the world scene. Many American space enthusiasts, stricken

with gloom at the time, now reflect that it might have been the

best thing that could have happened to awaken the need for an

aggressive space program. Only four years later President Kennedy

would call for what became the Apollo program. An enormous infrastructure

of space research and development centers, test and launch facilities

and supporting industry and university programs, would come into

being.

#### Some Negative Western Reaction to Space Buildup

There were those who reacted negatively to the surge in space

technology and its consequent spurring of the growth of high tech

weapons. As former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan

put it in his memoirs, "It <Sputnik> caused Western

alarmists, such as my friend Joe Alsop, to demand the immediate

subordination of all other national interests to the launching

of immensely expensive crash programs to outdo the Russians in

this competition. It gave effective arguments to the various enthusiasts

for nuclear armament in the American military-industrial complex.

That the dangerousness and expensiveness of this competition should

be raised to a new and higher order just at the time when the

prospects for negotiation in this field were being worsened by

the introduction of nuclear weapons into the armed forces of the

Continental NATO powers was a development that brought alarm and

dismay to many people besides myself." 38

#### Sputnik 2, Pushed by Khrushchev, Readied in One Month

While all this introspection was taking place in the West, the

creators of Sputnik were unable to be interviewed, take bows,

be photographed, get medals. Sergei Korolev was literally back

at the office, because Khrushchev, realizing what a hot property

he had, gave him new orders. Do something bold, Sergei Pavlovich,

to celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Revolution!

It's only a month away.

Cosmonaut Grechko tells the story.

I heard this from Korolev himself with my own ears. After Sputnik

1 Korolev went to the Kremlin and Khrushchev said to him,

"We never thought that you would launch a Sputnik before

the Americans. But you did it. Now please launch something new

in space for the next anniversary of our revolution." 39

The anniversary would be in one month! I'll bet that even with

today's computers nobody would launch something into space in

one month. It was, I think, the happiest month of his <Korolev's>

life. He told his staff, and his workers, that there would be

no special drawings, no quality check, everyone would have to

be guided by his own conscience. The engineers would make drawings

and give them directly to the workers. And we launched on November

3, 1957, in time for the celebration of the Revolution.

The payload of Sputnik 2 weighed 508 kg, more than six times the

weight of Sputnik 1. A shroud housed a carrier containing the

world's first space passenger, the mongrel dog Laika, plus a duplicate

of the Sputnik 1 sphere. Laika is reported to have barked and

eaten food during his lonely sojourn but, alas, he died when the

capsule overheated after failing to separate from its booster,

thereby rendering the thermal control system inoperative. Animal

groups protested, but the Soviets made Laika into a martyr for

a noble cause. Veterans of the Sputnik 2 project regard it as

an even more significant achievement than Sputnik 1. Not a single

engineering task had been performed on it until after Sputnik

1 went up.

With the new triumph Khrushchev could not resist escalating his

needling of the Americans. In a speech at the 40th anniversary

of the Revolution, on November 6, he said, "It appears that

the name Vanguard reflected the confidence of the Americans that

their satellite would be the first in the world. But...it was

the Soviet satellites which proved to be ahead, to be in the vanguard...In

orbiting our earth, the Soviet sputniks proclaim the heights of

the development of science and technology and of the entire economy

of the Soviet Union, whose people are building a new life under

the banner of Marxism-Leninism."

#### Vanguard, Rushed to Launch, Explodes on Pad

Those derisive comments proved even more galling to the Americans

a month later when, on December 6, the first attempt to launch

the Vanguard satellite was an ignominious failure before the world's

television cameras. The three stage rocket was designated TV-3,

for Test Vehicle 3, and it had been originally scheduled to be

just that, a test. But under Sputnik pressure, the "test"

was moved up several months, and made into a full-fledged attempt

at a satellite launch. But the vehicle got only a few feet off

the ground before sagging back, buckling, bursting into a huge

conflagration and tossing its tiny 1.47 kg payload, still transmitting,

some yards away.

Pravda delightedly reproduced the front page of the London Daily

Herald which showed a photo of the Vanguard being readied on the

launch pad next to one of the explosion. Superimposed above the

immense Herald headline, which read, "OH, WHAT A FLOPNIK!"

was Pravda's comment, "Reklama and Deistvitelnost,"

or "Publicity and Reality."

#### US Explorer Authorized, Launched, Discovers Van Allen

Belts

Following the Sputnik 2 launch, a team composed of the Von Braun

group from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency--for the launch vehicle--and

one from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California--for the

space capsule --the latter headed by William H. Pickering, was

given the nod to put up the first US satellite. On its initial

try the team launched the 14 kg Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958.

Fortunately, Pickering and Ernst Stuhlinger, one of Von Braun's

staff chiefs, conscious of the odds against Vanguard's success,

had persuaded James Van Allen of the University of Iowa to make

the package of scientific instruments being readied for Vanguard

compatible with Explorer 1's Jupiter C launch vehicle. 40  This turned

out to be particularly fortuitous because Explorer 1, with only

one sixth the payload weight of Sputnik 1, scored a major scientific

coup when its instruments sensed a pattern of radiation around

the Earth leading to the discovery of the now famous Van Allen

Belts. It is an interesting footnote on scientific history that

Sputnik 1 could have made the discovery if it had installed simple

instruments. Sputnik 2, in fact, did have the instruments, wrote

Van Allen: "a pair of Geiger-Mueller tubes...which operated

properly and yielded data for seven days" . 41   but the Soviet

scientists failed to develop the data necessary to interpret the

discovery.

#### Sputnik 3 Finally Orbited, NASA Established

Oleg Ivanovsky, who worked on Sputniks 1, 2, and 3, speaks with

deserved satisfaction of the Soviet achievements of those months

in late 1957 and early 1958. But there was trouble too. "We

had our first space failure," he told me, with the difficult

Sputnik 3. "It was April 27, 1958, and it was caused by a

rocket engine failure. The rocket went up about 12-15 km and the

satellite fell separately. There was a search for the satellite.

I remember that the pilots conducting the search were not allowed

to know what they were looking for. 'Just search the area for

anything unusual,' they were told, 'and don't attract the camels.'

It was crazy secrecy. Finally one pilot came back and said he

had seen something that sounded to us like the satellite. We sent

out a rescue team in an armored vehicle. When we got it back some

of the instruments could still operate." Ivanovsky then showed

me proudly a copper wire which he had recovered from one of the

instruments which kept the satellite beeper from operating prematurely.

When the 1.5 ton Sputnik 3 was launched successfully, on May 15,

1958, it caused even more anxiety in the West. Any doubt that

the Russians would soon have the capability to send an ICBM to

the United States was demolished. Lyndon Johnson, then Senate

Majority Leader, had demanded a Congressional investigation of

the impact of Sputnik 1 only a few days after its launch. On the

Senate floor in January he had made recommendations originating

in his Preparedness Subcommittee to "Start work at once on

the development of a rocket motor with a million pound thrust,"

"Put more effort in the development of manned missiles (satellites),"

and "Accelerate and expand research and development programs,

provide funding on a long-term basis, and improve control and

administration within the Department of Defense or through the

establishment of an independent agency."

During the same months in early 1958 President Eisenhower, with

his science adviser, James Killian, also concluded that a civilian

space agency was needed, and directed Hugh Dryden, head of the

National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), to prepare

legislation which would create such an agency on that relatively

small organization's structure. The result was Public Law 85-568,

signed on July 29, 1958 by the President, calling for the creation

of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It

was quite an about-face for a president whose staff members had

belittled Sputnik 1 as "a silly bauble" and "a

neat scientific trick" and who, himself, had said that it

had not bothered him "one iota." . 42

Sputnik 3's large load of scientific instruments was designed

to measure micrometeorites, density of the upper atmosphere, cosmic

rays, solar radiation, the presence and effect of high energy

particles and the Earth's own radiation environment. . 43   It could

have performed a tour de force of scientific research in virgin

territory. The Manchester Guardian reported that "This

impressive list (of instruments) is a telling demonstration of

the fact that the latest Russian sputnik has been launched for

strictly scientific purposes."

#### Sputnik 3 Misses Chance to Map Van Allen Belts

Unfortunately, to the great embarrassment of the Soviets, the

huge vehicle missed one more chance at what would have been its

most significant achievement--mapping the radiation belts. Explorer

1's instruments, which had revealed the existence of the radiation

from the belts, had at first been overwhelmed by its intensity,

and it took some time for the Van Allen analysis team to understand

what it had measured. Sputnik 3 could have mapped the belts systematically,

but failed to do so because of a defective tape recorder. The

recorder, designed to store and transmit to Earth the information

collected by the instruments when it was out of direct radio contact,

had failed utterly to transmit the necessary data. Roald Sagdeev

recounts what happened:

A scientific team landed at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the final

integration and testing of hardware on Sputnik 3. Korolev invited

everyone for the last briefing before the final okay was to be

given and the countdown started...It was the first impressive

collection of scientific instruments, each of which was reported

to be functioning normally.

However, trouble was soon discovered in some of the supporting

hardware. The problem was with the more or less routine tape recorder,

whose function was to accumulate data from the different experiments

and to prepare messages for the ground station. The spacecraft,

revolving around the globe, would only be in contact with the

ground station during periods of "direct radio visibility."

Simply speaking, the ground station would be unable to sense the

signals from the spacecraft when it was behind the horizon...With

such a crucial role, members of the scientific team were extremely

worried about the troubled tape recorder and they recommended

postponing the actual launch to give the technicians a chance

to fix it. However, the tape recorder's ambitious engineer, Alexei

Bogomolov <"I too often had to depend on his hardware,"

Sagdeev footnotes acidly> did not want to be considered a loser

in the company of winners. He suggested that the testing failure

was simply caused by electromagnetic interference from the multiplicity

of different electrical circuits in the test room. He boldly proposed

to launch Sputnik 3 on time.

To the great disappointment of the scientific team, Korolev accepted

Bogomolov's suggestion... During the flight, however, it was confirmed

that Bogomolov had been dead wrong. His tape recorder did not

work. Consequently, the scientific information gathered was limited

by the area of direct radio visibility...Each scientific group

had results, but because of the recorder failure they had to guess

whether the phenomena discovered were of local or planetary significance. . 44

The most disappointed scientist, says Sagdeev, was Sergei Vernov,

a renowned physicist. The detectors on Sputnik 3 sensed extremely

high levels of radiation, but was it local or did it exist around

the Earth? Some six weeks earlier, on March 26, Explorer 3 had

been launched (Explorer 2 had failed to orbit), carrying the first

tape recorder ever launched on a satellite. As Van Allen wrote,

it "functioned beautifully in response to ground command

and fulfilled our plan of providing complete orbital coverage

of radiation intensity data." . 45

The Soviets, without tape recorded data, were hogtied. As Van

Allen recalled, the team was at first puzzled that they "were

encountering a mysterious physical effect of a real nature." . 46

They "worked feverishly in analyzing the data from Explorers

1 and 3 (by primitive hand reduction of pen-and-ink recordings)

and organizing them on an altitude, latitude and longitude basis." . 47

In an interesting sidelight on the whole episode, at first there

was suspicion that the intense radiation was coming from a Soviet

nuclear test. Subsequent analysis, however, proved that it was

"geomagnetically trapped corpuscular radiation" distributed

in a "belt" around the Earth. At a conference in the

summer of 1958, the name "Van Allen radiation belt" .

was applied for the first time. . 48   More confirmation of the origin

of the radiation, as well as the discovery that there was also

an outer belt, came two months later--again from the Americans--when

Explorer 4 mapped the belts from July 26 to September 19, 1958.

"On a purely observational basis," wrote Van Allen,

"the Sputnik 3 data actually represented discovery of the

earth's outer radiation belt inasmuch as they were acquired

before those of Explorer 4 and Pioneer 3." . 49   However, Vernov

and colleagues had not yet interpreted the observational finding,

although in what seems to have been hindsight, Vernov published

a photo of what is now known as the Van Allen belts in Pravda

on March 6, 1959, alleging that the data were based on findings

that he had reported at an IGY conference in August, 1958. However,

colleagues of Van Allen who heard the paper maintain that the

fragmentary data available at that time from Sputniks 1, 2 and

3 could not have formed the basis for such a finding, and, what's

more, no such finding was reported in the paper. . 50

Afterwards, a Russian joke circulated that the belts were to be

called the Van Allen-Vernov radiation belts. "What did Vernov

do? He discovered the Van Allen belts."