Red Moon Rising

EPILOGUE

When told that Explorer was in orbit, Nikita Khrushchev reportedly shrugged. The race, he well knew, would no longer be so one-sided, now that a sleeping giant had been roused; and for the Soviet Union, it would be a contest of diminishing returns. But it did not matter.

Moscow had already scored its biggest gains by the time Juno soared into space, and those all-important early victories could never be pushed aside. In the eyes of the world, Sputnik made the Soviet Union a genuine superpower and America’s equal, and this new status would persist regardless of whose future rockets flew farther, faster, or higher. The triumph was psychological and irreversible, and would endure until the Soviet Union itself disappeared into the dustbin of history one wintry day in 1991. Then, just as swiftly, Moscow’s international image would revert to its pre-Sputnik reputation as a brutish and backward land.

Russia’s dominance of the space race did not peak in 1958. Moscow was able to hold its lead for another three years, culminating with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s ride into orbit atop an R-7 on April 12, 1961. But by then the element of surprise was gone. America had learned not to underestimate its Communist adversary, and Washington had embarked on its own ambitious and long-term space program. The shock value was therefore not the same as with Sputnik, though the historical significance of Gagarin’s flight was probably far greater and did indeed resonate throughout the rest of the world, particularly in developing countries.

The Soviet Union and Khrushchev, however, paid a steep military price for the early space triumphs. The R-7, for all its success as a heavy-lift vehicle and propaganda tool, was a failure as an ICBM. “It represented only a symbolic counter threat to the United States,” Khrushchev later conceded, and was “reliable neither as a defensive nor offensive weapon.” The very qualities that made it so adept at hurling large payloads into orbit rendered it almost useless as a fast-strike strategic weapon. It was just too big and unwieldy for war. It couldn’t be hidden in silos, moved on mobile launchers, or adequately protected. It took too long to fuel, and the huge infrastructure it required made too inviting a target. Khrushchev exaggerated somewhat when he boasted that his factories would roll out R-7s like sausages. In the end, only seven were ever deployed, and only four launchpads were built capable of handling the mammoth missile, which meant that Moscow could realistically depend on getting off only four shots in a first-strike scenario. If the United States attacked first, only one or two of the big missiles might be fired in time. Or possibly none. Whichever the case, the R-7 would not keep America at bay. As a security shield, it was a failure.

Ultimately, the R-7 cost Russia its missile lead because Moscow had to go back to the drawing board to develop an entirely new ICBM. In that regard, Korolev’s ploy to distract Khrushchev from the R-7’s failings by launching satellites worked all too well. By the time the Soviet leader fully realized that he did not have a reliable intercontinental rocket, the United States was pumping billions of dollars into its neglected missile programs because of the Sputnik scare, rapidly making up the lost ground. Khrushchev’s bluff ended up backfiring. When Dwight Eisenhower left office in January 1961, the United States had 160 operational Atlas ICBMs and nearly one hundred Thor and Jupiter IRBMs stationed in Europe to Moscow’s meager reserve of four vulnerable R-7s. Ironically, the additional Jupiters that were produced to mollify Lyndon Johnson and the jittery American public after the Sputnik scare now haunted Washington. “It would have been better to dump them in the sea than dump them on our allies,” Ike later commented. But the need to find a home for the superfluous missiles preoccupied Washington, exasperating superpower tensions. Great Britain had the Thors, which could hit only the Warsaw Pact countries and the westernmost parts of European Russia. But no frontline NATO allies wanted the Jupiters. In the end, Italy and Turkey reluctantly agreed to accept them in late 1959, and since they were geographically closer to Soviet borders, the Kremlin reacted furiously. “How would you like it if we had bases in Mexico and Canada?” fumed Khrushchev, angrily denouncing the deployment.

Tensions escalated further still, six months later, on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 was finally shot down over Soviet territory. Eisenhower, who was playing golf that day, as he had on the day of the very first U-2 mission four years earlier, would initially deny the incident, presuming that the pilot was dead and that the fragile aircraft had disintegrated, leaving little incriminating evidence. But as the Soviets kept pressing the issue, on May 5 the State Department would be forced to concede that a “civilian pilot of a weather-research plane” had indeed experienced problems with his oxygen supply over Turkey. “It is entirely possible that having a failure in the oxygen equipment, which would result in the pilot losing consciousness,” the statement coyly reasoned, “the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.” A few days later, Washington would be further forced to eat its words when a beaming Khrushchev produced the CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers and the U-2’s intact spy gear at an international press conference.

The incident caught Eisenhower in the devastatingly embarrassing lie that he had long predicted and feared, and spelled the end of manned reconnaissance flights into Russia. But just a few months later, on the same day that a Moscow court convicted Francis Gary Powers of spying, a new era of robotic, outer-space espionage began. On August 19, 1960, Richard Bissell’s spy satellite successfully jettisoned its first batch of photographs of Soviet territory. Corona’s film canister reentered the atmosphere off the shores of Hawaii, deployed its parachute, and was snagged in midair at 8,500 feet by grappling hooks attached to the front of a C-119 military plane.

And yet Bissell’s triumph would be short-lived, as he was undone by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the following year. Begun under Eisenhower and executed under the new Kennedy administration, the botched attempt to topple the Cuban president Fidel Castro would prove even more embarrassing than the U-2 shoot-down. As the failed mission’s architect and primary planner, Bissell—along with his patron and boss, Allen Dulles—would be forced out by the newly elected president, who would soon find himself baptized by rocket fire and international crisis.

“Those friggin missiles,” as John F. Kennedy derisively referred to the Jupiters, finally caused Khrushchev to snap when they became operational in Turkey in late 1961. From their Turkish bases, they could hit military installations in the heart of the Soviet Union, effectively restoring the very same strategic imbalance that had prompted Moscow to build rockets in the first place. The net result was the Cuban missile crisis.

As it turned out, it would be a U-2, and not the top-secret Corona, that snapped the incriminating photographs of Soviet launchpad preparations on Castro’s island that would spark the most dangerous showdown of the cold war. For Khrushchev, the attempt to station intermediate-range rockets on Cuban soil in the autumn of 1962 was a desperate gambit to redress the R-7’s shortcomings. By placing smaller missiles within striking distance of America’s shores, he sought to buy time for Yangel’s R-16 to finish trials and go into mass production. The Soviet military, by then, had long switched its allegiance from Korolev’s R-7 to rival missile designs, but the R-16 had suffered a series of developmental setbacks, including a catastrophic explosion of Glushko’s acid propellant that claimed the lives of Marshal Nedelin and 112 other Soviet rocket scientists in 1960, when Nedelin disregarded Glushko’s advice and ordered repairs performed on a fully fueled missile without draining it first. Only after the R-16 was fully ready, Khrushchev reasoned, would the balance of power be restored and security reestablished. To achieve that balance, he would risk confrontation. But in Cuba, Khrushchev made the wrong bet, and it would cost him the throne.

In the missile crisis it was Khrushchev who blinked first, promising to withdraw the IRBMs from Cuba. And even though Kennedy secretly agreed to remove the offending Jupiters from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet pullback, Khrushchev’s days were numbered. In that sense, the R-7 was the vehicle through which Khrushchev’s career soared and sank. Sputnik’s glory cemented his grip on power. But when the R-7 proved a battlefield bust, and the missile foray into Cuba turned into a humiliating retreat, the resulting political wounds proved equally fatal. Rumblings of discontent started almost immediately in the Presidium. In 1963 they grew louder and bolder as Khrushchev’s position further weakened due to his disastrous agricultural experiments. The ambitious farming reforms he had stubbornly rammed through the reluctant Presidium in 1957—the cultivation of millions of acres of “virgin lands” in Siberia and central Asia and the tripling of livestock quotas to overtake the United States in meat and dairy production—had completely collapsed. Not only were the thin-soiled Siberian fields ill suited for annual planting, but the quota system for increased meat and milk supplies served only to bankrupt many collective farms. To meet Khrushchev’s unrealistic norms, wily farm bosses used funds allocated for machinery and buildings to buy cattle on the sly and then resold the animals to government agencies at a third of the price. The purchase and upkeep of tractors and combine harvesters were sacrificed for the paper gains, and the charade lasted just long enough to devastate the countryside. Far from overtaking the United States, as Khrushchev had boldly boasted in 1957, by early 1964 the gap had actually widened in America’s favor. So poor were the harvests that the Soviet Union faced food shortages and, for the first time since the Second World War, rationing restrictions. Retail prices at official food stores rose 50 percent that year, many times more on the thriving black market, prompting protests from ordinary citizens and calls from indignant Central Committee factions for Khrushchev to answer for his “adventurism and irresponsibility.”

In October 1964, while Khrushchev was vacationing at his dacha on the Black Sea, the decision was made to oust him. In the Central Committee, 197 of the 200 full members supported the secret vote of no confidence, selecting Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary in his place. Given a generous pension, a small staff, and the use of a large apartment and dacha, Khrushchev lived out his retirement peacefully. The virtually illiterate peasant who freed the Soviet Union from Stalin’s terror and turned the USSR into an unlikely beacon of technological progress was the first leader in Russian history not to have died or been murdered in office. His son, Sergei, fulfilled his father’s dream of earning a doctorate and became a rocket scientist. Eventually, he moved to America, where today he is a senior fellow at Brown University.

Under Brezhnev, cosmic conquests would lose priority and momentum in the Soviet Union. Moscow still aimed for the moon, the ultimate bragging ground, but the effort did not have the same intensity or urgency as the post-Sputnik rush to paint the heavens Red. Focus steadily shifted toward military missile expenditures, as funds dried up and the economic crisis that the CIA had long predicted worsened. In addition to its agricultural woes, Soviet industrial growth began to slow dramatically in the mid-1960s, actually contracting in many cases, and resources became increasingly scarce. With the milestones in the space race growing ever more ambitious and costly, the Kremlin’s cautious new bosses preferred to spend on security rather than prestige.

In 1965, for the first time since its inception, OKB-1, Sergei Korolev’s design bureau, began suffering budget shortfalls and cutbacks. The Chief Designer’s star also began to fade. Khrushchev, his devoted patron, was gone, and Brezhnev did not have the same obsessive commitment to upstaging the Americans. Other missile makers were on the rise, landing big military orders, while Korolev’s giant new Lunar rocket, the N-1, was mired in technical and financial problems. What’s more, his quarreling with the imperious Valentin Glushko over the type of fuel to use on the 400-foot-tall N-1 had reached a point where the two were no longer on speaking terms, and not even Khrushchev could reconcile their differences. “I did everything I could to patch up their friendship,” the Soviet leader recalled, “but my efforts were in vain.” Worse, for the hypercompetitive Korolev, the United States was making very real strides with its proposed equivalent to N-1, the Saturn, and by the mid-1960s the Americans were poised to overtake him.

It was perhaps fortunate that Korolev died when he did, on January 11, 1966, before things began to unravel in earnest. Officially, the cause of death was complications during routine surgery to remove a tumor from his intestinal tract. But his colleagues said he worked himself to death. Korolev’s heart gave out during the operation. It had always been weak and had grown weaker in the last few years of his life, forcing frequent hospital stays. In the end, the gulag and the relentless pressure that he imposed on himself finally took their toll. The hard-driving Chief Designer was fifty-nine years old.

Buried in the Kremlin wall near Lenin’s tomb with all the pomp and ceremony of a national hero, Korolev was at last accorded the recognition he so richly deserved. He never realized his dream of putting a man on the moon, and as a weapon maker his most lasting contribution to the world’s arsenals would not be the R-7, but the R-11, originally a small submarine-launched rocket whose land-based version would become more commonly known as the Scud. His enduring legacy, however, would be as a space pioneer, as the man who in total anonymity made America tremble. Had he lived another five years, perhaps history would have been rewritten; perhaps the hammer and sickle would have flown first on the moon, instead of the stars and stripes. But then again, the tide seemed to have turned by then, and it is not clear whether even the tenacious Chief Designer could have rescued the faltering Soviet space program. One will never know. What is certain is that Russia’s moon dreams died with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.

His influence on the United States, however, persists to this day. NASA, the institution created in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 as a direct response to Sputnik, landed a man on the moon, created the space shuttle, and is now probing farther and deeper into the cosmos. Millions of American students still benefit from the college loan programs started under the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which also revamped elementary and high school curricula with an emphasis on science and foreign languages to better compete with Soviet engineers. The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 created the advanced military research agency that developed the Internet and countless other inventions that have transformed the daily lives of Americans.

Politically, Korolev and Khrushchev cast an equally long shadow across the United States. Without the “Sputnik Congress,” and the Preparedness hearings that gave him such national exposure, Lyndon Johnson might not have won a spot on the 1960 Democratic ticket and ultimately may never have become president. NASA and the educational and military reforms of 1958 were all the creations of Johnson’s hearings, and the perceptions of the “missile gap” that he first raised became a central issue in the 1960 election, not to mention a costly mainstay of defense expenditures for decades to come. Stuart Symington beat the missile gap drums almost as loudly and alarmingly as Johnson, but in the end this consummate cold warrior’s presidential hopes withered because he refused to endorse escalating America’s involvement in Vietnam. In the 1960s, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the CIA’s covert activities in Indochina. Vietnam, he predicted, would prove an inescapable quagmire and ultimately a losing proposition. For his prescience, Symington was castigated as weak and soft on communism, and his career never recovered.

As the 1960 presidential poll approached, it looked as if Richard Nixon would at last have his just reward for all those painful and bitter dues he had paid at Ike’s cold and distant shoulder. Personal relations between Eisenhower and his vice president never truly improved in the years after Sputnik, but Nixon, in preparation for the 1960 elections, was accorded a far greater role in Ike’s second term. He traveled more frequently, especially after John Foster Dulles’s death in 1959, and assumed many of the secretary of state’s foreign policy duties. Some of the trips did not go smoothly. His infamous shouting match with Nikita Khrushchev at Moscow’s international technology fair in July 1959 did little for the cause of improving superpower relations. Visiting a mockup of an American kitchen displayed at the fair, the two leaders launched into an impromptu argument over missiles that ended with the red-faced first secretary jabbing a pudgy finger in the vice president’s chest and growling: “You want to threaten? We will answer threats with threats.”

Nixon’s eventual opponent, John F. Kennedy, would make much of the unstatesmanlike buffoonery of the “kitchen debate,” and he would owe a large debt to the continued fallout from Sputnik and the missile gap for his electoral victory the following year. But it would be Nixon who would preside over the White House when Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon was finally realized in 1969. Some would say this was fitting since he had advocated, as vice president, for Ike to shoot for the moon. But ultimately, would Kennedy have made the pledge, and would Neil Armstrong have taken his famously “small step” when he did, had Sergei Korolev not pitched Khrushchev the idea of a satellite? Perhaps not. The Chief Designer may be completely unknown to most Americans, yet his hidden hand has left indelible prints on the nation.

The hidden hand would become a term better associated with Eisenhower’s detached style of leadership. Ike, after leaving office, did not enjoy rave reviews from historians, but by the mid-1980s scholarly esteem for Eisenhower had risen, a reevaluation that coincided, in part, with the declassification and release of many important documents, which revealed a vastly different man from the fuzzy, remote, and sometimes bumbling public persona. Behind closed doors, Eisenhower proved to be a far sharper figure, much more on top of issues than he publicly let on. It was the dichotomy that Richard Bissell had noticed, when he first assumed that John Foster Dulles ran the show, but after careful observation concluded that Ike was very much his own man. In hindsight, Ike’s subdued response to Sputnik probably owed as much to his instinctive fear of the rise of the “military-industrial complex” as to his failing health and his longing for a peaceful retirement. His farewell address to the nation in January 1961 highlighted the danger of allowing the political and economic interests of military contractors and bureaucrats to hijack the national security agenda for their own gain. America did not heed his advice, however, and to this day trillions of tax dollars have been needlessly spent on unnecessary weapons systems that have not necessarily made the country safer.

Donald Quarles, Eisenhower’s contentious point man on curbing runaway military spending, was to have succeeded Neil McElroy as secretary of defense in 1959. But he was felled by a massive heart attack that year, and his legacy as the man who oversaw America’s earliest space and missile efforts would remain mixed at best.

Sputnik would taint Eisenhower’s legacy as well. Contemporary revisionists are too charitable when they hail his passivity during Sputnik as exemplary. Leadership during times of crisis cannot be hidden or managed from a golf course. It must be assertive and overt. During the Sputnik crisis, Ike fell short on both counts, and populists like Lyndon Johnson stepped into the leadership vacuum.

Assertiveness was never a quality lacking in General Bruce Medaris, the closest thing America had to a Korolev. Though von Braun would get the credit for opening the heavens to the United States, it was really Medaris’s iron will and stubborn refusal to yield to bureaucratic setbacks that lofted Juno into space. A lesser general might have accepted the Pentagon line and awaited orders, but had that happened ABMA would not have been prepared to respond as quickly as it did. He is the other unsung hero of this tale.

Since mavericks don’t tend to last in large institutional settings, it came as no surprise that Medaris’s military career ended shortly after ABMA’s 1958 triumph. Despite Explorer’s political victory, the army lost the war for missile supremacy with the air force, and ABMA was gradually dismantled to make room for the new civilian space organization. Medaris vehemently opposed NASA’s founding on the grounds that it would cannibalize his beloved agency, and his criticisms were so vocal that he had little choice but to resign his commission once von Braun’s team was transferred to civilian control. In early 1960, Joseph P. Kennedy offered Medaris a job advising his son’s presidential campaign on space issues, but he declined, wanting no part in politics. Instead, he accepted the presidency of the Lionel Corporation, a toy train maker with a defense contracting arm. A bout with cancer in the mid-1960s and a miraculous recovery left the devout former general convinced that he had been spared to fulfill a higher calling. He became a lay deacon in 1966, and four years later, at the age of sixty-eight, he was ordained an Episcopal priest. Father Bruce, as Medaris would be called in the final years of his life, passed away in 1990. He was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Wernher von Braun, of course, went on to become NASA’s most famous founding scientist. He took America to the moon, became rich and respected, and fulfilled all his childhood dreams. His past, however, started catching up with him in the early 1970s. After Paris Match, the glossy French magazine, published a glowing article on the handsome space prophet, several readers wrote in to report that they recognized the man in the photographs. He was stouter and grayer than they remembered, but the burning eyes were unmistakably the same. The readers were survivors of Mittelwerk, former V-2 slave laborers, and the accounts they gave of von Braun differed starkly from the magazine’s fawning profile. They claimed he had personally ordered prisoners executed for sabotage and was a war criminal who should face international tribunals.

Nothing came of the allegations, but von Braun spent the final years of his life defending his war record, and he died in 1977 under a growing cloud of suspicion. In 1984, another V-2 veteran, Arthur Rudolf, the designer of the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon, was quietly extradited to West Germany on identical charges. Von Braun unquestionably deserves a place in American history, but his true legacy remains murky.

As for the legacy of the first space race, the pioneering technology of the era is omnipresent in today’s information age. Satellites govern virtually every aspect of modern life, from communications to credit card transactions to avoiding traffic jams using GPS receivers. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first military campaign in the history of warfare run almost entirely remotely, via satellite. Thanks to microchip implants, satellites monitor the whereabouts of wayward pets and track cargo and stolen vehicles. They transmit television signals to dish owners and cable operators and broadcast the rantings of radio personalities like Howard Stern.

Space is no longer the exclusive domain of superpowers, but increasingly it is a commercial battleground open to all who can afford it. In this new profit-driven arena, OKB-1, Korolev’s old design bureau, is now called Russian Space Corporation Energya, and it supplies the boosters that orbit private U.S. satellites like DirectTV, beaming The Sopranos and National Football League packages to millions of American homes. Ironically, its partner in the rocket-for-hire venture is Boeing, the same company whose long-range bombers scared Nikita Khrushchev into founding OKB-1 to build the ICBM.

It’s a fitting end to the Sputnik saga to see the former ideological rivals now working together in the common pursuit of market share. That, too, is a big part of the new wireless age that the launch of the world’s first satellite made possible fifty years ago.