Red Moon Rising

5 DESERT FIRES

The R-7’s rescheduled March 1957 test-launch deadline came and went, and Sergei Korolev was still not ready. He was becoming increasingly irritable, more prone to terrorizing his staff with his infamous flare-ups, and he wielded both the stick and the carrot to motivate his engineers. Breakthroughs were rewarded with on-the-spot bonuses, wads of rubles that Korolev kept in an office safe for just such a purpose. The most significant achievements earned holidays to Black Sea resorts or even the most sought-after commodity in the entire Soviet Union: the keys to a new apartment. Like all large factories and institutes, OKB-1 was responsible for housing its employees. For young and especially newlywed scientists living in dormitories without privacy, few incentives matched the prospect of skipping to the front of the long waiting list for a place of their own.

The capitalist approach was paying dividends, as glitches were progressively ironed out. Valentin Glushko had wanted no part in making modifications to the steering thrusters, so they were completed in-house at OKB-1. The addition of the tiny directional thrusters also solved the problem of postimpulse boost; the R-7’s main engines could now be shut down a fraction of a second early to compensate for residual propellant, while the little thrusters could be fired to adjust speed and position at the critical aiming, or “sweet,” point, as guidance specialists called cutoff.

A backup radio-controlled radar guidance system was also installed to augment the accuracy of the onboard inertial gyroscopes. Boris Chertok supervised the duplicate system, which had involved building nine tracking stations deep in the Kazakh desert over the first 500 miles of the R-7’s trajectory route, and another six stations within a 90-mile approach to the target area in the Kamchatka Peninsula, 4,000 miles farther. As the missile would fly over the first nine stations, radar would pick it up, plot whether it was on course, and send back telemetry signals for any needed adjustments to trim, yaw, or pitch in what essentially was a very large and costly version of amateur modelers flying radio-controlled airplanes. But with the R-7, the action would unfold at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour and span many time zones in a matter of minutes.

With the R-7 now capable of guided flight, Korolev’s team solved the problem of how to support its crushing weight during liftoff. Their solution was ingeniously simple. A gigantic vise with collapsible jaws, pivots, and counterweights was built in Moscow and tested at a military shipyard in Leningrad—the only place with cranes big enough to lift the R-7. When the rocket was lowered into this vise, its 283-ton mass forced the jaws to squeeze shut, like the petals of a tulip. As the rocket rose after ignition, relieving the load from the clamped jaws, the hinged counterweights at the end of the petals exerted downward force, releasing the vise grip.

On the other hand, concerns about the R-7’s nose cone persisted throughout the winter and spring of 1957. After much experimentation, the warhead receptacles were blunted and shortened to reduce drag, while an ablative material that used a combination of silica and asbestum with textalyte was selected for the heat shield. The reentry problem, as Korolev would discover, was far from licked, but by late April the Chief Designer felt sufficiently confident that he moved his entire operation to the secret facility that had been built for the R-7 in Kazakhstan to finally take the ICBM out for its long-delayed test flight.

Originally known as Tyura-Tam and eventually as Baikonur (in yet another instance of Soviet misdirection), the installation was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Soviet Union. Correspondence to it was simply addressed to Moscow Post Office Box 300, and it figured on no map. The military construction crews that had built it had been rotated in short, highly compartmentalized shifts, and never told what they were doing in the middle of the broiling Kazakh desert, where temperatures soared to 135 degrees in summer and plunged to 35 below in the short, merciless winter. Dust storms clogged machinery with salty sand particles blown across the central Asian steppe from the Aral Sea. For hundreds of miles, there was not a single tree to offer shade or firewood. Soldiers slept in tents crawling with scorpions, and water had to be trucked in.

Besides the benefit of seclusion, the Tyura-Tam site had been selected because of the R-7’s guidance problems. Tracking stations could be built in the depopulated area along the route to Siberia, and rocket engineers didn’t have to worry about spent boosters falling on urban centers. A major rail spur also happened to run nearby, easing the transport of missile parts and building materials. The pace of construction at Tyura-Tam had been so frenetic, so filled with accidents and setbacks, that the young military officer responsible for erecting the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ICBM launch site had gone crazy and been carted away to a psychiatric ward. Only the rudimentary infrastructure had been completed in time for testing: a huge assembly hangar connected by rail to a fire pit the size of a large quarry to absorb the flames at liftoff; several underground propellant storage tanks; a cement bunker blockhouse; and a 15,000-square-foot launch platform erected out of sixteen massive bridge trusses. Otherwise, and in every direction, there were only shifting dunes and the shimmering heat waves of the sun reflecting off the sand. There had been no time to build housing, cafeterias, recreation halls, laboratories, or even lavatories. Scientists lived four to a compartment in train cars that had been built in East Germany after the war and equipped with special labs for the storage and testing of delicate rocket components. Showers were a rare luxury. The food was gritty and abysmal. And at night the principal form of entertainment seemed to involve watching scorpions duel to the death in empty vodka bottles.

Ill omens appeared almost from the start. During a dress rehearsal for the first launch, a fire alarm was inadvertently triggered, setting off sprinklers in the blockhouse control room that drenched everyone, including irate military representatives who had come to observe the birth of the Red Army’s latest and most lethal weapon. Later, a technician dropped a bolt inside the R-7, and for several tense hours the missile was searched for the lost object. Korolev exploded when Chertok informed him that one of the Moscow dignitaries had offered the clumsy technician a bonus of 250 rubles—about a week’s pay—for owning up to the potentially catastrophic mishap. “What the hell are you doing?” the Chief Designer roared. “You should punish him, not reward him. Rescind the bonus immediately and issue a reprimand.”

As the May 15 countdown neared, tension grew. A few hours before liftoff, Korolev blew up at another military observer, Colonel Alexander Maksimov, who he thought was sending false reports about leaky liquid oxygen feed lines to his superiors. “Get him out of here right now, or I’m aborting,” Korolev shouted. Only it turned out that Maksimov was innocent, and Korolev had to apologize publicly. Any leaky valves had been fixed; Korolev’s head of testing, the equally crotchety Leonid Voskresenskiy—the only person among the thousands of NII-88 and OKB-1 employees permitted to address Sergei Korolev by his first name, without the formal patronymic—had a decidedly low-tech method for dealing with leaks. He would wrap his cap over the faulty valve and urinate on it. The minus-297-degree liquid oxygen would freeze the urine on contact, sealing the leak.

The rocket was cleared for liftoff just after 7:00 PM MOSCOW time on May 15. The massive engines fired, the Tulip launch stand worked perfectly, and the R-7 rose to the whooping cheers of assembled engineers and VIPs. But ninety-eight seconds into the flight something went terribly wrong. The missile crashed, scattering debris over a 250-mile radius.

Back in Moscow, Sergei Khrushchev recalled the phone ringing after dinner at the family’s mansion in Lenin Hills. It was the white line, the German-made phone used for important government business. “That was Korolev,” said Nikita Khrushchev, looking particularly gloomy as he hung up. “They launched the R-7 this evening. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful.”

Korolev, though, was upbeat. First launches almost always failed. That had been the rule with the R-l, the R-2, and the R-5. And he had reason to feel optimistic: for the first minute and a half, the R-7 had performed flawlessly. The trouble had been with one of the peripheral boosters, block D, which had caught fire shortly before separation. The suspected cause of the explosion was excessive vibrations, what was known as the Pogo effect. Korolev and his team would figure out exactly what had happened and fix the glitch. Next time, he was certain, his missile would make it all the way to the target zone in Kamchatka, almost 5,000 miles away on Siberia’s Pacific coast.

For a long, hot month, they tinkered. At last, on June 9, another R-7 was wedged into the Tulip launch stand. Voskresenskiy supervised all the preparations. Korolev trusted him implicitly, and on more than one occasion he had proven his loyalty and courage. Once, when a launch had misfired and the live warhead had been dislodged from its missile, dangling precariously over the pad, everyone had frozen in panic. But Voskresenskiy had calmly told Korolev, “Give me a crane, some cash, five men of my choosing, and three hours.” With wads of vodka-walking-around money bulging out of their pockets, Voskresenskiy’s men safely dismantled the one-ton warhead, after which they got royally drunk.

Like a great many test pilots and other people who push safety envelopes for a living, Voskresenskiy was deeply superstitious. So when the next R-7 failed to start, not once, not twice, but on three consecutive days before sputtering out with a smoky cough on the launchpad on June 11, Voskresenskiy decided it was cursed. “Take it away,” he ordered. “I never want to see it again.” The blighted rocket was hauled away in disgrace.

A dark, defeated mood settled over the exhausted R-7 team. They hadn’t seen their families in several months. They were working round the clock, seven days a week, and people were getting sick from the long hours and unremitting worry. Chertok came down with a strange ailment with similar symptoms to radiation poisoning. Eventually he would have to be medically evacuated to Moscow. Korolev developed strep throat and had to take frequent penicillin shots. His health had never fully recovered from the ravages of the camps, and he frequently took ill. “We are working under a great strain, both physical and emotional,” he wrote his second wife, Nina. “Everyone feels a bit sick. I want to hug you and forget about all this stress.”

Korolev had met Nina Kotenkova at OKB-1, where she served as the institute’s English-language specialist, translating Western scientific periodicals. It was through her that the Chief Designer had kept abreast of Wernher von Braun’s writings and exploits in the American media, and in the flush of lonely nights spent jointly hunched over the pages of Popular Mechanics they had fallen in love. Korolev had still been married to his first wife, Ksenia, when they had met, and their affair had led to a bitter divorce and estrangement from his teenage daughter, Natalia, who for years refused to see him and would never agree to speak to Nina.

From his monastic hut at Tyura-Tam, a cabin without running water and only a bare lightbulb to illuminate the lonely gloom, Korolev wrote his daughter weekly, begging for her forgiveness. He tried calling on her twenty-first birthday, but she hung up on him. “It hurts me so much,” he told Nina.

Even at the best of times, Tyura-Tam was a dispiriting place. But with two consecutive failures, growing friction between the different design bureaus over responsibility for the myriad malfunctions, and Moscow becoming increasingly irritated, the atmosphere was downright foreboding as Korolev lined up a third R-7 for launch on July 12. This time the countdown went uninterrupted, the engines all fired properly, and the missile lifted off without a hitch at 3:53 PM. Thirty-three seconds later it disintegrated. The strap-on peripheral boosters had separated early.

Watching the four flaming boosters slowly sail down into the desert just four humiliating miles from the launchpad, Korolev dejectedly shook his head. “We are criminals,” he said. “We just burned away [the financial equivalent of] an entire town.”

Fear now descended on the despondent scientists. The Soviet Union was not so far removed from the Stalinist era to presume that punishment might not be meted out for the catastrophic and costly failures. “What can they do to us?” a frightened Chertok asked Konstantin Rudnev, the deputy minister of armaments. “They are not going to jail us, or send us to Kolyma?”

“No,” Rudnev reassured him. “But your rocket will be put into the hands of other people.” He reminded Chertok that Korolev was not the only designer who had caught the Kremlin’s eye. There was the talented Vladimir Chelomey over at OKB-52, where the young Sergei Khrushchev was about to go to work. “He was a brilliant scientist, but alienated people,” Sergei recalled. At OKB-586, Mikhail Yangel had just landed a commission to build the 1,200-mile-range R-12 missiles that Khrushchev would later try to ship to Cuba. Yangel, especially, was viewed by many as the complete package: a gifted engineer, an astute manager, and an effective salesman. Korolev’s main strengths were his ability to sell Khrushchev on his ideas and his hard-driving, almost maniacal management style; he was not seen as technically brilliant. In fact, there were dark rumblings that the dozen additional mini-steering thrusters that he had grafted onto Glushko’s engines were actually causing some of the malfunctions. They were “worthless,” Glushko railed, and a clear demonstration that the arrogant Korolev had overstepped his “technical competence.”

It wasn’t just Glushko’s increasingly vocal recriminations that the Chief Designer had to worry about. He also had powerful enemies in Moscow, including the ruthless Central Committee official Ivan “the Terrible” Serbin, who was jealous of his independence and status as Khrushchev’s pet designer. Many in the military were equally resentful and begrudged the vast sums Korolev’s missiles diverted from conventional forces. (One general had famously groused that if the alcohol wasted on rocket propellant were given to his soldiers instead, they could wipe out any target more effectively.) The Soviet brass was by no means enamored of rockets. “You can’t count on Malinovsky,” Rudnev warned Chertok, referring to the deputy defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky. “He only tolerates you because Khrushchev supports the rocket.”

But how long would the support last? Already there were mutterings to stop wasting money on R-7 flight tests. “The rocket will fly,” Korolev stubbornly maintained. But others were starting to have their doubts. In Moscow a whispering campaign had begun that Khrushchev had backed the wrong horse, that once more his rash decisions were endangering the empire. Without the R-7 as a deterrent, the Soviet Union had horribly exposed itself by cutting conventional forces. What would stop the madman LeMay, and his huge armada of new B-52s, from laying waste to Russia now?

If there was one consolation, one sliver of good news, it was that the American missile effort seemed to be faring even worse. There were encouraging reports of explosions and misfires plaguing the Thor and Atlas trials. Von Braun’s Jupiter program was on the verge of being canceled, and its first test launch had ended in a spectacular fireball. Most heartening of all was word that the American secretary of defense had just announced his intention to cut $200 million from rocket spending. Wilson was putting a freeze on all new missile proposals and had banned overtime on existing projects.

Though it didn’t appear that the U.S. missile program was going to overtake the Soviets anytime soon, for some reason Korolev was fixated on the notion that von Braun was going to launch a satellite at any moment. The Americans are on the verge, he kept telling anyone who would listen, and he obsessively scoured Nina’s translations of Western publications for any hint that might betray America’s orbital intentions.

The Chief Designer’s manic paranoia on the subject had begun to irk his exhausted colleagues at Tyura-Tam, where tempers were flaring and the blame game among the designers was reaching new heights. They had now had five failures, and everyone was pointing fingers.

“And you and your rocket? Are they not to blame?” Glushko shouted at Korolev during a particularly heated exchange. “What about the draining [valves]? What if the feed line erupted?”

“You should understand,” Korolev shot back. “There are no Korolev rockets. These are our rockets with your engines, with his radio guidance,” pointing to Nikolai Pilyugin from the NII-885 design bureau. “Your approach to this case has been flawed from the beginning,” he went on. “Yes, the rocket can fail because of his launch pad”—Korolev nodded toward Vladimir Barmin, the man behind the Tulip—“because of the failure of your engines, because of the failure of his equipment”—Korolev’s glare now fell on Viktor Kuznetsov, the inertial gyroscope expert—“or because of my drainage valves. But each time is a failure of our rocket. We all should be responsible.”

Vasiliy Ryabikov, the chairman of the State Commission on the R-7, the Kremlin’s direct representative, wasn’t buying it. “You are a very cunning person, Sergei Pavlovich,” he said. “You spread so much stink on others while perfuming your own shit.”

Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin also seemed to have lost confidence in the once-golden Korolev. The head of the Soviet Union’s strategic rocket forces now wanted testing stopped.

“I agree with Mitrofan Ivanovich,” Glushko piled on, knowing that his opinion carried far more weight than all the other subcontractors. His bureau had a virtual monopoly on Soviet rocket engine manufacture, and he supplied all of Korolev’s competitors. Without his motors, there was no Soviet missile program or space program. “There’s no reason to continue these tests,” he huffed. “[Fifteen] of my excellent engines are destroyed, and if it goes on this way, my production line won’t be able to keep up.”

“But Valentin Petrovich,” Konstantin Rudnev addressed Glushko, in Korolev’s defense, “if the rockets flew according to schedule your engines would be destroyed anyway.”

“I wouldn’t begrudge the engines if they served their purpose,” Glushko retorted. “But why should I suffer from somebody else’s mistakes?”

“This is not somebody’s fault,” Korolev exploded. “It is our fault.”

Despite Korolev’s attempt to spread the bureaucratic blame, the message from Moscow was clear: it was his rocket and his responsibility, and the State Commission on the R-7 was getting ready to recommend pulling the plug. Korolev’s career, his dreams, his future—possibly even his freedom—hung by a thread. He was alone, literally sick and tired, stuck in the hellish Kazakh desert, and the vultures were circling. For the supremely self-confident Korolev, it was an unaccustomed and frightening predicament. “When things are going badly, I have fewer ‘friends,’” he wrote Nina with uncharacteristic humility. “My frame of mind is bad. I will not hide it, it is very difficult to get through our failures…. There is a state of alarm and worry. It is a hot 55 degrees [131 Fahrenheit] here.”

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev did not grow up dreaming of rockets or the stars. Space had never captivated the stocky, solitary youngster during the formative years he spent in lonely isolation at his grandparents’ estate in prerevolutionary Ukraine. “Sergei was about three when our family disintegrated,” his mother, Maria Balanina, recalled. A bitter divorce and prolonged custody battle had split the Korolevs in 1911, and Maria, an unusually headstrong woman, had left her only child with her parents while she completed her university degree. Few women of the era pursued higher education, and Maria, a dark-haired beauty with porcelain features, a wasp waist, and impressively plumed bonnets, juggled her dueling parental and academic responsibilities with a fiery determination she would pass on to her famously obstinate son.

The two lived mostly apart. During the week Maria studied French and literature at the Ladies College in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, while nannies and tutors cared for Sergei. On weekends she made the two-hour trip home to Nezhin, a small town along the bustling trade route that linked the czarist and Hapsburg empires. Her parents were wealthy merchants; in a photograph, one of their two stores sits at the foot of a four-spire church, occupying a low, block-long structure that resembles a turn-of-the-century strip mall. As a side business, the family had a small but highly successful brine operation that had applied to receive the coveted imperial seal as the official purveyor of pickles to the court of Czar Nicholas II.

Though young Sergei did not want materially, he lacked companionship and the freedom every child desires to roam. “He didn’t have any friends of his own age, and never knew children’s games,” his tutor, Lidia Mavrikievna Grinfeld, recalled. “He was often completely alone at home and… would sit a long while on the upper cellar door and watch what was happening in the street.” Moreover, the gates to the family estate were always locked because Korolev’s grandparents worried that his estranged father, whom he was not permitted to see, would try to kidnap him. “I felt I needed to keep him at home,” Maria later explained. “He was so impressionable and thin-skinned and I had to teach him how to better cope with reality.”

Locked away in his splendid isolation, Korolev built giant dollhouses and cried frequently. But the seclusion apparently instilled in him a self-reliance and vigorous imagination that would serve him well later in life. In the summer of 1913, when Korolev was six, an event occurred that would leave a lasting imprint on the melancholy child. “A poster appeared on the market square that announced that Pilot Utochkin would perform a flight for the public,” Maria recalled. No one in Nezhin had ever seen an airplane before; automobiles, at the time, were rare. “People were very excited. Some didn’t believe man could fly like a bird. The entire city turned out for the spectacle.”

Perched on his granddad’s stout shoulders, little Sergei watched rapt as the small four-winged contraption careened down the dusty fields, bouncing fifty feet in the air before wobbling back to earth near a convent a few miles away. The sight of such a display of freedom stirred a powerful urge in the sheltered young boy, and he couldn’t stop “babbling” when he got home.

“Mother, can you give me two new bed-sheets?”

“What for?”

“I will tie them to my arms and legs and climb to the top of the smokestack and fly.”

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“No, birds can fly.”

“But birds have rigid wings.”

Thus, according to family legend, was Korolev’s passion for flight ignited. His juvenile aspirations, though, were still relatively modest and did not yet soar beyond the clouds: he simply wanted to be a barnstorming pilot, a dashing daredevil with a white, flowing scarf. Perhaps it was the swagger, the star status, and the supreme self-confidence of early pilots like Utochkin that left such an indelible mark on a fatherless child desperately yearning for a male role model, the character traits that would form the bedrock of Korolev’s adult personality.

In 1916 Sergei acquired both a father figure and the opportunity to nurture his growing obsession with aircraft. Maria remarried that year, to a kind and gentle railway engineer, and the family later relocated to Odessa, where Korolev’s new stepfather, Grigory Balanin, had been appointed to a senior position at the harbormaster’s office. Odessa was a rough-and-tumble port city of palm trees and prostitutes, smugglers and sailors. It had always enjoyed an exotically lawless reputation in czarist times as an entrepreneurial haven with an unusually cosmopolitan makeup; Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, and Ukrainians mingled easily with the resident representatives of virtually every Mediterranean seafaring culture. The city changed hands several times during the Bolshevik revolution, and a French detachment supporting the czar’s White Army was still stationed there when Maria, Sergei, and Balanin moved into a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the Black Sea. Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists began block-by-block battles for control of the ravaged town. Korolev’s school closed during the worst fighting, and food was in short supply. “Hunger, chaos, a city filled with refugees,” Maria recalled. “There were homeless children living in lobbies and courtyards, and the authorities changed frequently.”

But there were also military aircraft, a squadron of plywood hydroplanes enticingly anchored within view of Sergei’s balcony, separated from the harbor traffic by a fence of barbed wire. For the young Korolev, the proximity was irresistible. He would swim out past the jetty, his mother wrote, and “hang onto the barbed wire for hours, as if mesmerized, watching with interest what was going on there. Once a mechanic shouted to him: ‘Well, what are you hanging around for? Why don’t you give me a hand? Can’t you see I’m having difficulty with this motor?’ That was all Sergei needed. He quickly crawled under the wire. Soon they got used to seeing him around in the detachment.”

When the civil war finally ended in 1921 and classes resumed, Korolev found himself drawn to mathematics and drafting, a subject introduced by the new Soviet government. Still shy from the years of home schooling and the disruptions of war, Sergei did not socialize much. “He was not interested in small talk like the other kids,” according to his daughter, Natalia. Sports were never really interesting to him either; he joined the gymnastics team only because “he felt it was important to stay fit to become an aviator,” said his daughter.

Discipline seemed to come easily to the fifteen-year-old future Chief Designer. “6:00AM Rise,” he recorded in his 1922 daily planner. “6:15: calisthenics; 6:30: Breakfast; 7-8:00AM Swim in the Sea; 8:30-1PM: School…” The morning swim, of course, was a euphemism for hanging out at the seaplane base, where by now he had become such a fixture that the pilots took him up regularly for rides. Prudently, he did not share this bit of potentially unsettling intelligence with his mother, though Maria suspected her son was up to something after he blurted out one day, “Oh Mother, if you could only see the clouds from the top.”

It was in his senior year in 1924 that Sergei Korolev finally began to bloom. He joined an amateur aviation club, started to come out of his shell, and developed a belatedly healthy interest in girls. He was particularly smitten by a classmate of Italian ancestry, Ksenia Vincentini, a fiery brunette who would become a prominent surgeon and his first wife. Korolev also designed his first airplane as part of his drafting class graduation project, a glider that he ambitiously called the K-5, as in Korolev Five. The four earlier versions were presumably little more than doodles, but the design was good enough to be chosen by the Ukrainian Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation for construction. “That was the definitive moment for Sergei,” Maria proudly remembered, “when he chose his career.”

Aeronautical engineering was still a relatively new field in 1925, and Korolev enrolled at the Polytechnical Institute of Kiev, which produced such graduates as Igor Sikorsky, the future helicopter designer. In Kiev, Korolev entered a small and obsessive community of aircraft builders, reveling in the heady, hands-on atmosphere, working late into the night and on weekends. He designed and built another glider, which he flew himself, and by his sophomore year his grades were good enough to transfer to the more prestigious Higher Technical School in Moscow, where his mother and stepfather had just moved from Odessa.

In Moscow, Korolev studied under the great Andrei Tupolev, who was already emerging as Russia’s most prolific designer of large-frame aircraft. Under Tupolev, Korolev designed his first motorized cub plane as a graduation project in 1930. It was an ungainly snub-nosed craft with a squat twenty-two-foot fuselage and a top speed of one hundred miles per hour. He called it the SK-4 and proudly painted a dark racing stripe down the side of the prototype. Alas, the SK-4 crashed on its third flight. “To my dear friend Piotr Frolov,” Korolev inscribed a photo of the wreckage to a fellow student, “in memory of our joint collaboration on this unhappy machine.”

The SK-4’s technical shortcomings showed Korolev’s limitations as a designer. He did not have the artistry, flair, or intuitive vision of others in his graduating class, and his first real job, working on hydroplanes, was not a particularly plum assignment. What Korolev did possess, however, was an uncanny knack for spotting talent, which he did during a chance encounter at a glider club outing in October 1931, when he met two rocket enthusiasts, Friedrich Tsander and Mikhail Tikhonravov. Tsander was a Latvian of German extraction, twenty years older than Korolev, and the founder of a rapidly growing volunteer rocket association called the Group for Studying Reaction Propulsion, or GIRD, whose branches would spread to ninety Soviet cities. Tsander had been a disciple of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky and the author of a popular tract on interplanetary travel. Eloquent and obsessed, sickly and impoverished, Tsander had a Rasputin-like hold on a legion of young Soviet scientists, who pooled funds to support his research.

Tikhonravov, on the other hand, was shy and unassuming—his name fittingly translates as Quietman—and he was not blessed with the ephemeral qualities that make inspirational leaders. But he possessed acute faculties, a reputation for deep thoughts, and “the air of a man who had already sampled the mysteries of another planet,” in the words of the British historian Deborah Cadbury. Classically trained in French and Latin, Tikhonravov would coin the term cosmonaut, Latin for “space traveler,” leaving the United States to settle for the slightly less accurate astronaut, or “star traveler,” to distinguish its spacemen, though stars, of course, could not be traveled to.

Tsander in 1931 had been working on a small rocket engine, and Korolev hit upon the idea of grafting it to a tailless, trapezoidal glider that he had used from time to time while training to qualify for his pilot’s license. The suggestion marked the first hint of where the future Chief Designer’s real talents lay: as an organizer, pulling together other people’s inventions. It was also his first spark of a dawning realization that rockets could have immediate and practical applications. Attached to wings, they could assist heavily loaded bombers to take off from short runways.

Korolev threw himself into the project with his customary vigor, taking only a day off to marry Ksenia, his high school sweetheart from Odessa, in a rushed civil ceremony that set the low-priority tone for their unhappy union of competing careers. After a few hurried toasts, his bride boarded a train back to medical school in Ukraine, and Korolev returned to working on planes by day and rocket motors by night.

Tsander died of typhus in 1933, but by then Korolev was hooked, spending all his spare time with Tikhonravov, who would become his lifelong collaborator. That same year, the pair launched Russia’s first liquid propellant rocket, the GIRD-09. It weighed forty-two pounds, flew 400 yards, and attracted the attention of the military. By the time of Natalia’s birth in 1935, Korolev’s hobby had become a profession. The Soviet authorities had created the Reaction Propulsion Institute, or RNII, to study the development of missiles, and Korolev was appointed senior engineer.

Then, tragedy. The Great Terror of 1937-38 brought mass arrests and murders, denunciations and deportations. Tupolev and Glushko were imprisoned and charged with sabotage. Korolev’s immediate bosses at RNII were executed; he himself was tortured and handed a ten-year sentence. Told that her father was a fearless pilot away on an important mission, Natalia Koroleva to this day vividly remembers her first memory of meeting her dad. It was at the feared Butyrka prison in 1940, under the supervision of an NKVD secret police guard. “But Father, how could your plane land in such a small courtyard?” she asked.

“Little girl,” the guard interrupted with a laugh. “It’s very easy to land here. Taking off again is much harder.”

Korolev, in the summer of 1957, was not the only one facing serious problems, whose career and possibly freedom were on the line. For Nikita Khrushchev, the chickens were also coming home to roost. The trouble, this time, began innocently enough with a telephone call. Khrushchev was having lunch at his official residence in Lenin Hills on June 18 when the special government hotline rang. Nikolai Bulganin was on the other end. “Nikita, come to the Kremlin,” he said, according to Sergei Khrushchev. “We’re having a session of the Presidium.”

Sergei Khrushchev recalled being struck by the unusual timing. “The weekly meetings were always held on Thursdays and this was a Tuesday,” he explained. His father also thought the sudden scheduling change strange. “Nikolai, what’s the hurry?” he asked, puzzled. Bulganin muttered something about going over a speech for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, as the city had been renamed. “We can do that on Thursday,” said Khrushchev dismissively. But Bulganin persisted.

The last speech Khrushchev had made in Leningrad in May had caused quite a stir in the Presidium. Speaking off the cuff, and without prior consultation of his fellow Presidium members, Khrushchev had predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in meat and dairy production by 1960. “We will bury you,” he had roared in the heat of passion, choosing his words callously, because the world press interpreted the boast not as an agricultural duel but as a threat of nuclear annihilation. Even without the unfortunate reference to mass graves, the challenge was a tall order given that American farmers produced almost three times as much meat per capita as their Soviet counterparts. Apparently, Khrushchev’s competitive spirit, the same insecure desperation to upstage the Americans that Korolev had played upon, had gotten the better of him. But Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich had fumed that Khrushchev had thrown down a rash challenge that put the USSR in a potentially embarrassing bind. There was simply no way the creaky collective farms could triple their current quotas, and the exuberant Khrushchev had set up the Soviet Union to fail.

“Who’s there?” Khrushchev finally asked, growing uneasy. He had been around palace intriguers long enough to sense that something was up.

“Everyone who’s having lunch,” said Bulganin evasively.

The attack on Nikita Khrushchev began the moment he walked into the gilded conference room in the Kremlin’s main administrative building. A dozen pairs of hostile eyes followed his progress as he pushed past the tall padded door and made his way along the intricately laid parquet floor to his customary seat at the head of the long green baize table. Before he could sit down, Georgi Malenkov, a former prime minister whose demotion to minister of machine building Khrushchev had orchestrated during the post-Stalin power struggle, rose to speak. Khrushchev, he declared, should not chair the meeting. The extraordinary Presidium session had been convened to address his outrageous behavior, and it would be wrong for Khrushchev to preside over the discussions. Shaking with rage and slamming the table with such vigor that drinks reportedly rattled, Malenkov launched into a tirade outlining “error after error” and then nominated Bulganin to take Khrushchev’s place.

Khrushchev was stunned. For all his finely tuned political instincts, his decades of climbing the party ranks, and the considerable survival skills he had honed at Stalin’s court, the coup had taken him completely by surprise. And this was a coup, there was little doubt. It followed the exact same script Khrushchev had himself written four years earlier to get rid of Beria: the sudden session, angry accusations, arrest. Any moment now, Khrushchev could expect some ambitious KGB or army general to burst into the room with handcuffs. That was how Georgy Zhukov had earned his promotion first to deputy defense minister and then to defense minister and had received candidate Presidium membership. Now Zhukov’s predecessor, the crusty Stalinist soldier Kliment Voroshilov, declared Khrushchev “unbearable” and unfit to be party leader. Kaganovich called him a cow “knocking about the whole country” with his rash economic and de-Stalinization policies. When the young Leonid Brezhnev—a candidate Presidium member Khrushchev had rescued from the relative obscurity of the Naval Political Department—rose in his patron’s defense, Kaganovich turned viciously on him. “Leonid Ilyich barely had time to utter the first words,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “Kaganovich, his mustache bristling, loomed over him. The last words Brezhnev heard were something like this: ‘You like to talk. You’ve forgotten how you were relegated to the [NPD]. We’ll chase you back there soon enough.’ Leonid Ilyich faltered, started to clutch the back of his chair, and sank slowly to the floor. A doctor was summoned. Guards carried the unconscious [Brezhnev] to an adjacent room.”

The insults continued, even from within Khrushchev’s own camp. “You’ve become the expert on everything—from agriculture to science to culture,” charged Dimitri Shepilov, the Pravda editor Khrushchev had appointed foreign minister to replace Molotov, who had held the post for nearly three decades. “Someone who’s illiterate can’t govern a country.”

Khrushchev was ousted as first secretary of the Communist Party by a margin of seven to three, excluding his own vote. But the expected arrest never materialized. For three days and three nights he stayed in the Kremlin waiting for the final ax, as the hard-liners celebrated. But the coup leaders had made a critical mistake: they had not arrested Khrushchev. “They couldn’t,” explained Sergei Khrushchev, “as long as Father retained the loyally of two key people: Zhukov and KGB chief Ivan Serov. He had appointed both of them, and they both knew that if he was replaced so would they.” Without the backing of the military and the secret police, Molotov and the other conspirators could not risk jailing Khrushchev. “I’m sure they planned on doing so later,” Sergei Khrushchev said, “once they were in complete control.”

The delay bought Khrushchev badly needed time. He knew that with the exception of the hard-liners, most members of the Central Committee backed him. He was a man of the people who traveled widely in the provinces, unlike his Stalinist cronies, and most rank-and-file representatives of the Communist Party approved of his liberal reforms. If he could just reach them. With Serov’s help, Khrushchev hatched a countercoup, and the two began secretly mobilizing the three hundred elected members of the Central Committee. In theory, only a full plenum of the Central Committee could override the Presidium. In practice, it had never happened before, and it posed logistical problems. Central Committee members were scattered across the Soviet Union, often in inaccessible provinces in Siberia and central Asia, and getting them all to Moscow on Aeroflot passenger planes could take days, and in some cases weeks. Only the KGB could contact them surreptitiously, without alerting Kaganovich’s forces. And only Zhukov’s new long-range jet bombers could fly them back to the capital in time to make a difference.

By the late afternoon of June 20, forty-eight hours after the coup began, Zhukov had managed to deliver eighty-seven Central Committee members to Moscow. His bombers were landing, refueling, and taking off to pick up more Khrushchev supporters. The new arrivals demanded that the shocked Presidium plotters convene a full party plenum to discuss the leadership crisis. Lest the conspirators forget where the military stood on the matter of Bulganin versus Khrushchev, the delegates descending on the Kremlin were led by a parade of generals and marshals. By June 22, a weeklong plenum had been convened, and Kaganovich, Bulganin, and Molotov were in full retreat. It was now the war hero Zhukov, the savior of Moscow and conqueror of Berlin, who led the countercharge. The coup plotters, he said, were the very men who had been Stalin’s bloodiest henchmen, responsible for the worst of the purges. During a murderous eight-month rampage in 1938 alone, he alleged, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Malenkov had personally signed 38,679 execution orders. So had others, they protested. So had Khrushchev. But their tone was defeated. The fight in them had gone. Kaganovich, as Khrushchev noted in his memoir, no longer “roared like an African lion.”

Seated once more in the first secretary’s chair, Khrushchev could not suppress a satisfied sneer as his opponents squirmed for mercy. The attempted coup had been foiled. All that remained was for Khrushchev to decide the fate of the conspirators.

Sergei Korolev hadn’t had reason to laugh for a long time. But he was in unusually high spirits on the August morning he visited Boris Chertok at Moscow’s Burdenko military hospital. “Okay, Boris,” he cheerfully chided Chertok. “You continue playing sick, but don’t stay out for too long.” A half dozen jubilant engineers crowded around Chertok’s bed, teasing and poking their infirm colleague. The suspected radiation poisoning had turned out to be simply an exotic Kazakh bug that manifested similar symptoms. “This is the best medication,” assured Leonid Voskresenskiy, the daredevil chief of testing, pulling a bottle of cognac out of a bag. “So,” he said, once Korolev had finished his pep talk and excused himself on the grounds of an important meeting. “Here’s the pickle we’re in. Everyone congratulates us, but nobody other than us knows what’s really going on.”

The rocket, as Chertok already knew, had finally worked. Korolev had been given one final chance to prove himself, and at 3:15 PM on August 21, the R-7 had flown all the way to Kamchatka, landing dead on target next to the Pacific Ocean. Korolev had been so relieved, so euphoric, that he had stayed up till 3:00 AM the next morning, jabbering away excitedly about the barrier they had just broken. There was a slight hitch, however. The heat shield had failed, and the dummy warhead had been incinerated on reentry. Apparently, the nose cone dilemma hadn’t been solved after all. And without thermal protection, the R-7 was not an ICBM, just a very large and expensive rocket. That was why Korolev had just rushed off to meet with a group of aerodynamic specialists: to see if they had any solutions to what Voskresenskiy called “Problem Number One.”

Telemetry readings had shown that not only had the dummy warhead completely burned up ten miles over its intended target; it had also been rammed from behind in outer space by the main stage on separation. The bumping could be easily solved by venting some of the compressed nitrogen from the fuel tanks to slow the central block at the time of the warhead’s ejection, but the thermal shield failures had everyone stumped.

“We’ve only got one rocket left, number 9,” Voskresenskiy continued. “And we don’t know what to do to fix the nose cone.” The next test launch was scheduled for September 7, and it would have identical results. The R-7 would perform flawlessly; the dummy warhead would be completely destroyed on reentry, confirming the missile’s current uselessness as an ICBM and weapon.

“We need to take a break to make radical improvements on the nose cone,” Voskresenskiy told Chertok, leaning closer and lowering his voice to a mock-conspiratorial whisper. “While we’re working on it, we’ll launch satellites. That’ll distract Khrushchev’s attention from the ICBM.”