Red Moon Rising

7 A SIMPLE SATELLITE

There was only one problem with Sergei Korolev’s satellite plan. The R-7 State Commission, the government body that oversaw missile testing, wasn’t buying it.

One after another, Korolev fixed the commission members with long, livid looks. Fools, his eyes blazed, you stupid, shortsighted fools. Thirteen hard and hostile faces returned his angry gaze. From behind the thick stacks of telemetry readings and mission reports in front of each representative, a few smug and barely concealed smirks swirled amid the cigarette smoke and steaming glasses of sweet tea. For once, their satisfied expressions seemed to say, the arrogant Chief Designer wouldn’t get his way. This time, he wasn’t going to steamroll over anyone.

The meeting had not gone as Korolev had hoped. It had started cordially enough, with a postmortem of the successful August 21 launch. Glushko, Pilyugin, Kuznetsov, and the other bureau heads had delivered reports on how their engines, valves, and guidance and gyroscopic systems had performed during the maiden flight, and all had been found satisfactory. The critical failure of the warhead shield on reentry had been discussed without any of the rancor that had plagued the disastrous summer trials, and recommendations had been made for further investigations ahead of the next scheduled attempt on September 7. All the heartache, health problems, and bad blood seemed to have been forgotten, now that the rocket had worked, and everyone basked in its collective glory. Glushko and Korolev had even exchanged supportive glances as the list of systems successes had been read off. It was only when the Chief Designer rose to speak that the convivial atmosphere abruptly changed. “I suggest we begin preparations to launch the artificial satellite,” he said to stunned silence. “I mean to use the primitive satellite PS-1,” he added, referring to the Russian acronym for Simple Satellite Number One, the scaled-down substitute for the original 2,700-pound Object OD-1 that the Soviet Union had intended to enter into the IGY competition before discovering that Glushko’s engines wouldn’t be able to lift such a heavy payload. The smaller satellite, Korolev went on, was ready and could be launched in October with minimal alterations.

All at once, the room burst into a chorus of competing protests. In the hue and cry, the smiles vanished, Glushko suddenly sneered, and voices were raised. “This proposal was a big surprise,” General K. V. Gerchik, the Tyura-Tam deputy base commander, recalled decades later. “There were objections.”

Rather heated objections, according to the sparse historical record, which, in typical Soviet fashion, whitewashed the unseemly bickering in bland bureaucratic terms. Apparently Korolev’s fellow commission members had seen through his transparent ploy to distract Khrushchev from the warhead reentry problems by orbiting a satellite instead, and they wanted no part of the scheme. For their own reasons, the different factions on the commission rallied against Korolev’s rush to orbit. There wasn’t time, Glushko and the other design bureau heads objected, reminding the Chief Designer that the string of test failures had depleted the available stock of R-7s. They simply didn’t have the component parts to build more rockets to keep pace with Korolev’s frenetic schedule.

The six military representatives on the commission complained that a satellite was a waste of time and resources. The R-7 was a weapon, not a toy for silly scientific competitions. “All these space projects will simply distract us from the main objective of a nuclear ICBM,” said General Aleksander Mrykin, reiterating the military’s long-held position. “We should delay the development of a satellite until the R-7 is fully operational.”

Major General Oleg Shishkin, the nuclear ordnance chief, was particularly irate. It was his dummy warheads that were being incinerated by the faulty thermal shields, and until Korolev fixed the problem he couldn’t risk testing the R-7 with a live weapon. General Ivan Bulychev, the deputy communications commander, had equally pressing and practical reasons to oppose the satellite. It was Bulychev’s ground stations that would need to be reconfigured to track a completely new orbital trajectory, and the impatient Chief Designer wanted the upgrades ready by early October—an unrealistic time frame. Colonel Yuri Mozzhorin recalled, “The Directorate of Missile Weapons was sharply against the participation of the Ministry of Defense in the tracking of satellites… because it would harm the defensive capabilities of the country.”

Korolev had anticipated such rumblings from the armed forces. Soldiers were inherently conservative, and every major modern military innovation from the Gatling gun to the aircraft had been viewed with extreme skepticism by general staffs. Khrushchev had foisted missiles on his reluctant generals, had taken billions of rubles from their budgets to finance his gamble, and now the scheming Korolev was trying to bamboozle them with this sudden urgency to orbit a man-made moon. To deflect the criticism, the Chief Designer had already petitioned the government to issue a decree ordering his subordinate design bureaus to begin “development of an artificial satellite for photographing the earth’s surface.” Like von Braun three years earlier, he had hoped that the potential military applications of spacecraft as targeting and espionage vehicles would generate enthusiasm.

But the military men were unmoved. The Soviet Union did not have the same urgent need for aerial reconnaissance as the United States. America was a far more open society, ridiculously easy to penetrate. Its Congress publicly debated minute details of defense budgets. Astonishingly accurate road maps that would be highly classified in the USSR were sold at every gas station. Security was so incredibly lax that Korolev had been able to read a translation of U.S. newspaper accounts of Atlas’s latest test, a fiery failure off the Florida coast, and of the successful recovery of a nose cone Wernher von Braun had blasted into space with his Jupiter C. Von Braun, conversely, did not even know that Korolev existed—a fact that apparently grated on the egotistical Chief Designer. For the Soviets, it was mind-boggling how much information the Americans naively left lying around for the KGB to scoop up. Russia’s generals didn’t need a satellite to find out what was going on in Washington. They needed a missile that could destroy it.

Korolev’s satellite surprise had also encountered resistance from another, entirely unexpected quarter: from Mstislav Keldysh, a legend in the ranks of Soviet academia, who had been awarded three Hero of Soviet Labor gold stars, the USSR’s equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Korolev’s junior by four years, Keldysh was a handsome Latvian mathematical genius, a child prodigy both as a theoretician and as an applied aviation engineer, who had been the youngest member ever elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences. In Soviet scholarly circles, Keldysh’s name carried the same awe-inspiring weight as that of Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi. The suave Balt, a master at bureaucratic maneuvering, had used his status and unique position as the Presidium’s science adviser to become the USSR’s earliest advocate of space exploration. Long before Korolev’s breakthrough with the R-5 intermediate-range missile, it had been Keldysh’s political clout that had nudged the satellite proposal gradually up the government ladder.

But now the man who had once been Korolev’s greatest proponent was openly skeptical. This flimsy “simple satellite” that Korolev wanted to launch was nothing more than a political stunt, Keldysh complained. They should wait until Object OD-1, the mammoth orbiting laboratory bristling with sophisticated sensors, was ready. That way the Soviet Union could score a real scientific coup. Object OD-1 would perform invaluable research such as measuring the density, pressure, and ion composition of the atmosphere at altitudes from 200 to 500 kilometers (124 to 310 miles). It would measure magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and the corpuscular radiation of the sun. Ultraviolet and X-ray spectrums, inherent electric charges, and positive ion concentrations could be determined—in short, everything scientists needed to know before attempting to send a living being into space. The PS-1 Simple Satellite that Korolev now proposed launching instead was so small that the only real task it could perform was to send short bursts of a low-frequency signal back to amateur ham radio operators on earth. As a research tool, it had no real value.

Keldysh now charged that Korolev was more interested in the personal prestige of breaking the space barrier than in the collective data the mission would bring back. This was all about the Chief Designer’s ego, not the advancement of science, and he would be damned if he was going to tie up the Soviet Union’s most powerful computer for Korolev’s little vanity project. Russia had virtually no computers in 1957 because Stalin had viewed cybernetics as a “faulty science,” not applicable to a dialectical society. By the time the military applications of the machines had become obvious, the USSR lagged hopelessly behind the West, and Keldysh, as the head of the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics, controlled access to the only civilian supercomputer in Moscow.

Without access to Keldysh’s computer, Korolev would be stopped in his tracks because it could take months using manual six-digit trigonometry tables just to plug in all the variables needed to plot the parameters of an orbital trajectory. His engineers needed to calculate the exact speed of the rotation of the earth at the point of launch, which, at Tyura-Tam, was just over 1,000 feet per second. The direction of the launch, the azimuth, had to be factored in, since the earth rotates on a west-to-east axis and launching westward would be like swimming against a tide. The precise shape of the earth at the point of launch also had to be measured, since the planet is not a perfect sphere. The inclination of the equatorial plane, the angle between the equator and the azimuth, then needed to be calibrated to determine fuel load, which in turn affected the mass-to-thrust ratio critical to calculating the “escape velocity” that would propel PS-1 beyond the pull of gravity. This in turn determined the apogee and perigee—that is, the peaks and troughs of the satellite’s wavelike orbit—along with the duration of each revolution. These variables were all mercilessly interrelated, and the smallest mistake could result in the satellite crashing back to earth or escaping into deep space, never to be seen again. Even if PS-1 were catapulted to its proper celestial position, a tiny error in trajectory computations could result in a widely errant elliptical orbit that would either bypass the United States or appear over the North American continent at the wrong times. That, for Korolev, would spell disaster, because he wanted his little satellite seen in the night sky over enemy territory. It was why he had ordered PS-1 made entirely of a highly reflective aluminum material, polished to a mirrorlike sheen, and why he had gone to such lengths to insist on a spherical shape. Korolev had shot down the cone, the cylinder, the square, and every design his frustrated satellite makers had proposed. “Why, Sergei Pavlovich?” one of them finally asked, exasperated. “Because it’s not round,” he had replied mysteriously.

There was no real mystery, however. Spinning spherical objects simply caught the light better, and PS-1 would act like a bright mirror for the sun’s rays as it circled the earth, making it much more visible in the dark. Without this form of optical amplification, PS-1, at twenty-two inches in diameter, was too small to be seen from distances of up to 500 miles away. And seeing, as the old saying went, was believing.

The same psychological reasoning applied to Korolev’s decision to sacrifice scientific instrumentation in favor of audio capability. Virtually all of PS-l’s 184-pound mass was consumed by two transmitters and their three batteries. The silver-zinc chargers alone weighed 122 pounds, providing power for only a few weeks of operation. As a redundancy, they operated two identical one-watt transmitters that broadcast alternatively on different frequencies using separate pairs of ten- and eight-foot antennae. This way if one system failed, a signal would still reach earth. Hearing was also believing.

Sights and sounds from space would give even a crude little craft like PS-1 enormous propaganda and political value, Korolev argued. No one would be able to deny its existence, and even the “simple satellite” would be a Soviet triumph over the Americans, orbiting proof of the supremacy of Communist countries. “The Soviet Union must be first,” he said adamantly. Korolev’s colleagues, though, were far from convinced. “The Army needs just one thing,” Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin shot back, “a rocket that will work.” The standoff continued, with Korolev demanding that the commission accept his proposal.

Glushko and the military men led the revolt—the Red Army representatives because it was a distraction from solving the nose cone problem, Glushko perhaps as a way of getting even with his rival. Whichever the case, all the old animosity had bubbled to the surface: the fights, “using the dirtiest language and crudest phrases,” the tirades that had left so many wounded feelings. “Mindless malice,” Korolev complained to Nina.

Smarting from the rejection, Korolev stormed out of the conference room, no doubt leaving his own habitual trail of expletives that Soviet historians opted not to record for posterity. He was back two weeks later, early in the second week of September, once again insisting that his Simple Satellite Number One be given the green light. This time, however, his position had improved, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The R-7 had completed another nearly flawless test flight on September 7, using up the last of the original batch of rockets, and except for the persistent nose cone meltdowns he now had back-to-back successes to offset the three failures and months of catastrophic delays. Parts for another rocket were already being shipped to Tyura-Tam from Moscow, so he had the hardware. Once more, Korolev also had Khrushchev firmly in his corner, and his benefactor, after outwitting the hard-line coup plotters, now sat alone atop the Soviet hierarchy as the undisputed master of the Kremlin.

For Khrushchev, the R-7’s second consecutive success had also been a vindication of his vision for a new defense shield against the forces of imperialism. If the Soviet leader harbored any regrets with regard to the R-7, it was the disappointing reaction in the West to his announcement of the new weapons system. Washington had not quaked in panic at news of the Communist ICBM, as Khrushchev had hoped. In fact, the American general public barely noticed, and the Eisenhower administration appeared dismissively skeptical as to whether the R-7 was truly operational. There was a pervasive sentiment in Washington that a totalitarian state with communal toilets could not pull off something so technologically complex, as Senator Ellender had stated. A similarly derisive disbelief had greeted the initial news in 1949 that Moscow had detonated an atomic bomb. “Do you know when Russia will build the bomb? Never,” Truman had scoffed. When presented with incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets had indeed split the atom, Truman responded, “German scientists in Russia did it—probably something like that.” Even after the USSR had further narrowed the atomic gap with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in 1953, Moscow was still the butt of American jokes. Russia couldn’t possibly smuggle a suitcase bomb into the United States, went one popular punch line, because the Soviets hadn’t yet perfected the suitcase.

Such perceived slights drove Khrushchev to push his scientists harder to prove the critics in Washington wrong. But Korolev did not want to dwell on the time-consuming setbacks of the reentry problem. In the months required to completely redesign the warhead shield, momentum would be lost. Meanwhile, he had a rocket on its way to Tyura-Tam, and a record waiting to be broken. The Americans were surely not sitting idly by as the clock wound down on the International Geophysical Year. Korolev decided to turn the screws up a notch on his cautious fellow commission members. “I propose,” he said airily, “that we put the question of the national priority of launching the world’s first satellite to the Presidium. Let them settle the matter.”

There was, of course, no “them” in the Presidium any longer. By September 1957 the Communist Party’s ruling body was Khrushchev’s personal rubber stamp. The dissenting voices were all gone, replaced by loyalists like the fainthearted but trustworthy Brezhnev, and newcomers like Andrei Gromyko, who replaced the turncoat Shepilov as foreign minister and was scheduled to travel to Washington in the first week of October to meet John Foster Dulles for the first time. The mutineers had been dealt with—though not in the customary Stalinist fashion that they had so ardently supported. In a testament to Khrushchev’s reform of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a single conspirator was shot or even arrested. Molotov was dispatched to Outer Mongolia, to serve out his sentence as the Soviet ambassador in dusty Ulan Bator. Kaganovich was appointed director of a remote potassium mine in the Perm province of the Ural Mountains. Malenkov was sent to manage the Ust-Kamenogorsk electric power station on the equally desolate Irtysh River in Kazakhstan, while Shepilov was dispatched to Kyrgyzstan to teach central Asian children the tenets of Marxist-Leninism. They were effectively banished into internal exile, but they would live out their natural lives.

Korolev’s gambit had its desired effect. Opposition to the substitute satellite melted away almost as quickly as it had welled up at the previous meeting. The military men sat silent, and Glushko lowered his eyes in defeat. He may not have shared his rival’s dreams of space conquest, but he certainly did not want to be the nail that stuck out. “Nobody wanted to be accused of dragging their feet,” General Gerchik recalled, in the event that the United States did launch first and Khrushchev later came looking for answers and scapegoats. One after another, the commission members meekly raised their hands. The final decision was unanimous.

The only outstanding question, the launch date, was settled at the next meeting. On September 23, the same day as the Little Rock riot that spurred Eisenhower to action, the commission formally informed the Kremlin that PS-1 was scheduled for liftoff on October 6, 1957. It was official. The “Iron King,” as the petrified staff at OKB-1 sometimes called Korolev, had won. The stubborn Chief Designer had finally gotten his shot at space.

Liftoff was scheduled for 10:20 PM on Sunday, the sixth of October, under the cover of darkness because American spy planes roamed the skies during the day. It also turned out that the late hour was ideal for PS-1 to attain its desired orbit. The launch itself would be strictly secret in case it failed, and Korolev took every precaution to ensure that Washington did not get wind of his intentions. In the huge assembly hangar not too far from the spartan little house the Chief Designer kept at Tyura-Tam, the R-7 lay prone on a train-sized dolly, its copper-clad exhaust nozzles burnished to a bright orange under its flared white skirt. It was model number 8k71PS, sixteen feet shorter than its predecessors, and technicians in surgical smocks were tinkering with the final modifications to its smaller, stubbier nose cone. The alterations gave the now ninety-six-foot rocket a stouter, more matronly look, but PS-1, Tikhonravov’s tiny prostreishy sputnik, or “simplest satellite,” did not require the same large and elongated thermal shield as a five-ton thermonuclear warhead that would reenter the searing atmosphere. The warhead’s cumbersome radio-guidance targeting system had also been removed, shaving another four feet off the final package, since it too was no longer necessary. The satellite, after all, was not being aimed at an American city; with luck, it would never touch solid ground again. To achieve orbital velocity, Glushko’s central sustainer core engine was being recalibrated to fire until it ran out of fuel, rather than to cut off at a predetermined point along a ballistic trajectory, and a new, more potent mix of hydrogen peroxide was being introduced to drive its turbo pumps faster.

Throughout the modifications, Korolev anxiously paced the enormous hangar like an expectant father in the delivery room. “Silence fell whenever the Chief Designer appeared,” Colonel Mikhail Rebrov remembered. “Korolev was more exacting and strict than ever.” Every so often he checked on Tikhonravov’s baby, which sat on a felt-covered cradle in a sealed-off “clean room,” Tyura-Tam’s equivalent of a maternity ward. “Coats, gloves, it’s a must,” Korolev insisted, as he inspected the shiny satellite. Swaddled in a black velvet diaper, the little orb had spring-loaded antennae that dangled over the sides like electronic umbilical cords. To ensure its chances of survival, Tikhonravov had pressurized the sphere with nitrogen, a neutral gas that prevented corrosion. He had also installed a miniaturized climate-control system; it would heat or cool PS-1’s innards to maintain a constant temperature of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, which would ensure that its transmitters operated properly regardless of the external environment. No one knew for certain how the radio equipment—how anything man-made, for that matter—would react in the radiation-laden, zero-gravity vacuum of space, and that was another reason Korolev had insisted on the obsessive polishing of PS-l’s thin aluminum skin. He did not want to risk the heat transfers or fluctuations that could result from an uneven surface, and wanted to make sure solar rays were reflected, not absorbed, by the gleaming shell. It was during one of these final, frenzied cleanings that the senior OKB-1 engineer Anatoly Abramov witnessed a typical Korolev moment. “I saw a crowd gathered around the satellite and I heard screaming,” he recalled. “As I got closer I found myself at the receiving end of one of Korolev’s famous tirades. I immediately realized what was wrong. The satellite stand was covered in felt to prevent scratching, but the felt had been tacked on with little nails rather than glued. The nail heads weren’t actually protruding or touching the surface of the satellite, but it hadn’t occurred to us that using tacks wasn’t the brightest idea until Korolev rubbed all our noses in it.”

The Chief Designer was next sent into a frenzy by a message that arrived from Moscow on the morning of October 2. Apparently an unscheduled meeting of the IGY was being convened in Washington on October 6. “There should be an American report of a satellite over the planet,” the IGY’s Soviet representative had cabled Moscow. In fact, “Satellite over the Planet” was merely the title of the keynote speech. Either the Soviet representative got confused or something got lost in translation, and Korolev panicked.

“What does it mean?” he demanded, the color draining from his face. Were the Americans planning a launch? Were they planning to announce it on the sixth? “Maybe it’s just a routine update,” he tried to console himself. “Or maybe not,” he said after a moment of anxious reflection, “maybe this will be a report of a fait accompli.” Korolev was visibly shaken. A U.S. satellite might already be circling the earth by the time he attempted to launch PS-1. The idea of finishing second sent the Chief Designer into a state of profound agitation. He thrashed around his office, mumbling to himself, all the while clutching the worrisome communiqué. Get me the KGB, he finally roared.

Was it true? he asked, when the call was patched through. Were the Americans really about to launch a satellite? The duty officer at KGB headquarters did not know. A series of coded messages was exchanged between Moscow and the resident spies at the Soviet embassy in Washington. No, came the final answer. There were no early indications that the United States was planning any sort of launch.

Korolev, though, was far from relieved. What if the spooks were wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time Soviet intelligence had missed signals. Korolev couldn’t chance it. I’m moving up the launch date to October 4, he informed Vassily Ryabikov, chair of the R-7 State Commission.

This time he didn’t bother to wait for an answer from Moscow.

The rocket was rolled out of its hangar the following morning. An overhead crane lifted the twenty-seven-ton empty shell—light and eminently more manageable without its warhead and full complement of fuel—and gingerly deposited it on a giant green erector-transporter that waited on rail tracks at the hangar door. Korolev, apparently still feeling the emotional pinch of the previous day’s panic, patted his missile sentimentally. “Well,” he told the assembled dignitaries, “shall we see off our first-born?”

A solemn procession began along the sandy mile-and-a-half-long berm that connected the assembly hangar to the launchpad, a tradition that would be repeated for every subsequent space launch and continues to this day. Heads bowed in silence, hands clasped behind their backs, the scientists, soldiers, and technocrats followed the locomotive that slowly, painstakingly pushed the R-7 on its transporter to the fire pit. A grainy and undated Soviet video captured the scene. In the front row, Korolev in a black leather jacket walked next to Voskresenskiy, his trusted chief of flight testing, looking like a portly French painter in the black beret that he used to seal liquid oxygen leaks with frozen urine. Farther back, the bemedaled generals, their olive green uniforms matching the military paint job on the 150-foot-long transporter. Behind them, Glushko, Ryabikov, and Rudnev, the deputy minister for military-industrial works. Then, bringing up the rear, the rest of the bureaucrats and lesser designers. In the video, no one is talking, and faces seem grim. The camera pans away to reveal a tableau of windswept dunes and a pair of camels on a ridge—though these have almost certainly been spliced in for exotic effect since it was highly unlikely that Kazakh herders were permitted to wander freely around Tyura-Tam.

Fifty minutes elapsed before the R-7 reached the launchpad, and the huge hydraulic boom on the transporter began to inch upward. Slowly, over the next hour and ten minutes, the rocket was raised into the waiting arms of the Tulip launch stand. When at last it had been fully righted, the transporter boom lowered it and the Tulip’s petals closed around its waist like a vice. The R-7 was now suspended in midair, its thrusters hanging just below ground level over the 120-foot-deep, five-football-fields-wide concrete apron of the fire pit. But before fueling could begin, it still had to be tested one last time. It was a shortcoming of horizontal assembly, a time-consuming extra step that the Americans had skipped by building their towering new hangar at Cape Canaveral several dozen stories high so that U.S. missiles could roll out already tested and in the vertical position.

Marshal Nedelin, in particular, was unhappy with the Soviet arrangement. He was going to head the Strategic Rocket Forces, and in the event of a nuclear attack, precious time would be lost running unnecessary diagnostics. An ICBM’s retaliatory value depended largely on how quickly it could be fired, and the R-7 was proving painfully slow to get off the ground. Nor could problems be fixed once the missile was fueled, due to the risk of explosion.

Nedelin paced impatiently throughout the morning, glancing disapprovingly at his watch as the technicians checked connections and valves and electrical circuits. Sometime during the diagnostic tests—there are conflicting accounts as to precisely when—a malfunction with the satellite was uncovered. One of its silver zinc batteries was leaking electrolytes, and there was a disruption in the current. “Technical banditry,” howled Rudnev, the man who had assured Chertok that no one would be sent to Siberia if the R-7 failed. But now, in the heat of the moment, he wanted heads to roll for the perceived sabotage. Korolev, however, was uncharacteristically calm. “Let’s not make a fuss,” he consoled the highly agitated deputy minister. “There is still time to make the necessary corrections.”

It was not until shortly before six the following morning, on Friday, October 4, that fueling could begin. By then, many of the launch crew had fallen ill from spending so much time in the unseasonably cold weather. An Arctic blast had descended over the Kazakh steppe from Siberia, bringing howling winds and freezing temperatures, but the personnel at Tyura-Tam were still dressed for the broiling summer. Huddled around a makeshift shack that served moldy salami and stale pastries but no hot tea, the soldiers and technicians shivered and cursed. “OK, dear,” said one, addressing the missile. “Fly away and carry our baby into space. Or at least crash. Just fly away, and don’t stay here,” he added, dreading the prospect of the additional days it would take to drain and dismantle a stalled rocket.

Rail tankers containing 253 tons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen pulled up to the hinged girders of the Tulip, and soldiers heaved huge hoses onto cables and pulleys that hoisted them up to the R-7’s intake valves. The troops manning the fueling operation wore no protective clothing other than gloves, and clouds of cryogenic condensate descended on them through the bleed valves that hissed frozen oxygen vapors as they pumped a small amount of liquid oxygen to cool and pressurize the rocket’s plumbing.

The nearly minus-300-degree liquid oxygen evaporated at an alarmingly rapid rate, which was why the R-7 had to be filled shortly before takeoff and its tanks constantly topped off, and could not be stored ready for firing like future generations of ICBMs that would use storable propellants. The combustible mist infused the soldiers’ hair and clothes; eventually, after several horrific cases of people igniting, the Soviets would adopt more stringent safety precautions. But during the early R-7 launches, caution was not a concern.

The fueling process lasted five excruciating hours, the soldiers carefully distributing the propellant into each of the missile’s ten integral tanks to maintain weight equilibrium. Compressed gases like nitrogen and liquefied hydrogen peroxide were then pumped under high pressure into the turbos that would drive the fuel pumps. Throughout the arduous process, Nedelin once again must have watched the clock with alarm and dismay. The next war would be an instantaneous conflagration, won or lost not in a matter of days or months but hours and minutes. In such a conflict, when missiles could cross continents and oceans in the time it took to load a bomber, five hours was an eternity. The Americans were already talking about designing a new storable solid-fuel rocket that could be ready to launch in less than five minutes, and here Nedelin had to wait a day and a half just to top off the tanks. The very same soldiers fueling the R-7 would have to fire it in the event of a war, and unless they picked up the pace, the R-7 risked being taken out while it was still on the ground.

Korolev, however, ignored the impatient rumblings of the military observers. “Nobody will rush us,” he instructed his engineers. He had come too far to make a mistake now. He had waited twenty years for this moment, sacrificed his marriage to Ksenia, his health, even his freedom during the purges to work on rockets. He could wait a few more hours. “We will launch at 22 hours and 28 minutes,” he announced.

“T minus ten minutes,” blared the loudspeaker, as Korolev, Voskresenskiy, and the other R-7 State Commission members filed into the underground control bunker 200 yards from the launchpad. Above them, powerful spotlights illuminated the frost-covered rocket, which glistened in the night like a giant icicle. Steam hissed from its bleed valves, enveloping the launch stand in thick, billowy clouds bisected by sharp beams of light.

At 10:20 PM, the rocket’s automated guidance systems were switched on, and its inertial gyroscopes began spinning, emitting a low hum. Inside the crowded bunker, the military operators manning the dimly illuminated panels and dials of the various control stations scanned their indicators for signs of trouble. Almost immediately, a warning signal on the Auxiliary Systems panel started flashing. It was the fuel tank sensor in one of the peripheral boosters. The level of liquid oxygen was low. All eyes turned to Korolev. Was it serious? Should they abort? Korolev and Voskresenskiy exchanged meaningful looks and huddled in a whispered conference with the two ranking military launch commanders. It wasn’t critical, Korolev decided. They would proceed with the countdown.

Voskresenskiy returned to the helm of one of the bunker’s two periscopes and stared out through the viewer. The R-7 seemed fine. He flashed the Chief Designer a brief, helpless smile. He and Korolev had just made their final decision. The launch was now out of the scientists’ hands, an entirely military operation, and as civilians they were henceforth just spectators.

“One minute to go,” announced Colonel Aleksandr Nosov, swiveling the second periscope like a submarine commander. This was now Nosov’s show, and though he was aiming at space, the launch would be treated like a regular ballistic missile training exercise. “Key to launch,” he ordered, and Lieutenant Boris Chekunov, the “button man,” inserted the key that controlled the circuit breaker on the firing switch. “Key on,” Chekunov responded.

“Roll tape.” The telemetry readouts began rolling off the printer like a stock market ticker tape. “Purge the system,” Nosov called out ten seconds later. Inside the rocket, compressed nitrogen was blasted through the engine feed lines to flush out any gaseous residue from the fueling and testing. “Key to drainage.” Chekunov flipped the switch, and all the bleed valves closed. The hissing and steaming abruptly ceased, and the vapor clouds around the rocket disappeared as the last of the feed lines that topped off the evaporating liquid oxygen was automatically disconnected. Two minutes passed before Nosov issued his next command: “Pusk,” or “Launch.”

Chekunov pressed the launch button, starting the automated sequence. Inside the R-7, compressed nitrogen rushed into the propellant tanks, pressurizing them to the bursting point. The umbilical mast with the ground electrical connections retracted and the missile switched to onboard battery power.

“Roll tape two,” Nosov commanded ninety seconds later. Every ground receiving station in the Soviet Union was activated to full power, ready to track the rocket. It was now 10:28 PM. Inside the R-7, valves opened, and the turbo pumps began sucking thousands of gallons out of the propellant tanks. “Ignition,” called Chekunov, reading the flashing light on the panel in front of him. From their periscopes Voskresenskiy and Nosov could see a cloud of orange smoke envelop the rocket, as flames poured out of the thirty thrusters. But the fire was languid and lazy, dancing, directionless. “Initial stage,” Nosov called out. The engines were only warming up; the turbo pumps that fed fuel to the combustion chambers were operating at a fraction of their capacity. This was normal and followed after a few seconds by a ground-shaking roar. “Primary stage,” Nosov shouted, as the R-7 went to full thrust. An ear-splitting din, like the sound of lightning as it strikes, penetrated the bunker’s thick concrete walls, and the light coming through the periscopes’ viewfinders was blinding as the flames shooting out of the rocket intensified to white-hot jets of superheated gas. They slammed into the bottom of the fire pit with such force that updrafts propelled them back up the sides of the missile 120 feet above. For a split second, the rocket sat there burning itself alive, and then it slowly rose from the pyre. “Liftoff, liftoff,” Nosov screamed, as a million pounds of downward pressure pushed the Tulip’s hinged pedals open and the R-7 was released.

In the eight seconds it took the 280-ton missile to climb the first 1,000 feet, an alarm indicator had silenced the cheers in the control room. The engine of one of the peripheral blocs, the same side booster that had registered low liquid oxygen levels, had been late achieving full power. The rocket had still taken off normally, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a sign of trouble to come; the problematic booster might still suffer a critical failure before it separated. The seconds were ticking by quickly, though, and there was nothing anyone could do now but monitor the display panels and stopwatches and hope for the best. At sixteen seconds, another alarm indicator began winking. The Tank Depletion System, which ensured that propellant flowed evenly to all the combustion chambers, had malfunctioned. The engines weren’t burning fuel uniformly, which could affect the rocket’s course and, more important, its speed and preprogrammed cutoff time. Now everyone was seriously worried. The glitches were piling up fast, and no one had forgotten the disaster that had occurred at the ninety-eighth second of the first R-7 flight.

At 116 seconds a fiery cross appeared thirty miles above the Tyura-Tam test range. The four side boosters had jettisoned, creating the biblical effect, and miraculously the separation had occurred exactly on schedule. Relief swept through the control room. Only the central sustainer core was now firing, which meant that fewer things could go wrong. Glushko’s reconfigured engine had enough fuel for two more minutes of flight. Then they would know.

The control bunker was subdued; there were too many generals and colonels and deputy ministers present for the young lieutenants in the launch crew to display their emotions. But in the assembly hangar, where most of the civilian scientists and engineers listened to the action on a loudspeaker, it was a different story. There, emotions ran high; whoops and cheers greeted milestones, while announcements of glitches were met with moans and groans.

For the next two minutes, all eyes were riveted on the clock. Then the loudspeaker sounded. “Main engine shut down.” A distressed murmur reverberated through the hall. The engines had run out of fuel at 295.4 seconds. That was more than a full second early, a result of the Tank Depletion System malfunction. Slide rules were whipped out and calculations hastily performed. Would the early cutoff affect escape velocity? The R-7 was supposed to be traveling at just over 8,000 meters per second—roughly 18,000 miles an hour—but it was making only 7,780 meters per second. It was also five miles lower than it should be, at 142 miles in altitude instead of 147 miles. Would it be enough to orbit? Another 19.9 seconds passed before the next announcement. Meanwhile, momentum had carried the missile, still traveling at twenty-three times the speed of sound, another one hundred miles higher. “Separation Achieved.” Inside the R-7’s nose cone, pneumatic pistons rammed PS-l’s steel cradle, pushing it away from the spent booster. A spring-loaded mechanism popped off PS-l’s conical cover, and the sphere hurtled into the blackness of space.

At 325.44 seconds into the flight, Nosov issued his last command. “Open the reflectors.” A plate on the central booster jettisoned, exposing prismlike mirrors on the rocket’s casing. Korolev had installed the reflective material, knowing that the ninety-foot central stage would follow PS-l’s celestial path like the blazing trail of a meteor, and he wanted to ensure that it too would be visible from earth as it circled the planet just behind the satellite.

But was PS-1 really in orbit? Had the little orb survived the violent shaking and vibrations of takeoff? Had it overheated during its ascent, succumbing to the friction of slamming through the dense lower atmosphere at nearly 25,000 feet per second? Had the thin cover shields held? Everyone rushed to the communications van parked outside to find out. The van sprouted an array of antennae tuned to the two frequencies of PS-l’s twin transmitters. Inside the van, both operators hunched over their dials, cupping their headphones. “Quiet,” one of them yelled. “Be quiet.” So many people were pressing against the vehicle, clamoring for information, that the two operators couldn’t hear anything. Then, one of them raised an exultant arm. “We have the signal,” he shouted. “We have it.”

Celebration erupted: dancing, laughing, hugging. Grown men cried and kissed one another. Glushko and Korolev embraced, their clashes momentarily forgotten. “This is music no one has ever heard before,” the Chief Designer cheered. Even the rigid military engineers inside the control bunker rose out of their seats in a rare display of emotion, though Chekunov, the young lieutenant who had pressed the launch button, would later recall that none of them would truly understand what had just happened until much later.

Reports now started trickling in from the Far Eastern tracking stations. One after another, they were acquiring PS-l’s signal. It was on course, and its orbit seemed to be holding steady. Only a relatively minor altitude loss of fifty miles was reported. Once more cheering and shouting erupted, because that meant that the early engine cutoff had not had disastrous consequences after all. Already some of the State Commission members were reaching for the phones, ready to call Moscow with the good news. Korolev, though, was surprisingly subdued and silent. “Hold off on the celebrations,” he finally counseled. “It could still be a mistake. Let’s wait to hear if we can pick up the signal after a complete orbit.”

For an hour and a half they waited, smoking, pacing, and fidgeting. When the appointed time for PS-1 to reappear over Soviet territory came and went in silence, a deathly stillness descended on the anxious crowd assembled in the huge hangar. A sense of foreboding suddenly gripped the scientists. Maybe PS-1 had continued to lose altitude and had burned up in the atmosphere. Maybe they had failed after all.

At a few minutes after midnight, one of the westernmost tracking stations in the Crimea picked up something. At first faintly and with static, and then louder and clearer: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

Amid the pandemonium, Korolev turned to his fellow State Commission members. Now, he said triumphantly, we can call Khrushchev.