Rockets and People: Volume IV: The Moon Race, the N-1 Moon Rocket, Salyut Space Stations, Soyuz 11 Tragedy, Energiya-Buran Space Shuttle, plus Bonus 1967 American Report on Soviet Program (NASA SP-2011-4110)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), World Spaceflight News, Boris Chertok, Asif A. Siddiqi
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Rockets and People: Volume IV: The Moon Race, the N-1 Moon Rocket, Salyut Space Stations, Soyuz 11 Tragedy, Energiya-Buran Space Shuttle, plus Bonus 1967 American Report on Soviet Program
Boris Chertok
Asif Siddiqi, Series Editor
The NASA History Series
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Office of Communications * History Program Office * Washington, DC
NASA SP-2011-4110
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I dedicate this book to the cherished memory of my wife and friend, Yekaterina Semyonova Golubkina.
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Chapter 1 * Rocket-Space Chronology (Historical Overview)
Chapter 2 * U.S. Lunar Program
Chapter 3 * N1-L3 Lunar Program Under Korolev
Chapter 4 * A Difficult Conversation with Korolev
Chapter 6 * We're Behind, but We're Not Giving In
Chapter 8 * Once Again We're Ahead of the Whole World
Chapter 9 * "Sort It Out, and Report on Your Endeavors"
Chapter 10 * 1969 — the First N-1 Launch
Chapter 11 * After the Failure of N-1s No. 3 and No. 5
Chapter 12 * Long-Duration Space Stations Instead of the Moon
Chapter 13 * Preparing for the Launch of DOS
Chapter 16 * The Hot Summer of 1971
Chapter 17 * The Last N-1 Launch
Chapter 18 * People in the Control Loop
Chapter 19 * Valentin Glushko, N-1, and NPO Energiya
Bonus - Review of the Soviet Space Program 1967
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Series Introduction
In an extraordinary century, Academician Boris Yevseyevich Chertok has lived an extraordinary life. He has witnessed and participated in many important technological milestones of the 20th century, and in these volumes, he recollects them with clarity, humanity, and humility. Chertok began his career as an electrician in 1930 at an aviation factory near Moscow. Thirty years later, he was one of the senior designers in charge of the Soviet Union's crowning achievement as a space power: the launch of Yuriy Gagarin, the world's first space voyager. Chertok's 60-year-long career, punctuated by the extraordinary accomplishments of both Sputnik and Gagarin, and continuing to the many successes and failures of the Soviet space program, constitutes the core of his memoirs, Rockets and People. In these four volumes, Academician Chertok not only describes and remembers, but also elicits and extracts profound insights from an epic story about a society's quest to explore the cosmos.
Academician Chertok's memoirs, forged from experience in the Cold War, provide a compelling perspective into a past that is indispensable to understanding the present relationship between the American and Russian space programs. From the end of World War II to the present day, the missile and space efforts of the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia) have been inextricably linked. As such, although Chertok's work focuses exclusively on Soviet programs to explore space, it also prompts us to reconsider the entire history of spaceflight, both Russian and American.
Chertok's narrative underlines how, from the beginning of the Cold War, the rocketry projects of the two nations evolved in independent but parallel paths. Chertok's first-hand recollections of the extraordinary Soviet efforts to collect, catalog, and reproduce German rocket technology after World War II provide a parallel view to what historian John Gimbel has called the Western "exploitation and plunder" of German technology after the war.1 Chertok describes how the Soviet design team under the famous Chief Designer Sergey Pavlovich Korolev quickly outgrew German missile technology. By the late 1950s, his team produced the majestic R-7, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Using this rocket, the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik satellite on 4 October 1957 from a launch site in remote central Asia.
The early Soviet accomplishments in space exploration, particularly the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the remarkable flight of Yuriy Gagarin in 1961, were benchmarks of the Cold War. Spurred by the Soviet successes, the United States formed a governmental agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to conduct civilian space exploration. As a result of Gagarin's triumphant flight, in 1961, the Kennedy administration charged NASA to achieve the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade."2 Such an achievement would demonstrate American supremacy in the arena of spaceflight at a time when both American and Soviet politicians believed that victory in space would be tantamount to preeminence on the global stage. The space programs of both countries grew in leaps and bounds in the 1960s, but the Americans crossed the finish line first when Apollo astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., disembarked on the Moon's surface in July 1969.
Shadowing Apollo's success was an absent question: What happened to the Soviets who had succeeded so brilliantly with Sputnik and Gagarin? Unknown to most, the Soviets tried and failed to reach the Moon in a secret program that came to naught. As a result of that disastrous failure, the Soviet Union pursued a gradual and consistent space station program in the 1970s and 1980s that eventually led to the Mir space station. The Americans developed a reusable space transportation system known as the Space Shuttle. Despite their seemingly separate paths, the space programs of the two powers remained dependent on each other for rationale and direction. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, cooperation replaced competition as the two countries embarked on a joint program to establish the first permanent human habitation in space through the International Space Station (ISS).
Academician Chertok's reminiscences are particularly important because he played key roles in almost every major milestone of the Soviet missile and space programs, from the beginning of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the war, he served on the team that developed the Soviet Union's first rocket-powered airplane, the BI. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Chertok, then in his early 30s, played a key role in studying and collecting captured German rocket technology. In the latter days of the Stalinist era, he worked to develop long-range missiles as deputy chief engineer of the main research institute, the NII-88 (pronounced "nee-88") near Moscow. In 1956, Korolev's famous OKB-1 design bureau spun off from the institute and assumed a leading position in the emerging Soviet space program. As a deputy chief designer at OKB-1, Chertok continued with his contributions to the most important Soviet space projects of the day: the Vostok; the Voskhod; the Soyuz; the world's first space station, Salyut; the Energiya superbooster; and the Buran space shuttle.
Chertok's emergence from the secret world of the Soviet military-industrial complex, into his current status as the most recognized living legacy of the Soviet space program, coincided with the dismantling of the Soviet Union as a political entity. Throughout most of his career, Chertok's name remained a state secret. When he occasionally wrote for the public, he used the pseudonym "Boris Yevseyev."3 Like others writing on the Soviet space program during the Cold War, Chertok was not allowed to reveal any institutional or technical details in his writings. What the state censors permitted for publication said little; one could read a book several hundred pages long comprising nothing beyond tedious and long personal anecdotes between anonymous participants extolling the virtues of the Communist Party. The formerly immutable limits on free expression in the Soviet Union irrevocably expanded only after Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 and the introduction of glasnost' (openness).
Chertok's name first appeared in print in the newspaper Izvestiya in an article commemorating the 30th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik in 1987. In a wide-ranging interview on the creation of Sputnik, Chertok spoke with the utmost respect for his former boss, the late Korolev. He also eloquently balanced love for his country with criticisms of the widespread inertia and inefficiency that characterized late-period Soviet society.4 His first written works in the glasnost' period, published in early 1988 in the Air Force journal Aviatsiya i kosmonavtika [Aviation and Cosmonautics], underlined Korolev's central role in the foundation and growth of the Soviet space program.5 By this time, it was as if all the patched up straps that held together a stagnant empire were falling apart one by one; even as Russia was in the midst of one of its most historic transformations, the floodgates of free expression were transforming the country's own history. People like Chertok were now free to speak about their experiences with candor. Readers could now learn about episodes such as Korolev's brutal incarceration in the late 1930s, the dramatic story behind the fatal space mission of Soyuz-1 in 1967, and details of the failed and abandoned Moon project in the 1960s.6 Chertok himself shed light on a missing piece of history in a series of five articles published in Izvestiya in early 1992 on the German contribution to the foundation of the Soviet missile program after World War II.7
Using these works as a starting point, Academician Chertok began working on his memoirs. Originally, he had only intended to write about his experiences from the postwar years in one volume, maybe two. Readers responded so positively to the first volume, Rakety i lyudi [Rockets and People], published in 1994, that Chertok continued to write, eventually producing four substantial volumes, published in 1996, 1997, and 1999, covering the entire history of the Soviet missile and space programs.8
My initial interest in the memoirs was purely historical: I was fascinated by the wealth of technical arcana in the books, specifically projects and concepts that had remained hidden throughout much of the Cold War. Those interested in dates, statistics, and the "nuts and bolts" of history will find much that is useful in these pages. As I continued to read, however, I became engrossed by the overall rhythm of Academician Chertok's narrative, which gave voice and humanity to a story ostensibly about mathematics and technology. In his writings, I found a richness that had been nearly absent in most of the disembodied, clinical, and often speculative writing by Westerners studying the Soviet space program. Because of Chertok's storytelling skills, his memoir is a much-needed corrective to the outdated Western view of Soviet space achievements as a mishmash of propaganda, self-delusion, and Cold War rhetoric. In Chertok's story, we meet real people with real dreams who achieved extraordinary successes under very difficult conditions.
Chertok's reminiscences are remarkably sharp and descriptive. In being self-reflective, Chertok avoids the kind of solipsistic ruminations that often characterize memoirs. He is both proud of his country's accomplishments and willing to admit failings with honesty. For example, Chertok juxtaposes accounts of the famous aviation exploits of Soviet pilots in the 1930s, especially those to the Arctic, with the much darker costs of the Great Terror in the late 1930s when Stalin's vicious purges decimated the Soviet aviation industry.
Chertok's descriptive powers are particularly evident in describing the chaotic nature of the Soviet mission to recover and collect rocketry equipment in Germany after World War II. Interspersed with his contemporary diary entries, his language conveys the combination of joy, confusion, and often anticlimax that the end of the war presaged for Soviet representatives in Germany. In one breath, Chertok and his team are looking for hidden caches of German materiel in an underground mine, while in another they are face to face with the deadly consequences of a soldier who had raped a young German woman (Volume I, Chapter 21).9 There are many such seemingly incongruous anecdotes during Chertok's time in Germany, from the experience of visiting the Nazi slave labor camp at Dora soon after liberation in 1945, to the deportation of hundreds of German scientists to the USSR in 1946. Chertok's massive work is of great consequence for another reason—he cogently provides context. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, many participants have openly written about their experiences, but few have successfully placed Soviet space achievements in the broader context of the history of Soviet science, the history of the Soviet military-industrial complex, or indeed Soviet history in general.10 The volumes of memoirs compiled by the Russian State Archive of Scientific-Technical Documentation in the early 1990s under the series Dorogi v kosmos [ Roads to Space] provided an undeniably rich and in-depth view of the origins of the Soviet space program, but they were, for the most part, personal narratives, i.e., fish-eye views of the world around them.11 Chertok's memoirs are a rare exception in that they strive to locate the Soviet missile and space program in the fabric of broader social, political, industrial, and scientific developments in the former Soviet Union.
This combination—Chertok's participation in the most important Soviet space achievements, his capacity to lucidly communicate them to the reader, and his skill in providing a broader social context—makes this work, in my opinion, one of the most important memoirs written by a veteran of the Soviet space program. The series will also be an important contribution to the history of Soviet science and technology.12
In reading Academician Chertok's recollections, we should not lose sight of the fact that these chapters, although full of history, have their particular perspective. In conveying to us the complex vista of the Soviet space program, he has given us one man's memories of a huge undertaking. Other participants of these very same events will remember things differently. Soviet space history, like any discipline of history, exists as a continuous process of revision and restatement. Few historians in the 21st century would claim to be completely objective.13 Memoirists would make even less of a claim to the "truth." In his introduction, Chertok acknowledges this, saying, "I...must warn the reader that in no way do I have pretensions to the laurels of a scholarly historian. Correspondingly, my books are not examples of strict historical research. In any memoirs, narrative and thought are inevitably subjective." Chertok ably illustrates, however, that avoiding the pursuit of scholarly history does not necessarily lessen the relevance of his story, especially because it represents the opinion of an influential member of the postwar scientific and technical intelligentsia in the Soviet Union.
Some, for example, might not share Chertok's strong belief in the power of scientists and engineers to solve social problems, a view that influenced many who sought to transform the Soviet Union with modern science after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Historians of Soviet science such as Loren Graham have argued that narrowly technocratic views of social development cost the Soviet Union dearly.14 Technological hubris was, of course, not unique to the Soviet scientific community, but absent democratic processes of accountability, many huge Soviet government projects—such as the construction of the Great Dnepr Dam and the great Siberian railway in the 1970s and 1980s—ended up as costly failures with many adverse social and environmental repercussions. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Chertok's views, they are important to understand because they represent the ideas of a generation who passionately believed in the power of science to eliminate the ills of society. As such, his memoirs add an important dimension to understanding the mentalite of the Soviets' drive to become a modern, industrialized state in the 20th century.
Chertok's memoirs are part of the second generation of publications on Soviet space history, one that eclipsed the (heavily censored) first generation published during the Communist era. Memoirs constituted a large part of the second generation. In the 1990s, when it was finally possible to write candidly about Soviet space history, a wave of personal recollections flooded the market. Not only Boris Chertok, but also such luminaries as Vasiliy Mishin, Kerim Kerimov, Boris Gubanov, Yuriy Mozzhorin, Konstantin Feoktistov, Vyacheslav Filin, and others finally published their reminiscences.15 Official organizational histories and journalistic accounts complemented these memoirs, written by individuals with access to secret archival documents. Yaroslav Golovanov's magisterial Korolev: Fakty i Mify [Korolev: Facts and Myths], as well as key institutional works from the Energiya corporation and the Russian Military Space Forces, added richly to the canon.16 The diaries of Air Force General Nikolay Kamanin from the 1960s to the early 1970s, published in four volumes in the late 1990s, also gave scholars a candid look at the vicissitudes of the Soviet human spaceflight program.17
The flood of works in Russian allowed Westerners to publish the first works in English. Memoirs—for example, from Sergey Khrushchev and Roald Sagdeyev—appeared in their English translations. James Harford published his 1997 biography of Sergey Korolev based upon extensive interviews with veterans of the Soviet space program.18 My own book, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945—1974, was an early attempt to synthesize the wealth of information and narrate a complete history of the early Soviet human spaceflight program.19 Steven Zaloga provided an indispensable counterpoint to these space histories in The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945—2000, which reconstructed the story of the Soviet efforts to develop strategic weapons.20
With any new field of history that is bursting with information based primarily on recollection and interviews, there are naturally many contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, even on such a seemingly trivial issue as the name of the earliest institute in Soviet-occupied Germany, "Institute Rabe," there is no firm agreement on the reason it was given this title. Chertok's recollections contradict the recollection of another Soviet veteran, Georgiy Dyadin.21 In another case, many veterans have claimed that artillery general Lev Gaydukov's meeting with Stalin in 1945 was a key turning point in the early Soviet missile program; Stalin apparently entrusted Gaydukov with the responsibility to choose an industrial sector to assign the development of long-range rockets (Volume I, Chapter 22). Lists of visitors to Stalin's office during that period—declassified only very recently—do not, however, show that Gaydukov ever met with Stalin in 1945.22 Similarly, many Russian sources note that the "Second Main Directorate" of the USSR Council of Ministers managed Soviet missile development in the early 1950s, when in fact, this body actually supervised uranium procurement for the A-bomb project.23 In many cases, memoirs provide different and contradictory information on the very same event (different dates, designations, locations, people involved, etc.).
Academician Chertok's wonderful memoirs point to a solution to these discrepancies: a "third generation" of Soviet space history, one that builds on the rich trove of the first and second generations but is primarily based on documentary evidence. During the Soviet era, historians could not write history based on documents since they could not obtain access to state and design bureau archives. As the Soviet Union began to fall apart, historians such as Georgiy Vetrov began to take the first steps in document-based history. Vetrov, a former engineer at Korolev's design bureau, eventually compiled and published two extraordinary collections of primary documents relating to Korolev's legacy.24 Now that all the state archives in Moscow—such as the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN)—are open to researchers, more results of this "third generation" are beginning to appear. German historians such as Matthias Uhl and Christoph Mick and those in the United States such as myself have been fortunate to work in Russian archives.25 I would also note the enormous contributions of the Russian monthly journal Novosti kosmonavtiki [News of Cosmonautics] as well as the Belgian historian Bart Hendrickx in advancing the state of Soviet space history. The new work has opened opportunities for future research. For example, we no longer have to guess about the government's decision to approve development of the Soyuz spacecraft; we can see the original decree issued on 4 December 1963.26 Similarly, instead of speculating about the famous decree of 3 August 1964 that committed the Soviet Union to competing with the American Apollo program, we can study the actual government document issued on that date.27 Academician Chertok deserves much credit for opening the doors for future historians, since his memoirs have guided many to look even deeper.
The distribution of material spanning the four volumes of Chertok's memoirs is roughly chronological. In the first English volume, Chertok describes his childhood, his formative years as an engineer at the aviation Plant No. 22 in Fili, his experiences during World War II, and the mission to Germany in 1945-46 to study captured German missile technology.
In the second volume, he continues the story with his return to the Soviet Union, the reproduction of a Soviet version of the German V-2 and the development of a domestic Soviet rocket industry at the famed NII-88 institute in the Moscow suburb of Podlipki (now called Korolev). He describes the development of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R-7; the launch of Sputnik; and the first-generation probes sent to the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
In the third volume, he begins with the historic flight of Yuriy Gagarin, the first human in space. He discusses several different aspects of the burgeoning Soviet missile and space programs of the early 1960s, including the development of early ICBMs, reconnaissance satellites, the Cuban missile crisis, the first Soviet communications satellite Molniya-1, the early spectacular missions of the Vostok and Voskhod programs, the dramatic Luna program to land a probe on the Moon, and Sergey Korolev's last days. He then continues into chapters about the early development of the Soyuz spacecraft, with an in-depth discussion of the tragic mission of Vladimir Komarov.
The fourth and final volume is largely devoted to the Soviet project to send cosmonauts to the Moon in the 1960s, covering all aspects of the development of the giant N-1 rocket. The last portion of this volume covers the origins of the Salyut and Mir space station programs, ending with a fascinating description of the massive Energiya-Buran project, developed as a countermeasure to the American Space Shuttle.
It was my great fortune to meet with Academician Chertok in the summer of 2003. During the meeting, Chertok, a sprightly 91 years old, spoke passionately and emphatically about his life's work and remained justifiably proud of the achievements of the Russian space program. As I left the meeting, I was reminded of something that Chertok had said in one of his first public interviews in 1987. In describing the contradictions of Sergey Korolev's personality, Chertok had noted: "This realist, this calculating, [and] farsighted individual was, in his soul, an incorrigible romantic."28 Such a description would also be an apt encapsulation of the contradictions of the entire Soviet drive to explore space, one which was characterized by equal amounts of hardheaded realism and romantic idealism. Academician Boris Yevseyevich Chertok has communicated that idea very capably in his memoirs, and it is my hope that we have managed to do justice to his own vision by bringing that story to an English-speaking audience.
Asif A. Siddiqi
Series Editor
October 2004
1. John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
2. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Documents on International Aspects of the Exploration and Uses of Outer Space, 1954—1962, 88th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 18 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), pp. 202-204.
3. See, for example, his article "Chelovek or avtomat?" ["Human or Automation?"] in the book M. Vasilyev, ed., Shagi k zvezdam [Footsteps to the Stars] (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1972), pp. 281-287.
4. B. Konovalov, "Ryvok k zvezdam" ["Dash to the Stars"], Izvestiya (1 October 1987): 3.
5. B. Chertok, "Lider" ["Leader"], Aviatsiya i kosmonavtika no. 1 (1988): 30-31 and no. 2 (1988): 40-41.
6. For early references to Korolev's imprisonment, see Ye. Manucharova, "Kharakter glavnogo konstruktora" ["The Character of the Chief Designer"], Izvestiya (11 January 1987): 3. For early revelations on Soyuz-1 and the Moon program, see L. N. Kamanin, "Zvezdy Komarova" ["Komarov's Star"], Poisk no. 5 (June 1989): 4-5, and L. N. Kamanin, "S zemli na lunu i obratno" ["From the Earth to the Moon and Back"], Poisk no. 12 (July 1989): 7-8.
7. Izvestiya correspondent Boris Konovalov prepared these publications, which had the general title "U Sovetskikh raketnykh triumfov bylo nemetskoye nachalo" ["Soviets Rocket Triumphs Had German Origins"]. See Izvestiya, 4 March 1992, p. 5; 5 March 1992, p. 5; 6 March 1992, p. 5; 7 March 1992, p. 5; and 9 March 1992, p. 3. Konovalov also published a sixth article on the German contribution to American rocketry. See "U amerikanskikh raketnykh triumfov takzhe bylo nemetskoye nachalo" ["American Rocket Triumphs Also Had German Origins"], Izvestiya (10 March 1992): 7. Konovalov later synthesized the five original articles into a longer work that included the reminiscences of other participants in the German mission such as Vladimir Barmin and Vasiliy Mishin. See Boris Konovalov, Tayna Sovetskogo raketnogo oruzhiya [Secrets of Soviet Rocket Armaments] (Moscow: ZEVS, 1992).
8. Rakety i lyudi [Rockets and People] (Moscow: Mashinostroyeniye, 1994); Rakety i lyudi: Fili Podlipki Tyuratam [Rockets and People: Fili Podlipki Tyuratam] (Moscow: Mashinostroyeniye, 1996); Rakety i lyudi: goryachiye dni kholodnoy voyny [Rockets and People: Hot Days of the Cold War] (Moscow: Mashinostroyeniye, 1997); Rakety i lyudi: lunnaya gonka [Rockets and People: The Moon Race] (Moscow: Mashinostroyeniye, 1999). All four volumes were subsequently translated and published in Germany.
9. For the problem of rape in occupied Germany after the war, see Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945—1949 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 69-140.
10. For the two most important histories of the Soviet military-industrial complex, see N. S. Simonov, Voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks SSSR v 1920-1950-yegody: tempy ekonomicheskogo rosta, struktura, organizatsiya proizvodstva i upravleniye [The Military-Industrial Complex of the USSR in the 1920s to 1950s: Rate of Economic Growth, Structure, Organization of Production and Control] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), and I. V. Bystrova, Voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks sssr v gody kholodnoy voyny (vtorayapolovina 40-kh — nachalo 60-kh godov) [The Military-Industrial Complex of the USSR in the Years of the Cold War (The Late 1940s to the Early 1960s)] (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2000). For a history in English that builds on these seminal works and complements them with original research, see John Barber and Mark Harrison, eds., The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (Houndmills, U.K.: Macmillan Press, 2000).
11. Yu. A. Mozzhorin et al., eds., Dorogi v kosmos: Vospominaniya veteranov raketno-kosmicheskoy tekhniki i kosmonavtiki, tom I i II [Roads to Space: Recollections of Veterans of Rocket-Space Technology and Cosmonautics: Volumes I and II] (Moscow: MAI, 1992), and Yu. A. Mozzhorin et al., eds., Nachalo kosmicheskoy ery: vospominaniya veteranov raketno-kosmicheskoy tekhniki i kosmonavtiki: vypusk vtoroy [ The Beginning of the Space Era: Recollections of Veterans of Rocket-Space Technology and Cosmonautics: Second Issue] (Moscow: RNITsKD, 1994). For a poorly translated and edited English version of the series, see John Rhea, ed., Roads to Space: An Oral History of the Soviet Space Program (New York: Aviation Week Group, 1995).
12. For key works on the history of Soviet science and technology, see Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917—1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
13. For the American historical discipline's relationship to the changing standards of objectivity, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity" Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
14. For technological hubris, see for example, Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
15. V. M. Filin, Vospominaniya o lunnom korablye [Recollections on the Lunar Ship] (Moscow: Kultura, 1992); Kerim Kerimov, Dorogi v kosmos (zapiski predsedatelya Gosudarstvennoy komissii) [Roads to Space (Notes of the Chairman of the State Commission)] (Baku, Azerbaijan: 1995); V. M. Filin, Put k 'Energii' [Path to Energiya] (Moscow: 'GRAAL',' 1996); V. P. Mishin, Ot sozdaniya ballisticheskikh raket k raketno-kosmicheskomu mashinostroyeniyu [From the Creation of the Ballistic Rocket to Rocket-Space Machine Building] (Moscow: 'Inform-Znaniye,' 1998); B. I. Gubanov, Triumf i tragediya 'energii': razmyshleniyaglavnogo konstruktora [The Triumph andTragedy of Energiya: The Reflections of a Chief Designer] (Nizhniy novgorod: NIER, four volumes in 19982000); Konstantin Feoktistov, Trayektoriya zhizni: mezhdu vchera i zavtra [Life's Trajectory: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow1] (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000); N. A. Anifimov, ed., Tak eto bylo—Memuary Yu. A. Mozzhorin: Mozzhorin v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov [How It Was—Memoirs of Yu. A. Mozzhorin: Mozzhorin in the Recollections of His Contemporaries] (Moscow: ZAO 'Mezhdunarodnaya programma obrazovaniya, 2000).
16. Yaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: fakty i mify [Korolev: Facts and Myths] (Moscow: Nauka, 1994); Yu. P. Semenov, ed., Raketno-Kosmicheskaya Korporatsiya "Energiya"imeni S. P. Koroleva [ Energiya Rocket-Space Corporation Named After S. P. Korolev] (Korolev: RKK Energiya, 1996); V. V. Favorskiy and I. V. Meshcheryakov, eds., Voyenno-kosmicheskiye sily (voyenno-istoricheskiy trud): kniga I [Military-Space Forces (A Military-Historical Work): Book I] (Moscow: VKS, 1997). Subsequent volumes were published in 1998 and 2001.
17. The first published volume was N. P. Kamanin, Skrytiy kosmos: knigapervaya, 1960—1963 gg. [Hidden Space: Book One, 1960—1963] (Moscow: Infortekst IF, 1995). Subsequent volumes covering 1964-66, 1967-68, and 1969-78 were published in 1997, 1999, and 2001 respectively.
18. Sergey N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Roald Z. Sagdeyev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993); James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).
19. Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945—1974 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2000-4408, 2000). The book was republished as a two-volume work as Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003) and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003).
20. Steven J. Zaloga, The Kremlins Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945—2000 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
21. G. V. Dyadin, D. N. Filippovykh, and V. I. Ivkin, Pamyatnyyestarty [MemorableLaunches] (Moscow: TsIPK, 2001), p. 69.
22. A. V. Korotkov, A. D. Chernev, and A. A. Chernobayev, "Alfavitnyi ukazatel posetitelei kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina" ["Alphabetical List of Visitors to the Kremlin Office of I. V. Stalin"], Istoricheskii arkhiv no. 4 (1998): 50.
23. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlins Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 172; Golovanov, Korolev, p. 454. For the correct citation on the Second Main Directorate, established on 27 December 1949, see Simonov, Voyenno-promyshlennyy komples sssr, pp. 225-226.
24. M. V. Keldysh, ed., Tvorcheskoye naslediyeAkademika SergeyaPavlovichaKoroleva: izbrannyye trudy i dokumenty [ The Creative Legacy of Sergey Pavlovich Korolev: Selected Works and Documents] (Moscow: Nauka, 1980); G. S. Vetrov and B. V. Raushenbakh, eds., S. P. Korolev i ego delo: svet i teni v istorii kosmonavtiki: izbrannyye trudy i dokumenty [S. P. Korolev and His Cause: Shadow and Light in the History of Cosmonautics] (Moscow: Nauka, 1998). For two other published collections of primary documents, see V. S. Avduyevskiy and T. M. Eneyev, eds. M. V. Keldysh: izbrannyye trudy: raketnaya tekhnika i kosmonavtika [M. V. Keldysh: Selected Works: Rocket Technology and Cosmonautics] (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), and B. V. Raushenbakh, ed., Materialypo istorii kosmicheskogo korablya 'vostok': k 30-letiyupervogopoleta cheloveka v kosmicheskoyeprostranstvo [Materials on the History of the 'Vostok' Space Ship: On the 30th Anniversary of the First Flight of a Human in Space] (Moscow: Nauka, 1991).
25. Matthias Uhl, Stalins V-2: Der Technolgietransfer der deutschen Fernlen-kwaffentechnik in die UdSSR undder Aufbau der sowjetischen Raketenindustrie 1945 bis 1959 (Bonn, Germany: Bernard & Graefe-Verlag, 2001); Christoph Mick, Forschen fur Stalin: Deutsche Fachleute in der sowjetischen Rustungsindustrie 1945—1958 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000); AsifA. Siddiqi, "The Rockets' Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957" (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004).
26. "O sozdaniia kompleksa 'Soyuz' " ["On the Creation of the Soyuz Complex"], 4 December 1963, RGAE, f. 298, op. 1, d. 3495, ll. 167-292.
27. "Tsentralnyy komitet KPSS i Sovet ministrov SSSR, postanovleniye" ["Central Committee KPSS and SSSR Council of Ministers Decree"], 3 August 1964, RGAE, f. 29, op. 1, d. 3441, ll. 299-300. For an English-language summary, see Asif A. Siddiqi, "A Secret Uncovered: The Soviet Decision to Land Cosmonauts on the Moon," Spaceflight 46 (2004): 205-213.
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Introduction to Volume IV
In this, the fourth and final volume of his memoirs, Boris Chertok concludes his monumental trek through a nearly 100-year life. As with the previous English-language volumes, the text has been significantly modified and extended over the original Russian versions published in the 1990s. The first volume covered his childhood, early career, and transformation into a missile engineer by the end of World War II. In the second volume, he took the story up through the birth of the postwar Soviet ballistic-missile program and then the launch of the world's artificial satellite, Sputnik. This was followed, in the third volume, by a description of the early and spectacular successes of the Soviet space program in the 1960s, including such unprecedented achievements as the flight of cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin. The fourth volume concludes his memoirs on the history of the Soviet space program with a lengthy meditation on the failed Soviet human lunar program and then brings the story to a close with the events of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
In the summer of 1989, Soviet censors finally allowed journalists to write about an episode of Soviet history that had officially never happened: the massive Soviet effort to compete with Apollo in the 1960s to land a human being on the Moon. U.S. President John F. Kennedy had laid down the gauntlet in a speech in May 1961 to recover some of the self-confidence lost by the series of Soviet successes in space in the wake of Sputnik. Kennedy's challenge was embodied in an enormous investment in human spaceflight in the 1960s and culminated in the landing of NASA astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., on the surface of the Moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.
Although a number of Western analysts and observers (not to mention U.S. intelligence analysts) suspected that the Soviets had been in the race to the Moon, Soviet spokespersons officially disavowed or rejected the notion that they had tried to preempt the Americans. This facade eventually cracked at the height of glasnost ("openness") in the late 1980s. In the summer of 1989, Soviet censors permitted the publication of a number of articles and books that admitted the existence of a human lunar program in the 1960s.1 As more and more information emerged in the early 1990s, some salient features began to emerge: that the program had been massive, that it had involved the development of a super booster known as the N-1, that all efforts to beat the Americans had failed, and that evidence of the program had been whitewashed out of existence.2
It has become increasingly clear to historians that it would be impossible to understand the early history of the Soviet space program without accounting for the motivations and operations of the human lunar landing program. By the late 1960s, the N1-L3 project constituted about 20 percent of annual budget expenditures on Soviet space exploration; by some estimates, total spending on the Moon program may have been about 4 to 4.5 billion rubles, which roughly translated to about 12 to 13.5 billion dollars in early 1970s numbers.3
But beyond the numbers, the program was undoubtedly one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the Soviet space program. During the eventful and troubled period that Chertok covers in this volume, from about 1968 to 1974, the Korolev design bureau, now led by the talented but flawed Vasiliy Mishin, stumbled from one setback to another. The heart of the program during these years was the giant N-1 rocket, a massive and continually evolving technological system whose development was hobbled by difficult compromises in technical approaches, fighting between leading chief designers, lack of money, and an absence of commitment from the Soviet military, the primary operator of Soviet space infrastructure.
Chertok begins his narrative with a discussion of the origins of the N-1 in the early 1960s and the acrimonious disagreement between Sergey Korolev, the chief designer of spacecraft and launch vehicles, and Valentin Glushko, the chief designer of liquid-propellant rocket engines. On one level, theirs was a disagreement over arcane technical issues, particularly over the choice of propellants for the N-1, but at a deeper level, the dispute involved fundamental differences over the future of the Soviet space program. Korolev and Glushko's differences over propellants date back to the 1930s when Glushko had embraced storable, hypergolic, and toxic propellants for his innovative engines. By the 1940s, Korolev, meanwhile, had begun to favor cryogenic propellants and believed that a particular cryogenic combination, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, was the most efficient way forward. Korolev was not alone in this belief. In the United States, NASA had invested significant amounts in developing such engines, but Glushko had an important ally on his side, the military. When Korolev and Glushko refused to come to an agreement, a third party, Nikolay Kuznetsov's design bureau in the city of Kuybyshev (now Samara), was tasked with the critical assignment to develop the engines of the N-1.
Having known both Korolev and Glushko, Chertok has much to say about the relationship between the two giants of the Soviet space program. Contrary to much innuendo that their relationship was marred by the experience of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Chertok shows that they enjoyed a collegial and friendly rapport well into the 1950s. He reproduces a congratulatory telegram (in Chapter 3) from Korolev to Glushko upon the latter's election as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. It obviously reflects a warmth and respect in their relationship that completely disappeared by the early 1960s as the N-1 program ground down in rancorous meetings and angry memos.
Chertok has much to say about the development of the so-called KORD system, designed to control and synchronize the operation of the 42 engines on the first three changes of the giant rocket (see Chapters 5 and 7, especially). One of the main challenges of developing the N-1's engines was the decision to forego integrated ground testing of the first stage, a critical lapse in judgment that could have saved the engineers from the many launch accidents.
Chertok's descriptions of the four launches of the N-1 (two in 1969, one in 1971, and one in 1972) are superb. He delves into great technical detail but also brings into relief all the human emotions of the thousands of engineers, managers, and servicemen and -women involved in these massive undertakings. His accounts are particularly valuable for giving details of the process of investigations into the disasters, thus providing a unique perspective into how the technical frequently intersected with the political and the personal. His account in Chapter 17 of the investigation into the last N-1 failure in 1972 confirms that the process was fractured by factional politics, one side representing the makers of the rocket (the Mishin design bureau) and other representing the engine makers (the Kuznetsov design bureau). Some from the former, such as Vasiliy Mishin, made the critical error of allying themselves with the latter, which contributed to their downfall. Historians have plenty of examples of the impossibility of separating out such technological, political, and personal factors in the function of large-scale technological systems, but Chertok's descriptions give a previously unseen perspective into the operation of Soviet "Big Science."4
Chertok devotes a lengthy portion of the manuscript (five chapters!) to the emergence of the piloted space station program from 1969 to 1971. We see how the station program, later called Salyut, was essentially a "rebel" movement within the Mishin design bureau to salvage something substantive in the aftermath of two failed launches of the N-1. These "rebels," who included Chertok himself, were able to appropriate hardware originally developed for a military space station program known as Almaz—developed by the design bureau of Vladimir Chelomey—and use it as a foundation to develop a "quick" civilian space station. This act effectively redirected resources from the faltering human lunar program into a new stream of work—piloted Earth orbital stations—that became the mainstay of the Soviet (and later Russian) space program for the next 40 years. The station that Mishin's engineers designed and launched—the so-called Long-Duration Orbital Station (DOS)—became the basis for the series of Salyut stations launched in the 1970s and 1980s, the core of the Mir space station launched in 1986, and eventually the Zvezda core of the International Space Station (ISS). In that respect, Chertok's story is extremely important; when historians write the history of ISS, they will have to go back to the events of 1969 and 1970 to understand how and why the Russian segments look and operate the way they do.
Chertok's account of the dramatic mission of Soyuz-11 in the summer of 1971 is particularly moving. The flight began with an episode that would haunt the living: in the days leading up the launch, the primary crew of Aleksey Leonov, Valeriy Kubasov, and Petr Kolodin were replaced by the backup crew of Georgiy Dobrovolskiy, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev when Kubasov apparently developed a problem in his lungs. The original backup crew flew the mission and dealt with some taxing challenges such as a fire on board the station and personality conflicts, and then they were tragically killed on reentry when the pressurized atmosphere of the Soyuz spacecraft was sucked out due to an unexpected leak. The funeral of these three cosmonauts was made all the more painful for, only days before, Chertok had lost one of his closest lifelong friends, the engine chief designer Aleksey Isayev (see Chapter 16).
A chapter near the end of the manuscript is devoted to the cataclysmic changes in the management of the Soviet space program that took place in 1974: Mishin was fired from his post, the giant Korolev and Glushko organizations were combined into a single entity known as NPO Energiya, and Glushko was put in charge. These changes also coincided with the suspension of the N-1 program and the beginning of what would evolve in later years into the Energiya-Buran reusable space transportation system, another enormously expensive endeavor that would yield very little for the Soviet space program. Since the early 1990s, there have appeared many conflicting accounts of this turning point in 1974, but Chertok's description adds a useful perspective on the precise evolution from the death of the N-1 to the beginning of Energiya-Buran.5 A recent collection of primary source documents on Glushko's engineering work suggests that Glushko came to the table with incredibly ambitious plans to replace the N-1 and that these plans had to be downsized significantly by the time that the final decree on the system was issued in February 1976.6
In a final chapter (Chapter 18) on the later years of the Soviet space program, Chertok picks through a number of important episodes to highlight the tension between human and automatic control of human spacecraft. These included the failed Soyuz-2/3 docking in 1968, the short-lived flight of DOS-3 (known as Kosmos-557) in 1973, a series of failed dockings of crews flying to Salyut space stations (including Soyuz-15 in 1974, Soyuz-23 in 1976, and Soyuz-25 in 1977) as well as successful dockings (including Soyuz T-2 in 1980 and Soyuz T-6in 1982). All of these accounts underscore the enormous investments the Soviets made in rendezvous and docking systems and procedures that have paid off in the ISS era, when no Russian spacecraft has ever failed to ultimately dock with its target.
On the human dimensions of the Soviet space program, Chertok shows a rare ability to make small incidents both evocative and poignant. In Chapter 8, for example, he describes how, during a break while controlling a space mission in 1968, Chertok and his colleagues visited Sevastopol, the site of some of the most brutal fighting during World War II. When a war veteran noticed that Chertok had a "Hero of Socialist Labor" medal pinned on his lapel, he inquired as to why. Chertok explained that he had been honored for his role in the flight of Yuriy Gagarin. Given that Chertok's identity and job were state secrets, this was a rare moment of candor; bursting with pride, the war veteran eloquently equated the sacrifices made during the war with Soviet successes in space, a connection that many made during the 1960s.
I am often asked by interested readers about the relative worth of Chertok's memoirs in the literature on the history of the Soviet space program; in other words, where do these memoirs fit in the broader historiography? Chertok's memoirs stand as probably the most important personal account of the history of the Soviet space program. His ability to integrate technical detail, human yearning, high politics, and institutional history makes Rockets and People unusual for a memoir of the genre; the breadth of Chertok's recollections, covering nearly 100 years, makes it unique. As I have mentioned elsewhere, in the absence of any syncretic work by a professional historian in the Russian language on the history of the Soviet space program, the contents of Rockets and People represent probably the most dominant narrative available.7 Its availability in both Russian and English means that it will have a significant and enduring quality. That Chertok's memoirs are taken to be important and reliable does not mean, however, that it is the only narrative of this history worth considering. In underscoring the significance of Chertok, we should also acknowledge the abundance of other memoirs by Soviet space veterans. Collectively considered, they provide an extremely rich resource for historians. If Chertok represents the starting point for future researchers, I would recommend some other memoirs as crucial both in filling in spaces unexplored by Chertok and in providing a counterpoint to Chertok, especially on those events considered controversial. In this category of essential memoirs, I would include those by the following individuals:
• Vladimir Bugrov, the designer under Korolev (The Martian Project of S. P. Korolev, 2006);8
• Konstantin Feoktistov, the cosmonaut who played a key role in the design of Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, and DOS (Life's Trajectory, 2000);9
• Oleg Ivanovskiy, the engineer and bureaucrat (Rockets and Space in the USSR, 2005);10
• Vyacheslav Filin, the designer under Korolev (Recollections on the Lunar Vehicle, 1992, and The Road to Energiya, 2001);11
• Boris Gubanov, the chief designer of the Energiya rocket (The Triumph and Tragedy of Energiya: Reflections of a Chief Designer, four volumes in 1999);12
• Aleksey Isayev, the rocket engine designer (First Steps to Space Engines, 1979);13
• Kerim Kerimov, the chairman of the State Commission (Roads to Space, 1995);14
• Sergey Khrushchev, the son of the Soviet Party Secretary (Nikita Khrushchev: Crises and Rockets, 1994);15
• Grigoriy Kisunko, the chief designer of antiballistic missile systems (The Secret Zone, 1996);16
• Sergey Kryukov, the leading designer of the N-1 rocket (Selected Works, 2010);17
• Vasiliy Mishin, the successor to Korolev (From the Creation of Ballistic Missiles to Rocket-Space Machine Building, 1998);18
• Yuriy Mozzhorin, the head of the leading space research institute (How It Was: The Memoirs of Yuriy Mozzhorin, 2000);19
• Arkadiy Ostashev, the senior operations manager (Testing of Rocket-Space Technology—The Business of My Life, 2001);20
• Boris Pokrovskiy, the senior official in the communications network (Space Begins on the Ground, 1996);21
• Valentina Ponomareva, the female cosmonaut trainee (A Female Face in Space, 2002);22
• Vladimir Polyachenko, the leading designer under Vladimir Chelomey (On the Sea and in Space, 2008);23
• Vladimir Shatalov, the senior cosmonaut and cosmonaut manager (Space Workdays, 2008);24
• Vladimir Syromyatnikov, the docking system designer under Korolev (100 Conversations on Docking and on Other Rendezvous in Space and on the Earth, 2003); 25 and
• Vladimir Yazdovskiy, the senior space biomedicine specialist (On the Paths of the Universe, 1996). 26
I would also include in this category volumes that collect the recollections of dozens of key actors in the Soviet missile and space programs:
• Academician S. P. Korolev: Scientist, Engineer, Man (1986);27 and
• Roads to Space (three volumes in 1992 and 1994).28
In addition to these memoirs, a stream of highly valuable collections of primary documents has been published in Russia in recent times. These volumes are essential starting points for anyone conducting a serious investigation into the history of the Soviet space program. While one must exercise prudence in the use of published documents—particularly the obvious problem of selection bias—these volumes are excellent starting points for historians. In chronological order, they include the following:
• Pioneers of Rocket Technology: Vetchinkin Glushko Korolev Tikhonravov: Selected Works, which contains many documents on the early years (1972);29
• Path to Rocket Technology: Selected Works, 1924—1946, on the works of Valentin Glushko, (1977);30
• The Creative Legacy of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev: Selected Works and Documents, a pre-glasnost volume that has held up remarkably well (1980);31
• M. V. Keldysh: Selected Works: Rocket Technology and Cosmonautics, containing important documents on early ICBM development (1988);32
• S. P. Korolev and His Affairs: Light and Shadow in the History of Cosmonautics: Selected Works and Documents, an indispensable collection of documents on the early history of the Soviet space program (1998);33
• The Tender Letters of a Hardheaded Man: From the Archive of the Academician S. P. Korolev Memorial House-Museum, a collection of letters Korolev wrote to his wife during his life (2007);34
• The Soviet Space Initiative in Government Documents, 1946—1964, probably the best in the list, which includes many declassified documents from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (2008);35
• Selected Works of Academician V. P. Glushko, which collects a vast amount of original documents on Valentin Glushko's entire career (2008);36
• A Goal of Special State Importance: From the History of the Creation of Rocket-Nuclear Armaments and the Strategic Rocket Forces (1945—1959), a collection of declassified documents on the development of ballistic missiles in the postwar period (2010);37
• Man. Ship. Space: A Collection of Documents on the 50th Anniversary of the Spaceflight of Yu. A. Gagarin, an 874-page collection of documents about the creation of the Vostok spacecraft, the training of the first cosmonauts, and the flight of Gagarin (2011);38
• The First Piloted Flight, a two-volume work collecting government documents from 1946 to 1961 on all aspects of the early Soviet space program but focusing particularly on the Vostok and Vostok-2 missions in 1961 (2011);39 and
• Soviet Space: A Special Edition on the 50th Anniversary of the Flight of Yuriy Gagarin, a 720-page compendium of declassified government documents on all aspects of the Soviet space program from 1955 to 1966 (2011).40 Certainly, one should also include in this category the four-volume set of diaries of Nikolay Kamanin, the Air Force representative in charge of cosmonaut training from 1960 to 1971. These volumes have been published under the general title Hidden Space.41 This brief list should give the reader a sense of the richness of the literature on Soviet space history but no one should have any doubt that Chertok's memoirs are the starting point. It is the foundation upon which all the others rest.
I'd like to conclude this final introduction with a few words on the implementation of this enormous project. Working on this series for the past eight years has been an extraordinary honor and pleasure for me. I owe a debt of gratitude to many for their hard work in bringing these stories to the English-speaking world. As before, I must thank NASA historian Steve Garber, who supervised the entire project at the NASA History Program Office. He also provided insightful comments at every stage of the editorial process. Former NASA Chief Historians Roger D. Launius and Steven J. Dick supported the birth of the project with firm hands, and their eventual successor, William P. Barry, enthusiastically brought it to its completion. Bill read the entire manuscript carefully and offered many useful suggestions. Thanks are due to Jesco von Puttkamer at NASA for his sponsorship of the project. He also facilitated communications between the two parties in Russia and the United States and tirelessly promoted Rockets and People at home and abroad. Without his enthusiasm, sponsorship, and support, this project would not have been possible. I'd also like to thank Nadine Andreassen at the NASA History Program Office for her support throughout the past eight years. NASA History Program Office intern Anna J. Stolitzka is also due some thanks.
We were very fortunate to have a capable team of translators at the award-winning Houston-based TechTrans International to facilitate this project. Their team included translators/editors Cynthia Reiser, Laurel Nolen, Alexandra Tussing, and Ksenia Shelkova, as well as document control specialists Lev Genson and Yulia Schmalholz.
Thanks also are due to those who handled the post-editorial stage of the work at the Communications Support Services Center (CSSC) at NASA Headquarters: editors George Gonzalez and Lisa Jirousek; designer Chris Yates; printing specialist Tun Hla; supervisors Gail Carter-Kane and Cindy Miller; and civil servant Michael Crnkovic.
Every one of these aforementioned individuals put in long, hard hours to ensure that we produced the best product possible.
I would like to thank David R. Woods and Alexander Shliadinsky for kindly contributing supplementary images for Volume IV. Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the collection of Chertok.
As the series editor, my job was first and foremost to ensure that the English language version was as faithful to Chertok's original Russian version as possible. At the same time, I also had to account for the stylistic considerations of English-language readers who may be put off by literal translations. The process involved communicating directly with Chertok in many cases and, with his permission, occasionally taking liberties to restructure a text to convey his original spirit. I also made sure that technical terms and descriptions of rocket and spacecraft design satisfied the demands of both Chertok and the English-speaking audience. Readers should be aware that all weights and measures are
in the metric system; thus "tons" denotes metric tons (1,000 kg or 2,205 lbs) and not the English ton (2,240 lbs) or the American ton (2,000 lbs). Finally, I provided numerous explanatory footnotes to elucidate points that may not be evident to readers unversed in the intricacies of the Soviet space program, or Soviet history and culture in general. Readers should be aware that all of the footnotes are mine unless cited as "author's note," in which case they were provided by Chertok.
Asif A. Siddiqi
Series Editor
February 2011
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A Few Notes About Transliteration and Translation
The Russian language is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, which consists of 33 letters. While some of the sounds that these letters symbolize have equivalents in the English language, many have no equivalent, and two of the letters have no sound of their own, but instead "soften" or "harden" the preceding letter. Because of the lack of direct correlation, a number of systems for transliterating Russian (i.e., rendering words using the Latin alphabet), have been devised, all of them different.
For this series, editor Asif Siddiqi selected a modification of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names system, also known as the University of Chicago system, as he felt it better suited for a memoir such as Chertok's, where the intricacies of the Russian language are less important than accessibility to the reader. The modifications are as follows:
• The Russian letters "b" and "L" are not transliterated, in order to make reading easier.
• Russian letter "e" is denoted by the English "e" (or "ye" initially and after vowels)—hence, the transliteration "Korolev," though it is pronounced "Korolyov".
The reader may find some familiar names to be rendered in an unfamiliar way. This occurs when a name has become known under its phonetic spelling, such as "Yuri" versus the transliterated "Yuriy," or under a different transliteration system, such as "Baikonur" (LoC) versus "Baykonur" (USBGN).
In translating Rakety i lyudi, we on the TTI team strove to find the balance between faithfulness to the original text and clear, idiomatic English. For issues of technical nomenclature, we consulted with Asif Siddiqi to determine the standards for this series. The cultural references, linguistic nuances, and "old sayings" Chertok uses in his memoirs required a different approach from the technical passages. They cannot be translated literally: the favorite saying of Flight Mechanic Nikolay Godovikov (Vol. 1, Chapter 7) would mean nothing to an English speaker if given as "There was a ball, there is no ball" but makes perfect sense when translated as "Now you see it, now you don't." The jargon used by aircraft engineers and rocket engine developers in the 1930s and 1940s posed yet another challenge. At times, we had to do linguistic detective work to come up with a translation that conveyed both the idea and the "flavor" of the original. Puns and plays on words are explained in footnotes. Rakety i lyudi has been a very interesting project, and we have enjoyed the challenge of bringing Chertok's voice to the English-speaking world.