Roads to Space, An oral history of the Soviet space program.

Compiled by the Russian Scientific Research Center for Space Documentation

Translated by Peter Berlin, Edited by John Rhea

Aviation Week, ISBN 0-07-607095-6

Read: February 16, 1998 to January 1, 1999.

Reviewed: January 2, 1999

This material was originally published in Moscow in 1993 as three volumes. A. I. Radionov introduced the three Russian paperbacks to the translator, Berlin, who became engrossed in the story they told collectively and arranged for this text to be brought into English.

About fifty ranking officials during the development of the Soviet space program, from 1938 to 1978, basically give biographical anecdotes and stories from their points of view of what was happening after WW II while we and they were racing into space, and in parallel into the ability to lob nuclear missiles at each other.

I started into the volume during Jury Duty in February and found it a bit heavy for the constant-interruption bustle of the juror room. Over many months of spare-time reading, a story unfolded which is so similar to the American development of space in some ways that it is confusing. In some ways it reveals the Soviet mindset in ways that seem very strange to me, having always been a free-to-choose American with most weekends off and a belief in a God who was greater than I.

Some of the anecdotes are downright funny. One, in which a useless drill ends in a false-alarm fiasco and the State Commission gets soaked in a high-pressure fire department hose down is so hilarious that I couldn't stop laughing enough to read it to Viann in a half hour period. I put the story out on the internet for the entertainment of other friends.

Some are quite serious. Workers from various places, propulsion, radios, navigation, medical, etc. describe the launching of dogs into orbit and the successes and failures of boosters, and the life and death of cosmonauts and the peril to their own lives of making their high-power superiors angry or untrusting, which is easy among the Reds, apparently.

Sergei I. Korolyov is the central figure though he died in 1966 and is not among those interviewed himself. Everyone knew and admired him (his enemies are not on the contributor list either). Many were hand picked and nurtured (in a Soviet-Man sense) by him. He had a furious but controlled temper but knew when and who to trust and was the main organizing and technical force behind getting nuclear payloads delivered thousands of miles and objects into space, first satellites, then animals, then people. His death, a bureaucratic snafu of Soviet life in itself (due to Korolyov's importance, the chief of the surgical commission decided to perform the operation himself, then, finding cancer rather than just hemorrhoids, proceeded without equipment and supplies and managed to let him die on the operating table), basically defocused the Soviet moon effort, eventually allowing the N-1 program to be canceled. This was directly responsible for the American monopoly on moon flight in the early 70s.

In the middle of the book, the thought came to me (or was given by one of the fifty narrators) that just because the Russians "lost" the race, they didn't need to just quit as they did. How much different life and space exploration would be today if the Russians had gone on to the moon themselves and done their own research and staked their own claims! Viewed from 1999, the loss of Korolyov was a blow to the world's move into space, not just the Soviet one. But, he was nearly 60 then and everyone dies eventually. Some of the rest of us have to carry on, somehow.

In separate reading, I learned that both countries sacrificed many animals on non-recovery flights and, indeed the Soviets did not intend to lose Laika the dog, but merely did so through a guidance error. For such regimented people, they sure make big mistakes. So much for the value of strict, approved procedure.

One gets well acquainted with Nedylin, chair of the State Commission that oversaw the whole effort. He was the ranking casualty October 24, 1960 when the second stage of a fully fueled rocket ignited improperly on the pad and the whole thing blew up, melting roads in front of it and killing 92. Some, including some of the authors, were saved only through the expedient of being in the blockhouse at the time, or from having momentarily stepped behind a wall, or in some other safe place.

Many heroic deeds were done. People would walk up to firing rockets on test stands and pull something out in order to shut them off. A rocket on a test stand cut a long trench through some leader's summer house back yard, luckily without killing anybody.

Conditions at the launch sites and tracking sites and recovery sites were quite harsh, except by Antarctic standards. Tyura-Tam, a.k.a. Kapustin Yar, now known as Baikonur, is a place of temperature extremes, dangerous wildlife, floods and flatness. The people were housed in railroad cars at first then crude dormitories, but the workers themselves rarely went home. On many occasions, they worked six days straight, sometimes with only one break for sleep, and went home only on the seventh (presumably Sunday) for a bath before starting again. It is no wonder that they were able to put up Sputnik on October 4, 1958, then Laika in November!

A tradition of cosmonauts planting trees started in the area. Many non-brute-force innovations (like the four point, gravity-retracting rocket suspension that falls back at liftoff) made their budget rocket program possible. And they still use a Gagarin rocket derivative, the Proton, as their main workhorse on missions today.

Korolyov would send the KGB to find people on leave when they were needed. Payloads would malfunction and, on a budget, they would go out in airplanes and helicopters into the worst of Asiatic conditions to locate capsules, then at risk of their lives, disarm them and recover the dogs or other payloads. They make no secret that they lost cosmonauts due to several malfunctions and had several more close calls. There is no corroboration for stories that some Soviet "experiments" might have been lost in space even before Gagarin.

April 12, 1961 was the day they launched Gagarin. It is now "Cosmonautics Day" in Russia and “Yuri’s Night” worldwide. The Americans needed competition like this to focus their greater resources and equal abilities on something astounding. The Soviets, with much less in the way of resources (after all, every single procurement is bungled in the same way that we in government do things here, but there it is everywhere) still have great talent, self-denial, and perseverance. And they have the skill to avoid being killed for doing their job and making occasional mistakes. Their main motivation seemed to be to deploy a "Nuclear Shield" around their "Motherland" against the Great Enemy, the Americans. This is about the only context in which these people mention the Americans. The narratives only focus on what they, the Russians did and don't even mention Shepherd, Glenn or Armstrong or even Explorer I except in footnotes.

Having and mentioning this book has made it popular among my acquaintances. This is a good thing, seeing that it costs $50. I'm going to mail it to Ralph Wallio next and after that, Allen Farrington has a chit in to borrow it, but once it makes the rounds, it is one of the few that comes back to my reference shelf. With its fair to good index, I may need to refer to it in forming opinions about the past, or future, in the future.

Postscript 2007 June 26. This book is on loan to Paul Chodas now and probably always will be. cbd