It's said that around 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project to land a
man on the moon and apart from the astronauts themselves how many people
spring to mind when you think about who designed it who oversaw its construction
operation no one I can think of that was all done within the corporate
contractors.
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union there were many great scientists and engineers but
at the core of the Soviet space industry at the height of a space race three men
would come to dominate and set the pace driving forward innovation exploration
and putting the Americans on the back foot for years but ultimately through
their own infighting and favoritism it would also lead to the failure of the
Soviets to put a man on the moon. Whilst the design and construction of the
hardware on the US side was done by the major defense corporations for profit
and the Stalin's Soviet leadership a free market was seen as unequal and
wasteful projects were assigned to a range of design bureaus by the
government to a central plan to best use for resources available but as George
Orwell once said in Animal Farm "All animals are equal but some animals are
more equal than others". If the head of a design bureau was "in" with the current
leadership then their projects were often looked on more favorably who ever
or not they might be the best solution for a job. Soviet scientists conducted
their research at independent departments referred to by the codename
OKB which translates as experimental design bureau. If an aspiring engineer or
scientist came up with an outstanding idea or showed a great aptitude for the
work and he had the right connections they might be put in charge of their own
design bureau. The design bureaus were medium sized organizations tasked with
coming up with ideas and prototypes that would then be passed on to larger
factories to be made however in the space industry volumes were very low so
these design bureaus would build the entire projects like rockets in house
but still subcontracting the subsystems like the engines and control systems etc
from other design bureaus. Each design bureau had a code number in an attempt
to conceal the identity of a factory from foreign intelligence but internally
the bureau bore the name of its chief designer men who were ultimately held
responsible for the successes and failures under their command the largest
rocket engine design was OKB-1 led by the most famous figure
in the history of Soviet rocketry Sergey Korolyov the mastermind of Sputnik,
Vostok, the lunar probes as well as the first animal in space like of a dog, the
first man in space Yuri Gagarin and the massive N1 rocket, the Soviets version of
the Americans Saturn 5. For someone so powerful even at the height of his
career Korolyov's identity was a closely guarded secret from everyone outside the
upper echelon of power because they feared foreign agents would attempt to
assassinate him. To the world and even to many cosmonauts Korolyov was known only
by his initials or as the chief designer. As a youngster in the early Soviet Union
Corellia was interested in aeronautical engineering. When he was 22 he started at
the OPO-4 aircraft design bureau and by the time he was 30 he was the lead
designer of the Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber. When he was 23 he and a friend
Friedrich Zander created the group for a study of reactive motion or GRID, one of
the first state-sponsored rocket development centers. This was then merged
with the gas dynamics lab to create Reaction Engines Scientific Research institute
or RNII and this is where he would meet the second of our three
valentin glushko, a talented rocket engine designer and
life would take a turn for the worst for all concerned.
When Stalins great purges swept through the nation in 1937 the patron of
the RNII Marshall Tukhachevsky was sentenced to
death as an enemy of the people. On the 13th of June the Inquisition found its
way to Korolev's Bureau as Glushko was accused of being an anti-soviet
co-conspirator and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. Here under torture
Glushko denounced Korolev in return for a shorter sentence Korolev was
sentenced to 10 years of hard labor and was transported to the Kolyma gold
mine a gulag in Siberia. But soon both men's expertise was needed again in the
fight against the Nazis. Glushko had an easier path and
although he was still a prisoner who was given his own design bureau developing
liquid rocket engines with other prisoner scientists and engineers. In
1940 Korolev was brought back to work in a 'sharashka' or prison camp design
bureau in Omsk and then moved to another one in Kazan and Korolev
found himself working under the direction of none other than valentin
Glushko the man who had betrayed him. After the
war and despite the animosity between them Korolev and Glushko worked on
new rocket designs by now Glushko was the head of his own OKB-456 Bureau
and the Soviets leading rocket engine designer. Meanwhile Korolev was tasked
with dismantling and reverse engineering but captured German V2 rockets at his
NII-88 Bureau which soon became known as OKB-1. In february 1953 Korolev was asked
to scale up his tests to build the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a
launch vehicle capable of lifting a three ton warhead to an intercontinental
trajectory covering 8,000 kilometers or 5,000 miles far enough to hit targets in
the US mainland. Korolev envisioned a staged rocket
with four boosters surrounding a central core on each of these a huge main engine
would direct thrust through four nozzles something that had never been done
before Korolev coordinated between 36
factories including the bureau led by his old rival Valentin Glushko. Glushko
agreed to build the engines for the new rocket but insisted that he retained
complete control of the engine building process from 1954 of a four-chambered
main engines the RD-107 were rigorously proven on test stands. But the first
firings failed spectacularly literally burning through Glushko stock however by
1957 the world's first spaceport at Baikonur, Kazakhstan was nearing
completion and the R7 rocket was delivered to the launch pad in May the
first 'Semayorka' meaning seven in Russian
and failed. But after a string of failures and improvements on October 4th
Korolyov's rocket made history as it launched Sputnik 1 the first artificial
satellite into low-earth orbit Korolev's of hard-won victory brought even more
urgent competition between the competing arms of the Soviet aerospace industry
here the third figure appears as rival rocket designer Vladimir Chelomey and he
was betting everything on his universal rocket family especially the UR-500
heavy lift launcherwhich would later become the 'Proton', a design still in use today.
Chelomey was the youngest of the three
and probably the most ambitious. He developed the first soviet pulse jet
engine independently of the germans and the first anti-ship cruise missile. His
designs developed from his work for the military which had grown his bureau
OKB-52 into a missile building empire covering ICBMs, military satellites,
launch vehicles, cruise missiles, anti-ballistic missiles and made him in
his own words "the most expensive man in the soviet union". Rather than using the
liquid oxygen and kerosene mixture favored by Korolev the UR-500 was
powered by a mixture of nitrogen tetroxide and udmh propellants. These
hypergolic fuels spontaneously combusted on contact with each other something
which Korolev was vehemently opposed for safety reasons. This design choice made
it easy for Chelomey to work with Glushko who had favored hypergolic
engines for some time and he agreed to build the first stage engines for the
UR-500 the famous RD-253. Chelomey also had the advantage of being well
connected with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who sent his son Sergei to
work of the OKB-52 Bureau.Chelomey told Khrushchev a version of his rocket
could power a two-man mission around the moon much more economically than Korolev's
gargantuan N1 launcher. But in October 1964
Khrushchev was ousted from the leadership and replaced by a Leonid
Brezhnev an old ally of korolyov's. With Khrushchev gone all manned space
plans were again consolidated under Korolev. After the fall of
Khrushchev Chelomey was still supported by the defense minister Andrey Grechko,
however when he died in 1974 he had an uneasy relationship with the new
Minister of Defense and the patron of the rocket industry Dmitriy Ustinov and
although he retained support from Brezhnev his position was never as
strong as it was with Khrushchev. But meanwhile the Soviet space program was
beginning to visibly lag behind the Americans. In 1961 President John F
Kennedy announced America's goal to land a man on the moon by the end of the
decade Korolyov decided to push on with the N1 rocket
but grishko refused to build the massive kerosene LOX engines Korolev needed
instead he proposed massive hypergolic engines which Korolev said were too
dangerous for manned flight and the two men had a massive falling-out. Korolev
was in a fix without the engines required and turned instead to the kuznetsov
design bureau OKB-276. Although they had much less experience and they couldn't
build the large engines they did come up with a smaller but highly efficient new
design the NK-15 and subsequently the NK- 33 which is still one of the most
efficient kerosene LOX engines ever made. To make up a thrust required thirty NK-15's
would be used on the first stage of the N1 rocket but the complexity of the fuel
plumbing and the control systems for all these engines would create many problems
for the design. It took three more years before the Soviet command made the same
commitment to the moon missions meanwhile Korolev had pushed on with
the N1 which he believed could carry cosmonauts both on lunar missions and on
to Mars. But funding was short and Korolev was
in constant battles with Chelomey over who would get the resources required.
Couple this with the long hours and intense pressure to deliver and the
stress started to take its toll Korolev had already suffered a heart attack in 1960
and doctors discovered the a kidney disorder as well. On January 14th 1966 he
went in for what was supposed to be a routine surgery on a polyp in his large
intestine but with a weakened heart and immune system from me years of
imprisonment in the gulags the master designer died on the operating table.
Two weeks after Korolev death his Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to
successfully make a soft touch down on the moon's surface. With Korolev's death
his deputy Vasily Mishin took over the OKB-1 design bureau and the N1 project
But Mishin didn't have the contacts all the flair for dealing with the
soviet system like Korolev and after four launch failures of the N1 mission,
he was sacked and replaced by Korolev’s bitter rival Glushko. By now the US had
landed on the moon and even Apollo was being cut short as enthusiasm for big
space was waning. In 1974 Glushko scrapped the N1 project and ordered the
parts to be destroyed but Kuznetsov didn't get the orders and instead
mothballed for remaining NK-33 engines which some 20 years later would be sold
to the U.S. modified and used to launch the Antares rocket.
Glushko went on to develop the Buran the Soviet space shuttle and its massive Energia heavy
launch vehicle, which he hoped one day might be used to create a lunar
base. Ironically for a man who had refused to build a large kerosene/LOX
engine for Korolev and inadvertently helped the downfall of N1, he now
realized that this was in fact the best solution for the Energia to match the
power of a solid rocket boosters on the US shuttle. Although he couldn't overcome
the combustion instability of a large single chamber
he used a four chamber design of a single engine creating the RD-170 the most
powerful rocket engine in the world, just beating the F1 engine of the Saturn 5.
Although Vladimir Chelomey fortunes were on the decline after Khrushchev was
replaced he was still instrumental in a development of a Soviet space station
with the Almaz military stations which flew as Salyut 2, 3 & 5. In December 1984
Vladimir Chelomey died from an arterial blockage after his Mercedes car slipped
his brakes and broke his leg whilst he was closing the gates of his country
house. Valentin Glushko died in january 1989 and his funeral was attended by
Mikhail Gorbachev and like his rival Korolev before him it was only after
his death that the Soviet public found out about his efforts and achievements.
The Soviet space program produced some of the greatest leaps forward and most
daring accomplishments in human history backed by an economy far smaller than
their great rival the United States. Drawing upon the genius of these chief
designers and a thousands of scientists and engineers supporting them
Soviet Russia made itself for seacoast of the universe and the Rockets
developed from the R7 and the UR-500 are still launching towards the
Stars today. So I just like to say thank you to all our patrons for their ongoing
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