leaving earth space stations, rival superpowers and the quest for interplanetary travel

Joseph Henry Press Washington, D.C. by Robert Zimmerman Joseph Henry Press • 500 Fifth Street, N.W. • Washington, D.C. 20001 The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public. Joseph Henry was one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in early American science. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences or its affiliated institutions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zimmerman, Robert, 1953- Leaving earth : space stations, rival superpowers, and the quest for interplanetary travel / by Robert Zimmerman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-309-08548-9 (Hardcover) 1. Astronautics—History. 2. Outer space—Exploration—History. 3. Astronautics—Political aspects—History. I. Title. TL788.5.Z55 2003 2003007637 Cover: First two modules of the International Space Station. Photo by NASA/ Science Photo Library. Copyright 2003 by Robert Zimmerman. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. To my wife Diane, who knows how to help me write. vii Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1. Skyscrapers in the Sky 1 2. Salyut: “I Wanted Him to Come Home.” 19 3. Skylab: A Glorious Forgotten Triumph 48 4. The Early Salyuts: “The Prize of All People” 81 5. Salyut 6: The End of Isolation 114 6. Salyut 7: Phoenix in Space 163 7. Freedom: “You’ve Got to Put on Your Management Hat . . .” 207 8. Mir: A Year in Space 227 9. Mir: The Road to Capitalism 270 10. Mir: The Joys of Freedom 303 Contents 11. Mir: Almost Touching 326 12. Mir: Culture Shock 375 13. Mir: Spin City 416 14. International Space Station: Ships Passing in the Night 446 Bibliography 467 Notes 483 Index 509 List of Illustrations 1. Salyut with approaching Soyuz, 28 2. Skylab with docked Apollo spacecraft and Salyut for scale, 52 3. Salyut 3, 87 4. Salyut 4 with approaching Soyuz, 93 5. Salyut 6, 115 6. Salyut 7 with transport-support module, 166 7. Mir core module, 230 8. Mir core with Kvant, 240 9. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, 274 10. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, 284 11. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, with Sofora, Strela, and docked Soyuz-TM and Progress-M, 312 12. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, with docked Soyuz-TM, 385 13. Mir complete, with Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, Priroda, with docked Soyuz-TM and Progress-M, 407 14. International Space Station, as of December 2002, 450 viii CONTENTS ix Acknowledgments No book can be written without the help and support of others. I must give special thanks to my interpreter, Andrew Vodostoy, and to all those who made my trip to Moscow possible, including Nina Doudouchava and her two children, Alice and Philip, Nicholai Mugue, Anatoli Artsebarski, Alexander Cherniavsky, and Galina Nechitailo. I must also thank the many cosmonauts, engi- neers, and scientists who gave me so much of their time in inter- views when I met them in Russia. Authors Michael Cassutt and James Harford as well as Soviet space historians Asif Saddiqi, Bert Vis, and Charles Vic also deserve my gratitude for their advice about working in Moscow. Thanks must also go to David Harland and Michael Cassutt for reviewing my manuscript, Glen Swanson for helping me obtain Valeri Ryumin’s diary, David S. Hamilton at Boeing for creating the International Space Station graphic, and Janet Ormes and the librarians at the Goddard Space Flight Center as well as Jane Odom, Colin Fries, and John Hargenrader and every- one else at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C., for pro- viding me more information than I imagined existed. I also thank my editor, Jeff Robbins, for having faith in my writing talent, as well as all the talented people at the Joseph Henry Press for making my writing shine. This book would not exist with- out their effort. Finally, I must recognize and praise the men and women, Rus- sian and American, who risked their lives to fly into space and extend the range of human experience. It was their courage and dedication that actually wrote this history. xi Preface Societies change. Though humans have difficulty perceiving this fact during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The story of the first space stations and the men and women who built and flew them is in most ways a story of the evolution of the Russian people. When they began their journey to the stars in 1957, they were an isolated, xenophobic, authoritarian culture ruled by an oppressive elite who believed that they had the right to dictate how everyone else should live their lives. Forty years later, that same nation has become one of the world’s newest democracies. Its borders are open, its people free, and its economy booming. In the years between, driven by an inescapable, generations-old insecurity, Russia went out into space to prove itself to the world, and ended up taking the first real, long-term steps toward the colo- nization of the solar system. Cosmonauts, using equipment built by people only one generation removed from illiteracy, hung by their fingernails on the edge of space and learned how to make the first real interplanetary journeys. Sometimes men died. Sometimes they rose above their roots and did glorious and brave things. In the process, and most ironically, the space program that the commu- nists supported and funded in their futile effort to reshape human nature helped wean Russia away from communism and dictator- ship and toward freedom and capitalism. xii PREFACE Leaving Earth is my attempt to tell that story. Nor is this book solely about how Russia changed in the late twentieth century. For Americans, this story carries its own les- sons, lessons that some might find hard to take. For at the same time the Russians were pulling themselves out of tyranny as they lifted their eyes to the stars, the United States evolved from an innovative, free society to a culture that today seems bogged down with bureaucracy, centralization, and too much self-centeredness. In the early 1970s, the United States had the tools, the abili- ties, the vision, the freedom, and the will to go to the stars. We had already explored the moon. Our rockets were the most powerful ever built. And we had launched the first successful space station, with capabilities so sophisticated that the Soviets took almost three decades of effort to finally match it. With only a little extra labor, that station could have been turned into a space vessel able to carry humans anywhere in the Solar System. The road was open before us, ours for the taking. And then the will faded. For the next 30 years, the trail-blazing was taken up by others, as Americans chose to do less risky and possibly less noble tasks. More importantly, just as the bold Soviet space program helped teach the Russians to live openly and free, the top-heavy and timid American space program of the late twen- tieth century helped teach Americans to depend, not on freedom and decentralization, but on a centralized Soviet-style bureau- cracy—to the detriment of American culture and its desire to con- quer the stars. That these facts might reflect badly on my own country sad- dens me beyond words. I was born into a nation of free-spirited individuals, where all Americans believed they were pioneers, able to forge new paths and build new communities wherever they went. Or, as stated in 1978 by one much-maligned but principled politician, born of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, We are the “can-do” people. We crossed the oceans; we climbed the mountains, forded the rivers, traveled the prairies to build on this continent a monument to human freedom. We came from many lands with different tongues united in our belief in God and our thirst for freedom. We said governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We said the people are sovereign. 1 Whether this describes the American nation today I do not know. If one were to use as a guide our accomplishments in space since Barry Goldwater said these words, one would not feel encouraged. Preface xiii Yet, the true test of a free and great people is whether they have the stomach to face difficult truths, and do something about it. It is what the American public did in the 1860s, when it freed the slaves. It is what that same society did in the 1950s, when it ended racial discrimination. And it is what the Russian people did in 1991, when they rejected a communist dictatorship and became free. I sincerely hope that future Americans will be as courageous, performing acts as noble. Above us, the stars still gleam, beckoning us. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” said the poet Rob- ert Browning. Who shall grab for that heaven? Who will have the courage, boldness, and audacity to reach for the stars, and bring them down to us all? For the last 40 years far-sighted dreamers in both the United States and Russia struggled to assemble the first interplanetary spaceships. For many political reasons, they called them space sta- tions, and pretended that their sole function was to orbit the earth and perform scientific research in space. Their builders, however, knew better. Someday humans will put engines on these space stations, and instead of keeping station around the earth, humans will launch them out into interplanetary space, leaving Earth behind to voyage to other worlds and make possible the colonization of the planets. When that great leap into the unknown finally occurs, what kind of human society will those explorers build, out there amid the stars? Will it be a free and happy place, “a monument to human freedom”? Or will it be something else, something of which few would be proud? The nation that reaches for the stars will be the one to make that determination. “What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare. The events in space in the past 40 years have sent the human race down a certain path. It is my hope that by telling that story, I help future genera- tions travel that road more wisely. As far as the eye could reach, spread vast expanses of Russia, brown and flat and with hardly a sign of human habitation. Here and there sharp rectilineal patches of ploughed land revealed an occasional state farm. For a long way the mighty Volga gleamed in curves and stretches as it flowed between its wide, dark margins of marsh. Sometimes a road, straight as a ruler, ran from one wide horizon to the other. 2 —Winston Churchill, as he flew into the Soviet Union for the first time during World War II. Peter [the Great] probably also experienced what many succeed- ing generations of his countrymen experienced when returning home from abroad: a feeling of disappointment, irritation, even resentment, at one’s own nation, whose backwardness smacks one in the face. 3 —Russian historian Aleksandr B. Kamenskii, describing Peter the Great’s first trip to England. In Russia, like nowhere else, [they] are masters at discerning weak- nesses—the ridiculous—and shortcomings in a foreigner. One may rest assured that they will miss nothing, because, naturally, no Russian deep in his heart likes any foreigner. 4 —Catherine the Great I am not unduly disturbed about our respective responses or lack of responses from Moscow. I have decided they do not use speech for the same purposes as we do. 5 —Franklin Roosevelt, October 28, 1942, in a letter to Winston Churchill. We have to provide the crew with virtually everything for the en- tire duration of their absence from the earth—air to breathe, food and drinking water, repair tools, spare parts, heatable and pressur- ized quarters for the stay on the cold Martian plains, surface ve- hicles and fuel for them, down to such prosaic items as a washing machine and a pencil sharpener. 6 —Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun, 1956 I’ve been waiting all my life for this day! 7 —Sergei Korolev, the day that Sputnik was launched. [...]... security, to do weather forecasting, and to stage the shipbuilding and refueling facilities for the construction of the more advanced interplanetary ships.26 10 LEAVING EARTH Not all the Western promoters of space exploration in the 1950s were writers like Clarke and Ley One man, Wernher von Braun, was an engineer, and had begun his rocket-building career in Germany at the same Society for Space Travel that... During this time, the ship’s systems had to function without major breakdowns And if there was a failure, the spacefaring crews, in Earth orbit or far from home, must be able to use the tools and supplies at hand to fix them Then there was the question of the human body itself, a question beside which all other technical issues paled Could humans survive in space long enough to travel to other planets?... descend to the surface, landing on skis in what von Braun imagined as the smooth ice-covered polar regions of Mars Once on the surface, the crew would abandon their landing craft and travel to the Martian equator, where they would build a runway for the arrival of two more nosecone ships, which would land like airplanes on this homemade runway and then launch like rockets back to the mother ships in orbit... laboratory And it would also be a watchdog for the whole planet Finally, it could be a refueling place for rocket ships.”25 Like Clarke and many other writers and engineers of the time, Ley saw the space station as a separate entity from the interplanetary spaceships that would follow When the station was finished, it would become the base of operations from which to study the earth and the stars,... created for the study of space technology, biology, medicine, geophysics, astronomy, and astrophysics.” 10 Then, in a rhetorical flourish, Brezhnev emphasized this focus Space for the good of people, space for the good of science, space for the good of the national economy Such in brief, is the substance of the Soviet space program—its philosophical credo.11 Just as he desired his rule to be stable and. .. show their growth, as well as single samples of the flax, hawksbeard, and cabbage plants, and transferred everything to their Soyuz spacecraft On June 29, 1971, the crew packed up and climbed into the descent module of Soyuz Then, at 11:28 P.M Moscow time, they undocked from the Salyut station, and quickly eased away from what had been their home in space for the last 24 days Dobrovolsky radioed the. .. ships for voyages to the moon and beyond The Problem Though scattered across the globe, these men, along with thousands of others, all imagined a kind of grand adventure in space, and longed to make it happen In turn, their visions motivated a whole generation, and soon every technological culture throughout the world was caught up by the idea of traveling in space and visiting other worlds Soon money... on the Dneper River about halfway between the Black Sea and Kiev, became a war zone First the Austrians took over in April 1918 Then the Red Army rolled through in December 1918 For the next 18 months the civil war between the communist Reds and the more capitalistic Whites brought violence and looting as the two sides traded control of Dneprodzerzhinsk almost weekly Then, after the Reds took over for. .. visionaries across the globe stepped forward to lay out the first real, concrete blueprints for colonizing the Solar System These men wanted to go to the stars, and actually believed they could do it in their lifetime In the Soviet Union, the visionaries were engineers attempting to consolidate their country’s lead in space They had already built the first rockets able to place a satellite in orbit, and less... colonize the Solar System had been abandoned, and his design bureau had no program, at that time, for building permanent space stations 26 LEAVING EARTH A second design bureau, under the leadership of Vladimir Chelomey, was building space stations, but for the Soviet military Since the overthrow of Khrushchev, Chelomey had scrambled to find funding for his myriad space projects His interplanetary space . during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The story of the first space stations and the men and women who built and flew them. to assemble the first interplanetary spaceships. For many political reasons, they called them space sta- tions, and pretended that their sole function was to orbit the earth and perform scientific. turned into a space vessel able to carry humans anywhere in the Solar System. The road was open before us, ours for the taking. And then the will faded. For the next 30 years, the trail-blazing was