This New Ocean, page 68
Stafford tried to gloss over the discrepancy by calling Tyuratam “a little bitty old city,” adding that the Russians themselves referred to the entire region as Baikonur. But Bergman and many of his colleagues would not buy it, any more than Dino Brugioni had in the late fifties, when he had christened the place Tyuratam after referring to an old German Army map. The reporters believed that the facility had deliberately been misnamed to conceal its real location. They were right.
The Cosmic Ballet
With ballistic missile early warning and a variety of military reconnaissance satellites and ground stations looking and listening to them, Valeri N. Kubasov and Aleksei Leonov blasted off in Soyuz 19 on the afternoon of July 15, 1975. Kubasov was a brilliant flight engineer who had designed spacecraft for years. Leonov, who had made the first space walk from Vostok 2, was already a legend second only to the deified Gagarin. The stocky, muscular flier was a serious artist, an outstanding swimmer, fencer, volleyball player, cyclist, and yachtsman who had not only graduated from military flight school and was an accomplished fighter pilot who had once landed a burning jet rather than abandon it, but was an Air Force parachute instructor with a hundred jumps. (He was also a lucky man, since he had been on the Soyuz 11 backup crew.) Now Kubasov and Leonov were setting a new record: theirs was the first launch from Tyuratam to be carried live on television. They were followed seven and a half hours later by Stafford, Slayton, and Vance D. Brand in an Apollo command and service module, which went up on a Saturn 1B from Pad 39B.
Two days later, Stafford inched Apollo to a perfect docking with Soyuz. With millions watching on television (including Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, who followed the flight “in a state of nervous excitement,” as he put it, in the Department of State conference hall) Stafford opened the hatch that led into the Soyuz orbital module. “Aleksei,” Stafford said to Leonov, “our viewers are here. Come over here, please.” With a hand-lettered sign in the background reading “Welcome Aboard Soyuz,” the two commanders shook hands in the docking module—neutral territory—as they passed over the French city of Metz at five miles a second. Leonov gave Stafford and Slayton the traditional bear hug, and then, floating in the cabin like suspended ballet dancers, they exchanged flags and plaques. Leonov also presented the Americans with sketches he had made of them during training.
Two dockings, twenty-nine experiments, and thousands of photographs later, Soyuz and Apollo parted and returned to Earth, with the cosmonauts floating down to the steppe on July 21 and the astronauts landing in the Pacific three days later. It was the last time a manned American spacecraft would splash down.
It was also the end of Apollo. And it was the end of détente. With Cambodia and South Vietnam disintegrating, and with the Ford administration being accused of pandering to the Communists (Washington’s allegedly “submissive” attitude toward Moscow in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks being only one example), the lines of the cold war began to harden again. Apollo-Soyuz not only did little or nothing to stop the deterioration in relations, but to the extent that it represented cooperation between the two superpowers, it provided fuel for détente’s implacable enemies in both camps.
Yet the arguments of cynics aside, the spirit of Apollo-Soyuz would outlive not only the end of détente but the cold war itself. Two decades later, other space travelers would join forces in the Russian Mir (Peace) station and the American shuttle. That meeting, like that of Apollo-Soyuz, would be highly publicized as an example of the possibilities of cooperation in space. But, also like Apollo-Soyuz, it would be only the most apparent example of a broader, more pervasive, cooperation. The other was far less obvious, yet more important, because it had to do with relatively large numbers of scientists and engineers and was therefore an inherent part of the fabric of both space programs. Political conservatives on both sides stayed well clear of the scientists because they did not understand them and, in any case, did not want to become tainted by what they saw as their misguided, if not alarmingly naive, ways. The scientists thought that insulation from the reactionaries was wonderful.
The Imperative to Explore
The NASA report that accompanied the Space Task Group’s 1969 study was arranged according to the space agency’s own priorities, with the manned program coming first, followed by the exploration of Earth and the solar system. As was the case with the manned program, solar system exploration was internationally competitive on a number of levels, most notably propagandistic. But both exploration programs were also internally competitive.
The process of selecting experiments to put on a spacecraft was like the eliminations in sports play-offs. Before scientists were allowed to represent their own countries in the race to scout distant worlds, they had to survive competition at home, some of it political, some scientific. In the United States, NASA would publish its announcements of opportunity for scientists who wanted to win precious space for their experiments on the probes, and the scientists would respond by submitting detailed proposals for space agency evaluation. Given the fact that a maximum of only ten or eleven instrument packages could go on a spacecraft, the competition among scores or hundreds of scientists was often intense.
The popular image of the individual, selfless scientist, a politically oblivious Louis Pasteur, Walter Reed, Marie Curie, or Ernest Rutherford laboring in the forlorn isolation of their laboratories and worrying only about the good of mankind and the pursuit of knowledge was a myth that had been shoved aside by reality in the second half of the twentieth century. The outstanding scientific inventions that had come out of the pressure cooker of World War II—nuclear weapons, radar, infrared photography, and the ballistic missile, to take only four examples—had been produced by groups of individuals working together. The loners had mostly given way to coordinated teams that did research in laboratories whose lifeblood was the competitive government grant. If von Braun and Korolyov and their respective rocket establishments were on the government teat, so were thousands of scientists who, like Van Allen, could go nowhere else for the amount of money they needed, let alone to private rocket launchers.
Individually, the men and women with doctorates in the hard sciences inhabited a world that was grossly underpaid by corporate standards, but which certainly was as competitive. Their bottom line was neither stock options nor megabuck raises. At its heart it had to do with trying to understand how the natural world worked through a painstaking process that required a solid grounding in the knowns, formulating good questions about the unknowns, establishing parameters that would show what was true and what was not, designing experiments that could produce answers, and then getting those experiments—measuring instruments—on board spacecraft. The scientific community kept and continues to keep an internal score no less than its counterpart on Wall Street. Reputation, promotion, and tenure rested squarely on the publication of significant discoveries, pulling in grants, and by being quoted correctly (but not too often) by the news media. Carl Sagan, a first-rate astronomer, for example, would become too visible by writing eclectic, popular books and starring in a dramatic television series called Cosmos. For a time he would therefore be shunned by fellow scientists whose jealousy was camouflaged by apparent distaste for his “popularizing” their work. But that would change.
In the Soviet Union, there was fierce competition between the design bureaus and the state companies that manufactured the spacecraft and their components, all of it cloaked in secrecy and deception. And there was competition at IKI, the Space Science Institute, with consequences that mirrored the Moon program’s multiple afflictions; a competition whose destructiveness managed to overwhelm the brilliance of its participants.34 Sagdeev knew that there was a natural tendency for competing scientists to challenge each other in any institution in any country. But, he explained, the divisiveness could be overcome and positively directed by a few bright, strong leaders. Not so in the Soviet program. The physicist who would head IKI during the last flushes of the cold war would complain bitterly in his memoir that “barricades” separated the space industry (the design bureaus) from the space science community and, perhaps more perniciously, divided the community itself. “Deep divisions existed within the institute,” he would note, “which split into a number of small strongholds—in the hands of different scientific clans.”
Cooperation between the design bureaus and IKI, and between the institute’s laboratories and divisions, was held to an absolute minimum. Astronomers, for example, were openly contemptuous of their colleagues who studied Earth’s upper atmosphere or even the solar wind because those disciplines were more practical, which is to say, useful to a degree that was distasteful. “Despite the fact that early successes in space science were associated with this very discipline, the leader of IKI’s space astronomers … was sure that local ‘environmental’ science would be nothing but a ‘caliph’ for an hour.” Translation: studying Earth’s relatively mundane problems could not compare to delving into the grandeur that came with astronomy’s infinitely more important concern with time and space: with what the science writer Timothy Ferris would later call “The Whole Shebang.”
“It’s not a scientific institute,” Sagdeev would quote a colleague named Lev Artsimovich as saying in frustration, “it’s a travel agency for space science.”
Exploration’s Engine
Still, the motives of even science’s jackals were as pure as Dr. Faust’s: to know the world beyond their grasp, and in doing so, to extend themselves beyond what was required to merely survive. Murray made that point by challenging the notion that research on diseases, and even ending hunger, had a higher claim on the U.S. science budget than did space exploration. A civilization is ultimately measured, he said, not by what it has to do, but by what it wants to do. “Space exploration is forward looking, intangible, and appeals to the imagination and a sense of adventure, as distinguished from AIDS and cancer [research], which are basically utilitarian.… They’re important. But the reason we work on that is because we’re worried about dying.” Trying to survive—a trait humans share with viruses—is perfectly understandable, Murray added. But it is not particularly admirable.
In going to Mars, the former JPL director explained one sunny afternoon in his Caltech office, “we’re taking some of our valued treasure and spending it on something that doesn’t pertain to our territory, to our life and death. It’s an intellectual, spiritual, cultural endeavor.… Suppose the Russians could get the solution to AIDS,” Murray pondered aloud, “and we could have the planets?”
It was Venus and Mars and the great gas balls, Jupiter and Saturn, with their own retinues of orbiting worlds, that had captivated Galileo, Schiaparelli, Tsiolkovsky, Hubble, and all of their descendants from Tsander to Oberth, Goddard, Korolyov, von Braun, Pickering, and the great science and engineering establishments. And it was the whole solar system and the galaxies beyond that intrigued the dedicated amateurs who faithfully pored over the journals and kept long nocturnal vigils squinting through telescopes (many of them homemade) in hopes of spotting a new comet or just savoring the timeless magnificence of Saturn’s rings.
Von Braun had earned his living in 1948 by turning the V-2 into an advanced ballistic missile so his new masters could grow mushroom clouds on enemy territory if that was considered necessary. Shades of Dornberger and Korolyov. But he had entertained himself in his spare time that year by using a slide rule to plan in considerable detail an expedition to Mars that involved seventy astronauts and ten spacecraft, some carrying passengers, some cargo. What von Braun wanted to do was to end once and for all what he considered the myth that a boy, a girl, and a dog, or two intrepid brothers, or a guy named Flash Gordon, or even a few adventurous astronauts could fly to Mars almost as a lark. The point, as he put it, was to “explode once and for all the theory of the solitary space rocket and its little band of bold interplanetary adventurers. No such lonesome, extra-orbital thermos bottle will ever escape earth’s gravity and drift toward Mars.”
Just as Columbus had used three ships to explore the far reaches of the Atlantic and the pioneers had assembled wagon trains in long lines to move westward rather than risk everything by depending on only one ship or a single prairie schooner, an expedition to Mars would require a large number of people traveling in a convoy, von Braun had prophesied. He had gone on to describe the necessary propulsion systems, the trajectories, the winged “landing boats” that would be used to get down to the Martian surface and back up again and a great deal more in dense detail and with a generous use of equations. The book, which he called The Mars Project, was definitely not beach reading unless the reader was entertained by calculations for specific impulse and exhaust velocities or the wing areas and speeds of the landing boats and how hot their skins would become as they plunged into the atmosphere. It was published in German in 1952 and in English the following year, after his name was well enough known to help guarantee at least a break-even sale.
Until the 1950s, professors had actively discouraged students from careers that concentrated on the solar system because, they told them, most of the important information that could be collected was already in hand. Worse, most of the astronomers believed that optical telescopes had about reached their theoretical limit. But ten years after von Braun wrote his book, Sputniks and Explorers gave astronomers and other scientists cause to hope that far-ranging robots could actually reach well beyond the Moon to collect both data and samples. They were thrilled by the possibility of sending proxies to get up close.
One scientist at the University of California had a long wish list.38 Otto Struve anticipated Luna 3 by noting that he wanted to see the far side of the Moon out of “idle curiosity,” have another spacecraft plant an explosive charge inside the icy nucleus of a comet, and have still others collect lunar soil and bring it home, study the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, and snap up and retrieve fragments of Saturn’s rings. “[T]he year 1957 will be remembered in the history of astronomical exploration as the year 1492 is remembered in the history of geographical exploration,” Struve told an audience of scientists in Eugene, Oregon, in 1958.
“There will never again be a lecture on the solar system which does not in some way recognize the achievement of the Russian scientists” in developing the Sputniks, Struve said before quoting two other noted astronomers, Fred Whipple and J. Allen Hynek: “In his millennia of looking at the stars, man has never found so exciting a challenge as the year 1957 has suddenly thrust upon him.”
The published version of Struve’s paper was illustrated with the best pictures available at the time of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all of them taken by the two-hundred-inch Palomar telescope in California. They were maddeningly blurry blobs wholly lacking in real definition. The telescopes could not get close enough. And even if they could, they would not be able to touch what they saw.
The distances were colossal, beyond the grasp of most imaginations. They were so great that they invariably had to be reduced to basketballs and miles so the average mind could contain them. If the Sun was a house in New York and Jupiter was a basketball, Jupiter would be in Chicago. If Earth was a basketball and the Moon was a tennis ball, Harvard’s Owen Gingerich, a professor of astronomy and the history of science, explained one day in 1969, the Sun would be a house in Harvard Square, several blocks away. And, he added, the nearest stars—the triple star system called Centuri—would be houses on the real Moon. At some point the imagination that tried to leap such distances fell so far short that it had no choice but to shut down.
As both superpowers were finding out, reaching Venus and Mars, the nearest basketballs, was challenging enough for flights in which any number of otherwise minor glitches could ruin a mission. But at least the two planets themselves could be approached without a forbidding amount of velocity. Visiting the worlds beyond them, however, was an entirely different matter.
The Limits of Self-Propulsion
Conventional wisdom up to 1961, when the exploration race had begun to gather real momentum, said that the distance problem could be overcome only by increasing the sheer velocity of the rocket and using the old Hohmann Trajectory, or Hohmann Transfer.
The people who pondered solar system exploration going back to the pioneers thought that it depended squarely on very high velocities and precise trajectories: on brute power and on knowing exactly where to go and how to get there. Everyone believed that increasing velocity was the key to exploring the solar system, so as the 1960s got under way, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and others considered ways to squeeze more velocity out of the rockets. Between 1959 and 1962, while the world watched the duel taking place between Gagarin, Titov, Shepard, and Glenn, while generals and their staffs were fantasizing about lunar bases, orbital bombardment systems, space fighters, and real-time reconnaissance, and while the race to the Moon itself was gathering momentum, the scientists and engineers who were thinking about sending spacecraft on really long-distance missions were busily working the problem. Technical papers, journal articles, magazine pieces, and even chapters in anthologies that tried to come to terms with velocity proliferated.
Some considered, and invariably rejected, liquid-propelled chemical rockets of gargantuan proportion as still being inadequate. One, at 660 feet high, the length of a battleship, was named Sea Dragon and would have towered 125 feet above the Washington Monument.40 It would have weighed 100 million pounds and developed 130 million pounds of thrust. But even that monster would not have been able to carry a serious payload to the outer planets and beyond.
