DECLINE

On the face of it, the Soviets remained in the lead in terms of space endeavours – even the first manned Gemini mission, launched a few days after Voskhod 2, ran for barely five hours and the United States’ first spacewalk would not occur until June 1965. However, before the year’s end, American astronauts would have not only surpassed Valeri Bykovsky’s five-day endurance record, set on Vostok 5, but would have nearly tripled it. Moreover, they would have experimented with fuel cells for longer flights, demonstrated ‘real’ rendezvous techniques necessary for lunar sorties and their Apollo project was gearing up for its own missions from 1966 onwards. At the time, of course, many western observers would find it hard to fathom why the Soviets – once so far ahead – fell so far behind during this period. Their next manned mission, Soyuz 1, would not fly until April 1967 and would end with the death of its cosmonaut pilot, Vladimir Komarov.

Key to the Soviet slowdown was the death of Sergei Korolev, the famed Chief Designer, whose identity had been kept such a closely guarded secret that his importance would not become widely known until years later. In his autobiography, Alexei Leonov lamented that, even compared to Wernher von Braun, Korolev was both a giant and a genius. At a conference in Athens in August 1965, Leonov asked von Braun why America’s supposed technological superiority had not enabled them to launch their own Sputnik, their own Gagarin, their own Voskhod 2, first. The man who designed the Saturn rocket which would win the Moon race in barely three years’ time responded respectfully that the ‘Chief Designer’, his name still unknown in the west, was a far more determined man.

Determined, indeed, but by the middle of the Sixties, Korolev was also a sick man. Nikolai Kamanin had made numerous references in his diaries that Korolev had not been well and towards the end of 1965, as two American Gemini capsules rendezvoused in orbit, he was diagnosed as suffering from a bleeding polyp in his intestine, then admitted into hospital early in the new year. Released temporarily on 10 January to celebrate his birthday at home, he spent an evening with his closest friends, including Leonov and Yuri Gagarin, to whom he told the story of his remarkable life: from his early work in the field of rocketry to his incarceration in one of Stalin’s gulags, near Magadan in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Far East, then his recall to Moscow to support Russia’s war effort and, later, its space effort.

Only days later, on 14 January, after complications arose in what should have been a routine operation, Korolev died. The effect on the cosmonaut corps and upon the Soviet Union’s direction in space was dramatic, with many recognising that the death of this previously-unknown man would severely affect future endeavours.

Pravda ran an obituary, Yuri Gagarin delivered a solemn eulogy – describing Korolev as “a name synonymous with one entire chapter of the history of mankind” – and Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov took turns to carry his ashes for interment in the Kremlin Wall. The men who followed Korolev – his deputy, Vasili Mishin, who succeeded him, together with Georgi Babakin, Vladimir Chelomei and rocket engine designer Valentin Glushko – exhibited entirely different personalities which many cosmonauts felt damaged the Soviet Union’s chances of beating America to the Moon.

In particular, Alexei Leonov has said, the lack of co-operation between Korolev and Glushko led to problems with the choice of propellants and the number of engines needed for the gigantic N-l lunar rocket, while Mishin’s apparent favoritism of newly-selected engineer-cosmonauts over the veteran pilots alienated many in the corps. Summing up, Leonov is not alone in having suggested that, had Korolev lived a little longer, “we would have been the first to circumnavigate the Moon’’. His optimism was far from misplaced. In fact, even under Mishin’s leadership, early plans called for Leonov himself to command the first loop around the back of the Moon, scheduled, at one point, for mid-1967.

Judging from the ambitious Voskhod follow-on flights planned while Korolev was still alive, there is much reason to suppose that a Soviet man on the Moon was possible. Voskhod 3, notably, endured a lengthy and convoluted development and reared its head, drearily, on several occasions as yet another effort to upstage the Americans, this time by attempting a mission of almost three weeks in duration. Early plans from March 1965 envisaged a 15-day flight in October of that year, carrying a pair of cosmonauts – a pilot and a scientist – followed by the longer, 20-day Voskhod 4 in December, crewed by a pilot and a physician. By April, the first hints of crews appeared: Boris Volynov and Georgi Katys were favoured by Nikolai Kamanin for Voskhod 3, although some within the Soviet leadership contested this. Volynov, for example, was Jewish, whilst Katys’ father, of course, had been executed by Stalin and the cosmonaut had half-siblings living in Paris. As the months wore on, Volynov was retained, paired firstly with Viktor Gotbatko and, finally, with Georgi Shonin. The next Voskhod to feature a spacewalk proved yet more controversial, with a crew of two female cosmonauts: Valentina Ponomaryova and Irina Solovyeva, backed-up, interestingly, by two men, Gotbatko and Yevgeni Khrunov.

In terms of space endurance, the United States seized the lead in August 1965, when Gemini V astronauts Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad spent eight days in orbit, an endeavour which the Soviets, even with Korolev still alive, were powerless to prevent. Hopes of launching Voskhod 3 before the year’s end to at least upstage Gemini V faded when it became clear that the challenges of modifying the spacecraft, its environmental system and controls to handle such a long flight were simply too great. The 14-day Gemini VII mission pressed the American lead still further in December. In the final months of his life, Korolev was overburdened with the development of the new Soyuz (‘Union’) spacecraft, the massive N-l lunar rocket and plans to soft-land a probe on the Moon in early 1966. Privately, and with little direction from the government, he had already abandoned work on Voskhod 3.

The Soviet armed forces provided the impetus to jumpstart the proceedings when it became apparent that military activities had been conducted by the Gemini V astronauts. Ballistic missile detection experiments were duly added to Voskhod 3 and one of Korolev’s projects, an artificial gravity investigation, which utilised a tether between the spacecraft and the final stage of the R-7 rocket, was also approved. Short-lived plans were even floated by the Soviet Air Force in August 1965 to stage a one-man Voskhod 4, lasting around 25 days, for exclusively military tasks. One of these would centre on a set of high-quality, Czech-built cameras known as ‘Admira’. By the end of the year, Voskhod 3 had slipped into February 1966, much to the chagrin of many in the cosmonaut corps, who had already written to Leonid Brezhnev, complaining that the Soviet Union’s lead in space was being hampered by its lack of focus and clear management.

Following Korolev’s death, his successor Vasili Mishin pushed on with plans for a third Voskhod, pencilling it in for March 1966, although this date quickly became untenable due to nagging problems with ripped parachutes and an environmental control system which could not be qualified for missions longer than 18 days. On 22 February, the prime crew, Volynov and Shonin, passed their final examinations and were cleared to fly. In readiness for their launch, an unmanned Voskhod – under the cover name of‘Cosmos 110’ – entered orbit on 28 February and completed a 21-day flight with two dogs, Veterok and Ugulyok. However, Voskhod 3 itself continued to drift further and further to the right. An R-7 failure provided the first postponement and Voskhod 3 was scheduled for May, but Leonid Smirnov, chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission, argued that the flight served no purpose for the Soviet government. Despite achieving a new record duration, it was not enough, Smirnov reasoned, to have a profound impact on the world.

For his part, Kamanin argued that valuable military experiments would be conducted by Voskhod 3 and Smirnov relented a little and the launch was rescheduled for sometime in late May. A state commission convened early that month and confirmed that problems with the R-7’s engines, which had exhibited high-frequency oscillations in test-stand runs, would probably not occur under ‘real’ flight conditions. Later plans moved Voskhod 3 to July and even as late as October 1966, Mishin was ordered to prepare for its launch, but did so with little enthusiasm that it would actually go ahead as the new Soyuz project gained momentum. It has also been speculated that, just months after being appointed the new Chief Designer, Mishin simply did not want to begin his tenure under the cloud of a now-obsolete spacecraft which provided its cosmonauts with a limited margin of safety. In this way, as Mark Wade has pointed out on his website www. astronautix. com, Voskhod 3 was never really cancelled; it simply faded away.

Nikolai Kamanin had long since seen the writing on the wall: that Smirnov had killed the mission in favour of the more ambitious Soyuz project, which would demonstrate rendezvous and docking, long-duration flights, spacewalking, the potential to support an orbital station and whose crews would circumnavigate and land on the Moon. Placing their eggs in the Soyuz basket, it seemed, would give the Soviets a far better chance than Voskhod of decisively beating the American lead achieved by Gemini. The maiden voyage of the new spacecraft would suffer more than its own fair share of technical obstacles, but the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a January 1967 flash fire offered increased hopes that the Soviets might yet beat the United States to the lunar surface. Then, just three months after the Apollo disaster, tragedy would strike the Russians in a manner that even their best propaganda apparatus could not fully conceal.