Key players

INTRODUCTION

Any great enterprise is the product of people. It is people who make things happen. Institutions are the means by which great enterprises are realized, but it is the people in these institutions, and in particular the leaders of these institutions, that drive the mechanisms to create great products. And so it is in the space exploration enterprise. We begin the story of the Soviet Union’s space exploration program in the 20th Century with a description of the people who led the development of this great enterprise. While there were many administrators, engineers and scientists who were essential, we have room here only to describe those at the top of the enterprise, those whose personal and institutional power created the USSR’s space program. At the top are the Communist Party leaders and government ministers who had control over selecting and funding national projects; second, and most particularly, the individual Chief Designers of the space program who proposed the projects; third the directors of the design bureaus which were responsible for building rockets and spacecraft for the projects; and finally the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who besides his own leadership of the space program provided academic resources via the directors of the Academy’s research institutes where space mission goals were developed using the rockets and spacecraft built by the design bureaus.

The single most important individual in the development of the Soviet space program after WW-II was Sergey Pavlovich Korolev. After. Toseph Stalin decided to make rocket development a national priority at the end of the war, Korolev was retrieved from exile in a labor camp, together with others from his small band of engineers that built research rockets before the war. They started with the V-2 and a group of captured German engineers, just as occurred in the US. During the 1940s and 1950s Korolev’s design bureau developed the USSR’s first long range rockets using the German rocket engineers’ expertise to build their own design skills. By the mid-1950s the German engineers had been generally dismissed, and the enterprise was entirely Russian. Korolev began testing his R-7 ICBM in the spring of 1957, the rocket that would launch not only Sputnik and other early Earth satellites, but

W. T. Huntress and M. Y. Marov, Soviet Robots in the Solar System: Mission Technologies 5

and Discoveries, Springer Praxis Books 1, DOl 10.1007/978-1-4419-7898-1_2,

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

almost all of the Soviet lunar and planetary missions throughout the 1960s and all Soviet cosmonauts, in upgraded and modified versions, this venerable rocket has become the core of the Soyuz launcher that is used commercially today for both manned and unmanned missions.

Korolev was an excellent engineer and designer, with considerable leadership and political skills. These qualities and his mission successes made him the darling of the Soviet space program. His identity was kept secret and he became known as ‘Chief Designer’, a term invented for the titular head of the Soviet space program. There were only two others that followed him after his death in 1966, but neither man had the full measure of qualities possessed by Korolev and the program seemed to lose much of its driving force. Had Korolev remained in charge, the USSR may have landed a cosmonaut on the Moon – even if later than planned and after the Americans. The Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, the de-facto leader inside Kremlin circles, was at the same time a director of one of the implementing design bureaus. There was no equivalent in the US: Wernher von Braun had a similar leadership role but was not at the same time the Administrator of NASA. In the USSR, there was no equivalent of NASA. The space enterprise was only a portion of the government’s Ministry of General Machine Building, which had wide control over all of Soviet space industry and the design bureaus that implemented the policies of the ministry.

The design bureaus and research institutes were the places where all the hardware

Figure 2.1 Korolev’s Council of Chief Designers in 1959. Left to right: A. F. Bogomolov, M. S. Ryazansky, N. A. Pilyugin. S. P. Korolev, V. F. Glushko, V. P. Barmin, Y. I. Kuznetsov.

was developed and built to execute the Soviet space program, except for the science instruments supplied by the Soviet Academy of Seiences. The directors, also known as ‘Chief Designers’, of the several design bureaus and research institutes were the key ‘movers and shakers’ of the program. At the beginning of the Soviet rocket and space enterprise, Korolev established a Council of Chief Designers to coordinate all efforts in rocket development and space exploration. The members of the Council are shown in Figure 2.1. Council member Academician Valentin Petrovich Glushko (1908-1989) was an early colleague of Korolev’s before WW-II and supplied the rocket engines for the R-7, but later he became a dedicated rival to Korolev. He was one of the most important figures in the history of the Soviet program, and his role following Korolev’s death is described later in this chapter. Academician Nikolay Alexeevich Pilyugin (1908-1982) was Chief Designer of МІР and responsible for autonomous control systems (avionics) for rockets and spacecraft. Pilyugin was one of Korolev’s closest colleagues and pioneered the development of flight computers and precision avionics for autonomous navigation. Corresponding member Mikhail Sergeevich Ryazansky (1909 1987) was Director and Chief Designer of N11-885 and developed radio systems including on board transmitters, receivers, radio command links and terrestrial antennas for rockets and deep space missions. In particular, he pioneered the study of radio systems to facilitate autonomous navigation by vehicles in deep space and the development of imaging systems for spacecraft. Academician Alexey Fedorovich Bogomolov (1913 2009) w’as Director of Design Bureau OKB МЫ (until 1989) and principally responsible for the development of on board radio telemetry and trajectory tracking, in addition to terrestrial antennas for rockets and spacecraft. He also greatly contributed to radar remote-sensing techniques including the instrument Гог mapping of Venus by Venera 15 and 16. Academician Vladimir Pavlovich Barmin (1909 1993) was Chief Designer of all ground complexes for ballistic missiles and space launchers. He also contributed to the development of soil – sample devices for Luna and Venera missions. Academician Victor Ivanovich Kuznetsov (1913 1991) w as Chief Designer and Director of N11-10, and as such he developed gyroscopes for rockets and spacecraft and pioneered inertial navigation systems in the USSR.

The design bureaus were all in competition with one another. One or the other of the directors, such as Korolev, was by force of personality and political connection the LChief Designer’ of the whole space program. With no dedicated governmental space administration to marshal the competition between design bureaus, the Soviet space program was rife with rivalry, animosity and political intrigue. The resulting inefficiencies were wasteful of resources and a cause for much delay and many a failure. After Korolev died, there was no one with all the personal skills necessary to hold it all in check.

Almost equivalent in stature to Korolev was Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh, head of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and after 1961 President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. While Korolev w as the ‘Chief Designer’ of the Soviet space program, Keldysh was ‘Chief Theoretician’. They worked together both to advocate and implement the space exploration program. From 1956 until his death in 1978. Keldysh was the Chair of the highly recognized In ter-Departmental Scientific and

Figure 2.2 Sergey Pavlovich Korolev (left) and Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh (right).

Technical Council on Space Research (MNTS KI; Mezhduvcdomstvennyi Nauchno-Tekhnicheskii Soviet po Kosmicheskim Issledovaniyam) which was responsible for space science and technology development in the Soviet Union. The Council and the Academy determined the objectives for the space program, advised the government and recommended individual projects, provided expertise in space navigation, and supplied scientific investigations for flight missions. Acting together, Korolev and Keldysh were responsible for many of the achievements of the space program.

The final highly influential group were the directors of research institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The two leading space science organizations were the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry established in 1947 and the Institute for Space Research set up in 1965. The Academy’s science institutes devised the science objectives and instruments for space missions. The leading design bureau and science institute directors were strong individuals who advised Korolev and Keldysh on which missions to fly and determined what science investigations would be carried.

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