A TRACKING NETWORK

The moon programme required a tracking network. To follow Sputnik, a government resolution had been issued on 3rd September 1956 and authorized the establishment of up to 25 stations [1]. By the time of Sputnik, about 13 had been constructed, the principal ones being in Kolpashevo, Tbilisi, Ulan Ude, Ussurisk and Petropavlovsk, supplemented by visual observatories in the Crimea, Caucasus and Leningrad.

For the moon programme, systems were required to follow spacecraft over half a million kilometres away. For this, a new ground station was constructed and it was declared operational on 23rd September 1958, just in time for the first Soviet lunar probe. Yevgeni Boguslavsky, deputy chief designer of the Scientific Research Institute of Radio Instrument Building, NII-885, was responsible for setting up the ground station. It was located in Simeiz, at Kochka Mountain in the Crimea close to the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory of the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His choice of the Crimea was a fateful one, for all the main subsequent Soviet observing stations came to be based around there, including the more substantial subsequent interplanetary communications network. Boguslavsky obtained the services of military unit #32103 for the construction work and it was sited on a hill facing southward onto the Black Sea. Sixteen helice aerials were installed, turning on a cement tower. A backup station was also built in Kamchatka on the Pacific coast.

Although the station was declared operational, the people working there might have taken a different view, for the ground equipment was located in trailers, ground control was in a wooden barrack hut, many of the staff lived in tents and food was supplied by mobile kitchen. All of this cannot have been very comfortable in a Crimean winter.

The Soviet Union also relied on a 24 m parabolic dish radio telescope in Moscow and the receiver network used for the first three Sputniks. Pictures of the first missions – which indicated a location ‘near Moscow’ – showed technicians operating banks of wall computers and receiving equipment, using headphones, tuners and old-fashioned spool tape recorders, printing out copious quantities of telex. Presumably, they didn’t wish to draw the attention of the Americans to their new facilities on the Black Sea and this remained the case until 1961, by which time it was guessed, correctly, that the Americans had found out anyway.