KOROLEV DIES: THE MISHIN SUCCESSION

Korolev was summoned to Moscow to explain why the promised success had not been forthcoming, but the meeting never took place. He was dead. He was admitted to hospital on 13th January 1966, for the removal of a colon tumour. No less a person than the Minister for Health, Dr Boris Petrovsky, carried out the operation – on Korolev’s own request. Mid-way through, Petrovsky discovered a more serious tumour, ‘the size of a fist’. He continued the operation. A large blood vessel burst; haemorrhaging began; and Sergei Korolev’s heart – weakened as it had been from the toil of the labour camps – collapsed. Attempts to ventilate him were made more difficult by his jaw having been broken by a camp guard during the Gulag years. Frantic efforts were made to revive him, but on 14th January he was pronounced dead.

Once dead, his identity and importance could safely be revealed and indeed it was, following burial in the wall of the Kremlin on 16th January 1966. A flood of Korolev literature followed. No efforts were spared telling of his boundless energy, iron will, limitless imagination and engineering genius. This could have been mistaken for nostalgia but it was not. With Korolev’s death, the Soviet space programme was never the same again. The driving force went out of it and with him that unique ability to command, inspire, bargain, lead, design and attend to detail. After 1966, the programme had many excellent designers, planners, politicians, administrators and prophets, but never in one person all together. Not that this was immediately obvious. The programme continued on much as before. But the sense of direction slackened. Indeed, the absence of Korolev may have made the critical difference to the climax of the moon race in 1968-9.

The succession was not clear and the defence minister Dmitri Ustinov proposed Georgi Tyulin who for several months appeared to be the likely new chief designer. In May, the choice eventually fell on Korolev’s deputy, Vasili Mishin, who had worked alongside him since 1945. Vasili Mishin – born 5th January 1917 (os) – came from Orekhovzvevo near Moscow and became a mathematician at the Moscow Aviation Institute. Mishin had been the youngest member of Tikhonravov’s group to visit Poland in 1944 and had probably done the most to extract what could be learned from the fragments recovered. He was a very bright young engineer and was also a successful phot. Mishin contributed to the design of Sputnik before being named deputy to Korolev in 1959. He invented, for example, the railcar system for erecting the R-7 on its pad, one which facilitated launches in rapid succession at the same pad and would have enabled the assembly of the Soyuz complex. Vasili Mishin was a kindly man, well regarded by those who interviewed him and, before his death in 2001, did much to tell us of the moon race and open the historical record. Khrushchev made this judgement of him and, while it is harsh, few would dispute it:

Vasili Mishin was excellent at calculating trajectories, but did not have the slightest idea how to cope with the many thousands of people, the management of whom had been loaded onto his shoulders, nor to make the huge irreversible government machine work for him [8].

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov described him as a good engineer, but hesitant, un­inspiring, poor at making decisions, over-reluctant to take risks and bad at managing the cosmonaut corps [9]. He had a drink problem, though Alexei Leonov observed from first hand that his engineering judgement was remarkably unaffected while still under the influence. OKB-1 was reorganized and renamed TsKBEM (Central Design Bureau of Experimental Machine Building) while Chelomei’s bureau was renamed TsKBM (Central Design Bureau of Machine Building) (to avoid obvious and needless confusion, the old designators will continue to be used in this narrative).

The chief designer system had worked well for the Soviet Union in the time of Korolev. But the system was extremely dependant on one person and, lacking Korolev’s strengths and skills, the system exposed serious weaknesses when dependent on Mishin. The rival American programme was never as dependent on personality as was the Soviet system. Although Wernher von Braun was the closest the Americans came to a ‘great designer’, the Americans were much more circumspect in separating the space programme’s administrative leadership – the administrator of NASA, note the title – from its engineering leadership (the NASA centres and the contracting companies).

The Ye-6 series, its OKB-1 production run now expended, gave way to the Ye-6M series. This was the first series actually built by Lavochkin. The improvements of the Ye-6M might have happened anyway, but were also prompted by the failures of the Ye-6. These were:

• Inflation of the airbags after ignition of the final rocket engine firing.

• New, lighter and more efficient camera system.

• More instruments: two folded booms to be fitted to later spacecraft.

The new cabin was slightly heavier, up from 82 kg to 100 kg. The camera system, designed by Arnold Selivanov and built by NII-885, weighed 1.5 kg, used only 2.5 watts of power, could see a horizon 1,500 m distant and was in the form of a rotating turret out of the top of the lander. It was designed to have a higher resolution than the cameras on Luna 4-8 and a full 360° panorama would have 6,000 lines.