http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/09/28/105.html
Space Odyssey
Fifty years after Sputnik streaked into the sky, a book by Matthew Brzezinski
reconstructs the dawn of a new age.
By Asif Siddiqi
Published: September 28, 2007
It is hard to imagine that a metal ball about the size of a basketball could
throw the United States into panic. But 50 years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, when the
Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite into orbit,
Americans went into collective shock. To them, the Soviet Union embodied a
nation of collective farms, drab cities and household appliances that rarely
worked. Sputnik's success completely altered this view, as the Soviets took the
first baby steps into the final frontier of outer space. Beyond its political
and scientific importance, the success of Sputnik also underscored the
vulnerability of the United States: After all, if the Soviets could launch a
satellite that flew around the world, they could also deliver an atomic bomb to
the enemy.
Matthew Brzezinski provides an absorbing account of these "hidden rivalries
that ignited the space age" in "Red Moon Rising," an expansive work full of
colorful characters worthy of a great Cold War novel. Although Brzezinski, a
former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, often glosses over the
messy complexities of history, he displays a particular talent for capturing
the human essence of this epic battle -- the small detail of a scene, the odd
biographical factoid, the cultural fashions of the day that distinguish his
book from the many generic works on the early history of the space program.
The central personality in Brzezinski's narrative is the famous Chief Designer
of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov. A childhood aviation enthusiast
who later in life was attracted to space travel, Korolyov started his career in
the 1930s as a rocket engineer before being sent to the gulag on trumped-up
charges. Six years in the camps left him deeply scarred, but he never fully
lost his faith in Josef Stalin. After the war, Korolyov rose rapidly in the
missile program and gained a reputation as a hardheaded manager. His gruff
personality, stubbornness and managerial genius were indispensable in
convincing uninterested Communist Party and military leaders to commit
resources to a satellite project. Brzezinski gives a fascinating account of
Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Korolyov's design bureau in 1956, during which the
Chief Designer extracted a verbal commitment from the Soviet leader to back the
launching of a satellite. Khrushchev and his fellow Politburo members were more
bewildered than bedazzled when Korolyov showed them a full-scale model of the
R-7, the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
Itar-Tass
Sputnik's launch marked a major milestone in a race filled with hurdles
on either side.
To Soviet leaders, developing an ICBM was a matter of life and death. The
Soviet Union was literally surrounded by U.S. military bases, where squadrons
of bombers waited for orders to deliver their deadly nuclear weapons to the
Soviet landmass. By the middle of the 1950s, the U.S. nuclear arsenal was five
times bigger than the Soviet one. Desperate to counter this juggernaut, Soviet
industrial leaders invested enormous resources in developing nuclear weapons
and the ballistic missiles for sending them across oceans. But Korolyov and his
colleagues knew that an ICBM could also lob a small object into orbit around
the Earth. It was this marriage of military imperative and utopian dreaming
that Korolyov exploited. The Soviet military enthusiastically supported the
ICBM project, while Korolyov surreptitiously made plans to use it for a goal
whose importance few understood. As Brzezinski shows, the road to launching
Sputnik was littered with wrong turns, serendipitous events and brushes with
failure. Korolyov came out ahead by barely a hair's breadth.
In the United States, there were many with similar ambitions, including the
handsome and erudite German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, widely
considered to be Korolyov's Western doppelganger. To his credit, Brzezinski
foregoes that well-trod ground and instead touts Major General John Bruce
Medaris, the commander of the Army's ballistic rocket efforts and von Braun's
superior, as a more worthy parallel to Korolyov. Brzezinski convincingly argues
that "it was really Medaris' iron will and stubborn refusal to yield to
bureaucratic setbacks" that eventually facilitated an American foothold in
space.
U.S. efforts to reach the high frontier were bogged down by fierce
inter-service rivalry, major missteps, ill-advised decisions and just plain bad
luck. From 1955, Medaris, a veteran of two world wars, consistently advanced
von Braun's idea of using a Redstone long-range rocket to lob a U.S. satellite
into space. These entreaties fell on deaf ears, as senior Defense Department
officials were interested in neither ICBMs nor satellites. Instead, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration funded a parallel civilian project known
as Vanguard. In the aftershock of Sputnik, when Vanguard was launched, it
exploded in full view of a television audience of millions. With newspaper
headlines screaming "Flopnik!," Medaris finally extracted permission to go
ahead with von Braun's project. Less than two months later, in January 1958,
Medaris and von Braun finally had a satellite, Explorer-1, in orbit.
Brzezinski devotes much attention to domestic crises in the Soviet Union and
United States, underscoring that it was thanks to these distractions that
Korolyov and Medaris were able to push their own agenda. This overarching
argument would have been more convincing had Brzezinski not simplified some of
the history. His account of the prelude to Sputnik rests on the assumption that
the U.S. military and the Eisenhower Administration were uninterested in ICBMs
and satellites until it was too late. Yet, as many historians have shown, the
United States had a crash program from about 1954 to develop an ICBM known as
Atlas, a rocket Brzezinski hardly mentions; many officials also recognized the
need to launch satellites. The U.S. failure to preempt the Soviets had less to
do with lack of foresight than with a complex set of factors, including the
belief that work on a satellite might distract from the more important job of
creating new generations of effective nuclear-tipped missiles. Most
surprisingly, Brzezinski devotes only cursory attention to the legal gymnastics
behind the selection in 1955 of Vanguard as the first U.S. satellite project,
or to the CIA and Air Force's interest in developing satellites that could spy
on the Soviet Union. These critical factors warrant more detail since they
effectively ensured that the United States would take second place in the race
to space.
There are other simplifications or errors in Brzezinski's book, some more
serious than others. Documents declassified from Russian archives last year
show that when Eisenhower's press secretary announced on July 29, 1955, that
the Americans would soon launch a satellite into space, the Politburo held a
meeting to discuss the question just 10 days later. To Korolyov's delight,
Khrushchev approved the idea. This meeting, and not the later visit by
Khrushchev to Korolyov that Brzezinski describes, was the turning point in
Korolyov's dreams of space. Like many areas of Soviet history, the history of
Sputnik continues to evolve. But if Brzezinski falls short in telling the whole
story, he does know how to tell a good one. Easy to read and hard to put down,
his book provides a quick entry point into one of the most important episodes
of the Cold War.
Asif Siddiqi is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University and the
author of a forthcoming book on the social and cultural roots of Russian space
exploration.
Copyright © 2007 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved
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