Chertok ch1 12/21/04 11:27 AM Page 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: A Debt to My Generation On 1 March 2002, I turned ninety. On that occasion, many people not only congratulated me and wished me health and prosperity, but also insisted that I continue my literary work on the history of rocket-space science and technology.1 I was eighty years old when I had the audacity to think that I possessed not only waning engineering capabilities, but also literary skills sufficient to tell about “the times and about myself.” I began to work in this field in the hope that Fate’s goodwill would allow my idea to be realized. Due to my literary inexperience, I assumed that memoirs on the establishment and development of aviation and, subsequently, rocket-space technology and the people who created it could be limited to a single book of no more than five hundred pages. However, it turns out that when one is producing a literary work aspiring to historical authenticity,one’s plans for the size and the deadlines fall through, just as rocket-space systems aspiring to the highest degree of reliability exceed their budgets and fail to meet their deadlines. And the expenses grow, proportional to the failure to meet deadlines and the increase in reliability. Instead of the original idea of a single book, my memoirs and musings took up four volumes, and together with the publishing house I spent six years instead of the planned two! Only the fact that the literary work was a success, which neither the publishing house nor I expected, validated it. The Moscow publishing house Mashinostroyeniye had already published three editions of books combined under the single title Rockets and People.The Elbe- Dnepr publishing house translated and published these books for the German reader. Unfortunately, in the process of reissuing and translating these books, it was not possible to make changes and additions for reasons similar to the series production of technologically complex systems. As a rule, improvements are not made to works of artistic literature. But for a historical memoir, the author has 1. The phrase “rocket-space technology,” though unfamiliar in Western vernacular, is commonly used by Russians to denote a complete system of elements that include a particular spacecraft, the launch vehicles used to put them into space, and the various subsystems involved. A comparable term in Western English would be “space technology.” 1 Chertok ch1 12/21/04 11:27 AM Page 2 Rockets and People From author’s archives. Academician Boris Yevseyevich Chertok speaking with news correspondents in 1992 at the site of the former Institute RABE in Bleicherode, Germany. the right to make corrections if he is convinced, on his own or with the assistance of his readers, that they are necessary. I am not a historian, but an engineer who participated directly in the creation of rocket-space technology from its first timid steps to the triumphant achieve- ments of the second half of the twentieth century. Work on the leading edge of the scientific-technical front transformed creatively thinking engineers into noted figures upon whom various academic degrees and titles were conferred. As a rule, the mass media, including the foreign media, refer to such persons simply as “scien- tists.” I, however, must warn the reader that in no way do I pretend to wear the laurels of a scholarly historian. Correspondingly, my books are not examples of strict historical research. In any memoir, narrative and thought are inevitably subjective. When describing historical events and individuals who have become widely known, the author is in danger of exaggerating his involvement and role. Obviously my memoirs are no exception. But this is simply unavoidable, prima- rily because one remembers what one was involved with in the past. For me, work on these memoirs was not an amateur project or hobby, but a debt owed to comrades who have departed this life. At the Russian Academy of Sciences, I served for many years, on a voluntary basis, as deputy to Academician Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach—Chairman of the Commission for the Development of the Scientific Legacy of the Pioneers of Space Exploration. After Rauschen- bach’s death,I was named chairman of this commission. Work in this field not only keeps me busy,but also brings me satisfaction. At times I feel somewhat like a time 2 Chertok ch1 12/21/04 11:27 AM Page 3 Introduction:A Debt to My Generation machine, acting as an absolutely necessary link between times. There is nothing at the present and in the future that does not depend on the past. Consequently, my product has consumer value, for it reveals systemic links between the past and the present, and may help to predict the future. I lived through eighty-eight years in the twentieth century. In the three thou- sand year history of human civilization, this brief segment in time will be noted as a period of scientific-technical revolution and of breakthroughs into realms of the macro and micro world that were previously inaccessible to humanity. The scien- tific-technical revolutions of the twentieth century were intertwined with social revolutions, many local wars, two hot World Wars, and one forty-year Cold War. In September 2000, while presenting a paper in Kaluga at the Thirty-fifth Annual Lectures dedicated to the development of the scientific legacy and ideas of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskiy, I noted that of primary importance for the theory of rocket technology were the works of Ivan Vasilyevich Meshcherskiy on the movement of a body with variable mass and Tsiolkovskiy’s paper, published in 1903, the essence of which is expressed in the formula: VK = W ln (1 + M0/MK). Here VK is the maximum flight speed of a rocket, whose engine ejects the gas of the spent fuel at a rate of W, while M0 and MK are the initial and final mass of the rocket respectively. During the first decades of the twentieth century, a narrow circle of lone enthusiasts who dreamed of interplanetary flight were captivated by the works of Tsiolkovskiy and by analogous, independent works published some- what later by Hermann Oberth in Germany and Robert Goddard in the United States. In 1905, the German journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) first published Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity containing the formula: E = mc2 From this formula, now known to schoolchildren, it followed that mass is an enormous,“frozen” quantity of energy. In spite of their revolutionary importance for science, the appearance of these two new,very simple formulas did not lead to any revolution in the consciousness of the world’s scientific community during the first decade of the twentieth century. It was only forty years later that humanity realized that technological systems using these fundamental principles of rocket-space and nuclear energy threatened its very existence. Examples of discoveries by lone scientists that did not initially cause excitement but later would stun humanity are not isolated. During the second half of the twentieth century, the formulas of Tsiolkovskiy and Einstein entered high school textbooks, and strategic nuclear missile armaments came to determine the politi- cal climate on planet Earth. 3 Chertok ch1 12/21/04 11:27 AM Page 4 Rockets and People The peoples of the former Soviet Union enriched civilization with scientific- technical achievements that have held a deserved place among the principal victories of science and technology in the twentieth century. In the process of working on my memoirs, I regretfully became convinced of how many gaps there are in the history of the gigantic technological systems created in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Previously,such gaps were justified by a total- itarian regime of secrecy.Currently,however, it is ideological collapse that threat- ens the objective recounting of the history of domestic science and technology. The consignment to oblivion of the history of our science and technology is motivated by the fact that its origins date back to the Stalin epoch or to the period of the “Brezhnev stagnation.”2 The most striking achievements of nuclear, rocket, space, and radar technology were the results of single-minded actions by Soviet scientists and engineers. A colossal amount of creative work by the organizers of industry and the scientific- technical intelligentsia of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan,Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan—and to one extent or another all the republics of the former Soviet Union—was invested in the creation of these systems. The alienation of the people from the history of their science and technology cannot be justified by any ideo- logical considerations. I am part of the generation that suffered irredeemable losses, to whose lot in the twentieth century fell the most arduous of tests. From childhood, a sense of duty was inculcated in this generation—a duty to the people, to the Motherland, to our parents, to future generations, and even to all of humanity.I am convinced that, for my contemporaries and me, this sense of duty was very steadfast. This was one of the most powerful stimuli for the creation of these memoirs. To a great extent, the people about whom I am reminiscing acted out of a sense of duty.I have outlived many of them and will be in debt to them if I do not write about the civic and scientific feats that they accomplished. 2. The “Brezhnev Stagnation” refers to the period in the 1970s characterized by economic stagna- tion, the suppression of political and artistic dissent, and the growth of a massive inefficient bureaucracy.