• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

At Tyuratam, the Soviet moon booster emerged slowly and suffered disaster. The Secret at Complex J By Dwayne A. Day I T WAS mid-August of 1969 in Washington, D.C., and Jack Rooney was at work in the huge, windowless building that housed the National Photographic In- terpretation Center. Rooney was a photo analyst. His job was to squeeze useful data from sat- ellite images of the Soviet Union, and he was about to learn something big. Just a few weeks earlier, on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. had stepped onto the lunar surface and into history. America had won the “moon race.” Yet the Soviet Union did not con- cede the point. Moscow did not claim to be the first to reach the moon; rather, it insisted that it had never even made an attempt. That being the case, sniffed the newspaper Pravda, A KH-7 Gambit satellite reconnaissance photo showed something the United States had merely won a huge under construction at the Soviet Union’s Tyuratam space “race” with itself. The claim was facility in present-day Kazakhstan. The massive complex was to be the support facility for the Soviet Union’s enormous and widely repeated in Western media. secret N-1 moon rocket. The N-1 would have been somewhat However, what Rooney found sug- larger than the Apollo program’s Saturn V. gested a very different conclusion. He not only saw evidence of a Soviet moon effort, he also found indica- tions that Moscow’s program had recently met with disaster. 72 AIR FORCE Magazine / July 2004 Early American reconnaissance satellites rode into orbit on rockets such as this modified Thor, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in December 1963. lunar goal, US intelligence agencies sought evidence that the Soviets were also racing to the moon. They did not find any, but they kept looking. Success or Stunt? Sayre Stevens was an “all source” analyst working in the Space Divi- sion of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI). His job was to follow Soviet space systems by piec- ing together data provided to him It was a big discovery at the from a variety of sources, such as time, 35 years ago, but it was satellite photos, communications in- never publicized. Doubts that tercepts, agent reports, scientific jour- the Soviet Union had a moon nals, and statements by cosmonauts. program would persist for an- Stevens recalls that, in the sum- other 20 years, until the Soviet mer of 1962, the Soviet Union had press, in a startling episode of launched two manned spacecraft at glasnost, loosed a flood of revela- once, flying them past each other. tions about the program. (See “Yes, This appeared to demonstrate a ren- There Was a Moon Race,” by James dezvous capability that might be criti- E. Oberg, April 1990.) cal for any lunar effort. Those revelations marked the last At the time, Stevens did not be- chapter of a long tale of intelligence lieve the Soviet space program actu- operations. ally had achieved a rendezvous. The story started in May 1961, when Rather, Stevens recalled, it had pulled President Kennedy challenged the na- off a major publicity stunt, one that tion to put an American on the moon made the US “look like a fool for the within the decade. The US had little 48th time in the space race.” intelligence on the Soviet space pro- Within the Soviet space program, gram. After Kennedy announced his the CIA had no sources to which it AIR FORCE Magazine / July 2004 73 could turn for interpretation. David preters were “thinking space,” Doyle In April 1964, the photointerpreters Doyle, an NPIC photointerpreter in recalled. declared that the Soviet Union was, 1962, concluded that the United The site was close to what the CIA in fact, constructing a new launch States had no human intelligence at called Complex A, the first launch- complex at Tyuratam. They called it all on Moscow’s program. If it did pad at Tyuratam and the place from Complex J. They noted the Soviets have secret information from human which Yuri Gagarin and the other had begun constructing two massive spies, he recalled, “it wasn’t getting cosmonauts were launched into or- buildings, unlike anything yet seen down to us.” bit. When Soviet workers, a short at Tyuratam. US intelligence did, however, have time later, built a road from the site Stevens remarked to himself, “OK, spy satellites, which were growing to Complex A, US suspicions about let’s wait and see what happens with more and more sophisticated. a moon program were strengthened. J. Let’s just give ourselves a little In spring 1963, a Corona satellite In July 1963, however, a top Soviet leeway here.” photographed the Tyuratam range, a scientist told British astronomer Ber- That year, Stevens returned to work sprawling launch facility situated in nard Lovell that Moscow had no moon on his lunar report. This time, he the desert of the then-Soviet republic program at all. The comment created said, he included a judgment that, of Kazakh ASSR. Examination of the a stir within NASA and the CIA. Was “obviously, they were trying to build photos revealed a major new construc- it true or merely a ruse? To try to a big missile” but that the Soviet tion effort at the site. Subsequent spy answer this question, Stevens re- Union was not doing so with the satellite missions revealed that the viewed all available intelligence on speed required to complete the com- construction was following a typical the Soviet space program. He found plex and have it readied to launch a pattern. First to be built were barracks no evidence of a Soviet lunar pro- manned moon mission by the end of to house construction workers. Next gram, but the CIA deemed his report 1969—the American target date. came concrete batch plants and supply to be inconclusive. Stevens recalled that his second yards. Eventually, workers began a report caused some controversy in huge excavation. A Clearer Picture OSI. Albert Wheelon, the CIA’s At that early stage, no one could In July, the US also fielded a pow- deputy director for science and tech- determine what the Soviet Union was erful new reconnaissance satellite— nology, said later that he urged his planning to build at Tyuratam. designated KH-7, code name Gam- analysts to use great caution in this Doyle, who specialized in Soviet bit—which would provide images area. His message was: “Let’s be space and missile facilities, often was with clarity much greater than that sure, because an estimate here will the first person to look at the satellite of Corona. Gambit soon began re- affect national policy. Let’s be damn images of launch ranges and missile turning high-resolution photographs sure, because it really matters.” sites. From the beginning, the inter- of Tyuratam. The purpose of the rocket initially was not clear. The Soviet Union started building this large booster as a multi- purpose vehicle and not specifically as a moon rocket. In late 1963, how- ever, Moscow concluded that the US Note the long shadows in this early morning was, in fact, serious about reaching view of the two N-1 the moon, and Soviet officials in 1964 launchpads taken in formally, though secretly, launched a December 1968. They manned lunar effort. show two lightning- The Soviet military opposed a lu- rod towers with the massive N-1 between nar mission because of its massive them. The rocket is cost. Different Soviet design bureaus visible as a white fought for control of the project. As shape on the pad. a result, with limited support and resources, construction at Complex J proceeded in fits and starts. Meanwhile, though US satellite photos showed the massive construc- tion project was proceeding, Stevens and other analysts were waiting for a giant launch vehicle to emerge from the buildings. They had no hard data on this vehicle, only a conviction that it would be huge. They had a name for what they were expecting. They called it “Big Mother.” In addition, they had not yet seen a static test facility needed to carry out a test firing of the entire first stage of the rocket. They expected it 74 AIR FORCE Magazine / July 2004 to be similar to the one NASA built to test fire the Saturn V first stage at Huntsville, Ala. However, the ana- lysts could not find a similar facility anywhere in the Soviet Union. Some speculated that Soviet space offi- cials might try to test the rocket while it sat locked onto the launchpad, but Film from KH satel- nobody was satisfied with that theory. lites was retrieved in Some intelligence analysts theo- a dramatic way, as film canisters re- rized that the Soviets might strap entered the atmo- together several smaller rockets, such sphere and were as the SS-8 ICBM, to make a single snagged, dangling big booster. That would not require from their parachutes, construction of a new static test fa- by specially equipped C-130s. cility. However, a NASA rocket ex- pert at Huntsville said such an ap- proach would not work. The analysts were puzzled by other aspects of the Soviet effort, such as the slow progress of the construc- tion. It did not fit the known pattern. “We’d seen them build launchers ... and launchpads and all that kind of stuff,” Stevens said, “but this thing went on and on and on.” It was apparent that the launchpad “was going to have a Big Mother,” said Stevens, but the question in everyone’s mind was, “When are they going to get it ready to go?” What the analysts did not know, The images showed construction of a Soviets seemed to be using the rocket Stevens went on, was that there was massive rotating service tower that for fit checks with the ground equip- “a big war going on among the chief would support the rocket and early ment, but there was no indication of designers in the Soviet Union, ..

Load more

  6

Copy Link