Almost immediately after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, American strategists began to prepare plans for an attack on the USSR using a new, monstrous weapon. Already in 1953, the United States was armed with about 2,000 nuclear charges, which could deliver over 1,200 strategic bombers to the territory of the Soviet Union, concentrated at military bases near the borders of our country. The Soviet leadership at this time took emergency measures against a very real threat of attack.
Across the ocean within reach
In the early 1950s, our country also had atomic ammunition, but it was almost 10 times less than the American one. And to create a deterrent potential, we needed not only nuclear warheads, but also the means of delivering them to enemy territory, and in their capabilities they had to surpass American bombers. Only an intercontinental missile could become such a means, capable of delivering a nuclear charge to the opposite side of the globe in just 20-30 minutes.
Talk about the creation of a jet device that could easily fly over the ocean has been going on among Soviet rocket engineers since the late 1940s. However, only after the first successful tests of the R-5 rocket in 1953, the then Minister of Defense Industry of the USSR Dmitry Ustinov set before the OKB-l, headed by Sergei Korolev, a new task, which was soon officially enshrined in a closed resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of May 20, 1954.
This document spoke about the development in the shortest possible time of a launch vehicle capable of delivering an atomic charge to a distance of at least 12 thousand kilometers. Now it depended only on the leadership of OKB-l whether the Soviet Union could, in the event of an external attack, in a matter of minutes deliver a retaliatory nuclear missile strike against any aggressor, including the United States.
The secret decree also provided for the development of intercontinental cruise missiles "Tempest" ("product V-350") and "Buran" ("product 40"), but later these directions did not receive their development and were soon closed. As for the intercontinental ballistic missile, initially its design was calculated for the delivery of an atomic warhead weighing up to 3 tons. However, taking into account the successful tests of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953, the government set for specialists the task of increasing the design payload mass to 5.5 tons, which would also make it possible to place a thermonuclear charge in the head of the product.
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Adapt for an artificial earth satellite
The development of the project of a two-stage ballistic missile with an intercontinental flight range, the specialists of the design bureau of Sergei Korolev began in the fall of 1953. A young and promising designer Dmitry Kozlov was appointed the leading specialist in the development and manufacture of this product. The engineers of his group followed a completely unexplored path, since nothing like it existed in the world at that time.
Moreover, according to the information of Soviet intelligence, at that time no nuclear power in the world even made an attempt to design such equipment. Therefore, in the mid-1950s, the political leadership of the USSR, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, issuing the OKB-l task for such a development, was well aware that by the mere fact of a successful test of such a product, Soviet designers would give their country the most important military-strategic trump card for containment tactics. equal to which the United States cannot have for a very long time.
Now we know that after the start of their mass production, intercontinental ballistic missiles actually made the use of nuclear weapons meaningless in combat. After all, after their first tests, it became clear to the whole world that there would be no winners in the Third World War, since the nuclear powers within a few hours are able to completely destroy not only the resources of the enemy country, but also the entire population of planet Earth.
However, in OKB-1, they did not really think about such high matters, but they treated orders from above purely practically: if there is an order, then it must be carried out, and within the established, albeit extremely limited time. This is how Dmitry Kozlov later recalled that time:
- The new rocket in the design and technical documentation was named R-7. To ensure a record range and reliability of this product, a number of fundamentally new engineering and technical solutions were used, the main of which should be called the lateral arrangement of the first stage tanks, which is still used today. It is difficult to name the personal author of this technical idea now, but I can say that this layout of the tanks in its theoretical calculations was first presented by the design department of OKB-1 under the leadership of Sergei Kryukov, and one of its most active supporters was, of course, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
In July 1954, all design work on the R-7 product was basically completed, and on November 20, its main technical characteristics and a schematic diagram were approved by the USSR Council of Ministers. However, further work on the new product resumed only after successful tests of the R-5M rocket with an atomic charge, which took place on February 2, 1956. Already on March 20, the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a resolution on the practical implementation of the intercontinental missile project.
At the end of February 1957, after successful bench tests of individual systems and engines of the R-7, Korolev turned to the Central Committee of the CPSU and the government with a detailed report and letter. it said the following: “… we ask you to authorize the preparation and conduct of test launches of missiles in the period from April to June 1957 … - And then a very important addition followed in the document: - With some alterations they can be adapted for launching an artificial earth satellite (AES), having a small payload in the form of devices ….
This is how the road to space began
At that time, no one in the world knew that a little more than six months remained before the beginning of the space age of mankind. These six months were filled to the limit with work with new, unprecedented jet technology.
The tests of the R-7 rocket, which took place during the summer of 1957 at the Tyura-Tam test site (later Baikonur), were carried out in full accordance with the well-known rule: the more complex the technique, the more capricious it is and the more time it takes to “fine-tune” it. At the same time, the rocket scientists were especially offended to learn that most of the failures were not due to their design mistakes, but due to the banal negligence of production workers.
The very first launch of the R-7 took place on May 15, 1957 at 19:01 local time.
The rocket that took off after the command to turn on the second stage engine exploded in the air. And the cause of the explosion was an elementary factory defect - a leak in the joint of one of the fuel pipelines.
The new product continued to be plagued by failures. The second launch, scheduled for the night of June 10-11, 1957, actually did not take place, since one of the first-stage engines did not turn on. As it turned out, a worker put the valve upside down on the fuel line, which simply prevented fuel from entering the combustion chamber.
During the third launch of the R-7 (July 12, 1957), the rocket collapsed again in the active section of the trajectory, in fact, already on the border of the earth's atmosphere. And again, the cause of the accident was an assembly defect: in the wiring diagram of one of the control system devices, the polarity of the contacts was reversed.
At a meeting of the State Commission following the results of the third launch, the question was raised about the feasibility of the project of an intercontinental missile. The book of the journalist and writer Yaroslav Golovanov "Korolev: facts and myths" says the following about this:
“- I believe that this cannot continue. - said Mitrofan Ivanovich calmly (Marshal Nedelin, Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR, then commander of the strategic missile forces, - author's note). - As a customer, I am not interested in who is to blame for what failure … Therefore, I propose to remove the rocket from the tests, send all products that arrived at the test site back to the OKB to Sergei Pavlovich … When it finishes it, then we will launch it …”.
And only the fourth launch of the R-7, which took place on August 21, 1957, after fine-tuning the product, finally proved to be successful. The world's first intercontinental ballistic missile took off beautifully and steadily and within 15 minutes reached the target point of the Kamchatka test site.
However, to check the correctness of the selected design solutions, it was decided to carry out another test launch of the R-7, which took place on September 7, 1957. The rocket launch was again successful and went without comment.
And in less than a month. On October 4, 1957, the R-7 rocket launched the world's first artificial Earth satellite into orbit. So a real way into space was opened for all mankind.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №47. Author: Valery Erofeev