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The Inheritors

v1.1.1 / chapter 2 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* Although the Germans had accomplished the most with rocketry by the end of the Second World War, both the US and the Soviet Union had been investigating rocketry as well. In the postwar period, the V-2 would provide considerable inspiration for both West and East.

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[2.1] ROBERT GODDARD & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ROCKETRY
[2.2] THE CALTECH SUICIDE CLUB
[2.3] CALTECH, JATO, & AEROJET
[2.4] THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
[2.5] VON BRAUN ENLISTS WITH THE AMERICANS
[2.6] SERGEI KOROLYEV & THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET ROCKETRY
[2.7] KOROLYEV IN PRISON AND WAR
[2.8] THE SOVIET V-2

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[2.1] ROBERT GODDARD & THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ROCKETRY

* While Tsiolkovsky and Oberth were writing their theoretical treatises on rocketry in the 1920s, across the Atlantic in America, a professor at Clark College in Massachusetts named Robert Hutchings Goddard was trying to put their ideas into practice. Goddard had been a sickly lad who turned to science and technology to sustain him. He had been much impressed by the writings of H.G. Wells, going so far as to write a fan letter to Wells later in life.

During World War I, Goddard had developed ideas on rocket propulsion that solidified in an important paper published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1920, titled "A Method Of Reaching Extreme Altitudes". Goddard's paper described in detail the construction of a rocket propelled by a sequence of solid-fuel cartridges that could carry meteorological and other instruments to high altitude, and float down on a parachute after accomplishing its mission.

Goddard's paper included some casual speculations on sending a rocket all the way to the Moon. These remarks unfortunately led to sensationalistic headlines in newspaper articles. He was mocked by some papers as the "Moon Man", and, just as bad from his point of view, he received messages from many people, including silent screen star Mary Pickford, asking in all seriousness for reserved seats on his Moon rocket. Goddard, never the most outgoing or easygoing sort of person, was unable to turn a blind eye toward the silliness, and he became secretive while he continued his work. His cartridge rocket scheme didn't pan out, so he began to work on liquid rocket propulsion schemes.

Hermann Oberth heard about the Smithsonian paper and contacted Goddard. They conducted a strained correspondence, with Goddard eventually claiming that Oberth had stolen his ideas, though in fact many of the basic concepts of liquid-rocket propulsion were in the air at the time and went back over two decades to Tsiolkovsky's work. The timid Goddard was also a little put-off by Oberth's grand speculations about the future of spaceflight. Finally, Goddard was also suspicious of the "warlike Germans", which in that instance proved well-founded by later events.

* Goddard certainly lacked "people skills", but his technical efforts began to pay off. On 16 March 1926, Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fuel rocket, propelled by gasoline and liquid oxygen, to the "extreme altitude" of 56 meters (184 feet). Well, it was a start.

In 1929, the influential aviator Charles Lindbergh met Goddard and became interested in the professor's rocketry work. The next year, Lindbergh met the philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim and managed to obtain grants for Goddard's research. Grant funding allowed Goddard to continue his rocket studies. He went to the wide-open spaces of New Mexico to launch bigger rockets, and on 30 December 1930 he launched a 3.35 meter (11 foot) long liquid-fueled rocket to an altitude of 600 meters (2,000 feet) at his ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Lindbergh encouraged Goddard to publish his work, and so the professor described his technology in a second Smithsonian paper, "Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development", published in March 1936. The paper not only described the propulsion system of his rockets but also a gyroscopically-stabilized rocket guidance system.

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[2.2] THE CALTECH SUICIDE CLUB

* While Goddard continued his work in New Mexico, American amateur rocket societies sprang up. The "American Interplanetary Society", later the "American Rocket Society (ARS)", was founded in New York in 1930, and engaged in both promotional activities and small-scale experiments.

Some ARS members went beyond mere experiments. One, James Wyld, developed a small liquid-fuel rocket engine in 1938 and continued to enhance it over the next few years. In 1942, fellow ARS member Lovell Lawrence tried to sell Wyld's rocket technology to the US Navy. The Navy was interested but wanted to deal with a formal business organization, and so Lawrence, Wyld, and a few of their colleagues from the ARS formed a company named "Reaction Motors", based in New Jersey.

On the west coast, other rocket experimenters were also moving up in the world. On 31 October 1936, a small group of students from the "Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT)" went to an isolated site in the city of Pasadena and managed to get a liquid-fuel rocket powered by methanol and liquid oxygen to fire for a few seconds.

Other students in the aeronautical curriculum named this handful of zealots the "Suicide Club", but the group, led by a doctoral student named Frank J. Malina, was serious. Eventually Malina and his colleagues went to a prominent professor of aeronautics at GALCIT, Theodore von Karman (1881:1963), for help. Von Karman was a Hungarian who had worked in Germany on aeronautics until Nazism made him decide to come to the United States. He was noted for his ability and graciousness, and was sympathetic to the group's goals. Malina, despite his enthusiasm, was careful to keep his ambitions within the realm of the acceptable. At least publicly, the Suicide Club only wanted to build sounding rockets that could fly to altitudes of 32 to 80 kilometers (20 to 50 miles) to perform scientific observations.

Of course, the Suicide Club wanted to get in touch with Goddard, but when Malina went to New Mexico to meet with him in August 1936, he was received cordially by the Goddards but got little help. Goddard was very protective about his research, and showed Malina old articles ridiculing the "Moon Man" as justification for the secrecy. Von Karman was offended by Goddard's behavior and later said that Goddard cut himself off from the subsequent development of rocketry. That was something of an exaggeration, since Goddard's work was a great inspiration to the first generation of American rocket enthusiasts; if his later work was performed in something of an intellectual vacuum, his two treatises on rocketry remained very influential. However, the focus of American rocketry was shifting to Pasadena, much to Goddard's annoyance. He complained about being sidelined by the upstarts, but in reality Goddard had no one to blame but himself: he walled himself off and then complained about being ignored.

In January 1938, Malina presented a paper that he and fellow Suicide Club member Apollo Smith had written, entitled "Flight Analysis Of The Sounding Rocket", at the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences meeting in New York. CalTech gave Malina $200 USD to make the trip, the first time the university had provided funds to the rocketeers. The paper was published two months later in JOURNAL OF THE AERONAUTICAL SCIENCES, lending prestige to rocket research.

Press coverage followed and was favorable. Von Karman and Malina were careful to emphasize that they were solely interested in sounding rockets, but there had been a change in attitude since the days when Goddard had been mocked by the newspapers. Now the public found the idea of flying to the Moon exciting instead of foolish. Science fiction pulp magazines had become popular during the 1930s, creating a larger constituency for space activities. Instead of deflecting ridicule, Molina had to dampen the enthusiasm of the newspapers, who published articles featuring passenger liners flying to the Moon.

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[2.3] CALTECH, JATO, & AEROJET

* The CalTech researchers weren't concerned with interplanetary invasions, being busy on practical matters. Von Karman had been given a grant by the US Army Air Corps in 1938, while America was still at peace, to develop a rocket device that would help aircraft take off on short runways.

Preliminary investigations went well. In 1941, with increased grant funding, Malina leased seven acres in Pasadena at Arroyo Seco, near where the Suicide Club had conducted their original experiments, and set up a crude rocket test facility there. The site was relatively isolated and their noisy, sometimes explosive experiments wouldn't do the campus any harm. The local citizens weren't happy about the experiments, but they were persuaded to put up with them by an appeal to their patriotism.

Using the Arroyo Seco facility, von Karman and Malina developed strap-on rockets, known as JATOs, for "Jet Assisted Take Off", testing the first JATO rocket on an Ercoupe private plane on 6 August 1941. The term "jet" for this application seems odd by modern standards, but it was used to describe both rockets and air-breathing jet engines until after World War II. Part of the reason the term "rocket" was avoided was apparently because researchers felt it still smelled of crackpottery.

The JATO units used a new form of solid propellant. Traditional skyrockets used black powder, while military bombardment rockets used more potent nitrocellulose propellants. However, such propellants burned too quickly to be useful for boosting aircraft. John Parsons, a CalTech chemist, came up with a new propellant, consisting of asphalt (a fuel), mixed with potassium perchlorate (an oxidizer). The new propellant burned at an acceptable rate, and could be stored over a long period of time, though the rockets had to be stored nose-down since the asphalt fuel otherwise tended to slowly ooze out.

By the end of World War II, JATO rockets would be in widespread use. Once the stigma of the term "rocket" wore off, they would be renamed "rocket assisted takeoff (RATO)" units, or "rocket assisted takeoff gear (RATOG)" in British usage.

* The CalTech group also worked on liquid-fuel rocket engines for JATO boosters. Most liquid-fuel engines built to this time had used alcohol, gasoline, or kerosene as a fuel, with liquid oxygen as an oxidizer. However, liquid oxygen had to be kept very cold and that wasn't practical for gear that had to be used on aircraft carriers or rough field airstrips.

Malina worked with another member of the group, Martin Summerfield, to determine a more practical propellant scheme. Following up suggestions by Parsons and Robert Truax, a US Navy official who was directing the Navy's rocket program and working with Goddard and Reaction Motors, they settled on aniline as a fuel and fuming red nitric acid as an oxidizer. Aniline is a hydrocarbon similar to benzene, but with one of the hydrogen atoms replaced by an NH2 group. Fuming red nitric acid is nitric acid, HNO3, mixed with nitrogen dioxide. Aniline and fuming red nitric acid are both nasty, corrosive, toxic substances, but they are "storable" and, as an added benefit of sorts, are "hypergolic": they burn spontaneously on contact. This simplified the design of a rocket engine using them, reducing the problems of ignition and controlled combustion, though it made them even more troublesome to handle.

* The research on JATO units had gone so well that in early 1942, the Air Corps asked the CalTech researchers to go into production. This meant setting up a formal business, and so von Karman, Malina, Parsons, Summerfield, and a few others formed a startup company, named "Aerojet". Aerojet was later bought out by General Tire & Rubber of Akron, Ohio, which could provide funding for expansion of the business. The company was accordingly renamed "Aerojet General".

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[2.4] THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

* In early 1943, with Allied intelligence learning more about German long-range rocket developments, Malina and Suicide Club member Hsue-Shen Tsien -- pronounced roughly "shu-eh-sen chien", these days rendered more properly in correct Chinese name order as "Qian Xuesen" -- were asked by the War Department to help design the engine for a long-range missile, "long range" meaning a few tens of kilometers. They came up with a proposal for a 4.6 tonne (5 ton) vehicle with a range of 120 kilometers (75 miles). Von Karman passed the study on to the War Department on 20 November 1943, and recommended that a long-range missile program be started without delay.

The document called for major expansion of the Arroyo Seco test site and its research, including experimental work on ramjet engines and on rocket missiles. That level of development work was beyond the reach of the CalTech aeronautics engineering department, and so a new Army-funded organization was spun off, to be named the "Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)" in 1944.

The military was already using relatively small air-to-surface and surface-to-surface solid fuel rockets in combat. Urged by the Army's ordnance rocket branch, which was interested in long-range missile development, JPL submitted a second, more detailed report early in 1944. This one outlined not only engine development but also guidance systems, control systems, and the other elements for full development of a practical large rocket. CalTech got $3 million USD for the work immediately, and JPL was in serious business. By late 1945, there were more than 300 workers at the site, which by then included two labs, test facilities, and a supersonic wind tunnel. The Pasadena city government wasn't happy about the noisy and apparently hazardous activities at the site, but in those days the Army called the shots, and the site remained in business.

The first rocket that JPL developed for the Army was named "Private". Work on Private began in 1944, and resulted in a small unguided missile about 2.4 meters (8 feet) long, powered by the asphalt / potassium perchlorate solid fuel devised by Parsons.

The Army wanted JPL to move on to a much larger liquid-fuel missile named "Corporal" next, which would have a range of 100 kilometers (60 miles). Corporal was to be the first long-range missile fielded by the US Army. However, Malina argued reasonably that the lab should build a smaller, much less ambitious vehicle first, in the form of a "sounding rocket" to explore high altitudes. This was all new territory, and taking small steps would help reduce risk.

The Army agreed, and the result was the "WAC Corporal". "WAC" meant "Women's Army Corps" the female branch of the service, and the implication of the name was that the WAC Corporal was the Corporal's "little sister". Some humorless Army officials insisted that "WAC" meant "Without Attitude Control", since the WAC Corporal was unguided except for a set of fixed tailfins.

In fact, the WAC Corporal was simplicity itself. It was about 4.9 meters (16 feet) long and weighed about 300 kilograms (655 pounds) when fueled. It burned fuming red nitric acid and aniline, with the fuel and oxidizer fed to the engine by a pressurization system, not a turbopump. The engine was built by Aerojet. The first launch of the WAC Corporal was on 11 October 1945 from the Army's new missile test site at White Sands, New Mexico, with the rocket flying to an altitude of 71 kilometers (44 miles). The Suicide Club had achieved its original objectives.

* By this time, Robert Goddard was gone, dead of cancer on 10 August 1945, the day Japan surrendered. He had worked since 1942 on propulsion projects for the US Navy, mostly in Annapolis, Maryland, and a few months before his death he had the opportunity to inspect a captured V-2. He would later be honored as the father of American rocketry, in spite of his mixed influence on the field.

Goddard was a complicated man. In the summer of 1940, Lieutenant Homer A. Boushey of the US Army Air Corps, a student of Von Karman and an admirer of Goddard, received an invitation from Goddard to visit his New Mexico ranch. Boushey flew there in an Army fighter aircraft, and because of his dramatic entrance, military status, or charisma managed to win over the reserved Goddard immediately. Goddard showed Boushey his rocket designs, and after dinner they sat outside in the twilight. Boushey brought up interplanetary flight, and after some hesitation Goddard began to talk not only of interplanetary flight but interstellar flight and the future of the human race, outlining ideas far ahead of their time, such as a concept for what would much later be called a "solar thermal rocket". Goddard achieved great things. The only pity is that if he had been able to attain a better balance, he could have achieved much more.

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[2.5] VON BRAUN ENLISTS WITH THE AMERICANS

* Another important event had also taken place by that time: Wernher von Braun was now working for the Americans.

Although the American 3rd Army soldiers who captured von Braun and his team in early May 1945 didn't know what they had caught, in fact the US Army was already looking for him. In December 1944, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, an intelligence officer attached to the US Army's Ordnance Corps, was assigned to ensure that he collected a hundred V-2s for examination and test, with technical assistance from General Electric (GE) engineers. GE had gone into aviation by the back door, using their expertise in power turbines to develop turbojet engines, and rocket propulsion was the next logical step. In mid-November, the company had been awarded a US government contract for "Project Hermes", with a broad charter to evaluate and develop missile technologies for the US. Getting their hands on the V-2, the world's most advanced rocket, was a high priority.

In February 1945, Captain Robert B. Staver of the Ordnance Corps, who had worked closely with JPL, was sent to Europe to ensure that the US got as many German rocket scientists as possible. Staver got a list of "candidates" from British intelligence, with von Braun's name at the top.

After the surrender of von Braun and his people, Colonel Toftoy threw together a group designated "Special Mission V-2" to get the precious missile parts. Toftoy had to hurry, because by agreement among the Allies Mittelwerk was well inside what would become Soviet-dominated East Germany, and the Soviets were supposed to take charge on 1 June 1945, though it would actually take them over a month longer.

Special Mission V-2 arrived at Nordhausen in a truck convoy that had driven all the way across war-damaged country from the French port of Cherbourg. Toftoy, not knowing which parts were important and which were not, simply ordered his men to take a hundred of every item. They packed up parts and started filling freight trains with them. The first trainload of parts left Nordhausen on 22 May, bound for the port of Antwerp in Belgium. Trainloads left every day until the 1 June deadline. In the meantime, Captain Staver had been able to get the location of the stash of Peenemunde engineering documents at Dortnen from a local official. The mine was opened and the documents were hauled out by truck on 27 May.

* As far as von Braun and his people went, they played a cautious game, being cooperative, but not too cooperative, with their captors. Von Braun was no fool, and he wanted to get the best deal he could out of the Americans for him and his people. At the request of Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien of JPL, who had come to Germany to provide a technical evaluation of the catch, von Braun wrote a detailed document titled "The Development Of Liquid Rockets In Germany And Their Future Prospects". It combined pragmatic detail with far-reaching but disciplined imagination. It was a shrewd sales pitch that would appeal to both the hard realists and visionaries among his captors. Everyone who knew von Braun well found that, among his many other talents, he was a born salesman who could also back up any statement with cold hard facts.

The Americans didn't need much of a sales pitch. On 20 July 1945, Operation OVERCAST was put into motion to bring about 350 top-ranked German researchers, including about 100 of von Braun's people, to the United States for a year. Some senior US government officials had ethical reservations about making use of the expertise of Germans who had recently been working hard to help Hitler in his war against the Allies; however, expedience won out. The war in the Pacific was still in progress at that time, and many American officials believed it would take much more time and blood to crush the Japanese. Japan surrendered before any of von Braun's people made it across the Atlantic, but officials were also becoming increasingly fearful of Josef Stalin's intentions. Although the Cold War had not quite begun, the temperature was falling rapidly.

At the end of September 1945, von Braun and six of his people were sent to the US. Von Braun went from cool and gray Germany to the frying sands of Fort Bliss, Texas, to prepare the way for the rest of his people, who he referred to as "prisoners of peace". The other six Germans in the contingent were sent to US Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland to sort out the pile of documents obtained from Dortnen.

The Germans were in the US on special waiver and were not legal immigrants. They would be initially restricted in their movements, but they were essentially contract employees, not prisoners; none had been accused of crimes. In fact, although von Braun had been expecting to face a lot of hostility when he came to the US, he found that Americans didn't seem to be as inclined to hold grudges as Europeans. The soldiers he met were a bit suspicious of him, but they didn't have any problem with dealing him into their poker games.

Operation OVERCAST became too public, and so the effort was renamed Operation PAPERCLIP in March 1946. Ultimately, Operation PAPERCLIP funneled about 1,600 German technical specialists into the American military-industrial complex. Von Braun's team included his younger brother Magnus. Von Braun's group enforced the rules set on them by their management with their own little court, and handed out their own punishments: when Magnus sold off a bar of platinum that he had smuggled past US customs, Wernher reported to the Army officials investigating the matter that he had given Magnus a good thrashing.

PAPERCLIP was kept secret partly for national security reasons, but also to fend off public concerns about the US government hiring Hitler's researchers. Nobody in charge felt inclined to dig too deeply into the wartime records of the Paperclippers, and the general feeling was that it would be convenient if nobody else did, either.

Walter Dornberger was imprisoned by the British for two years on charges of building weapons to attack civilians, and his interrogators found him an unrepentant German nationalist who argued for a "Third World War". Such a lack of tact suggested that he was a hard case, but the British finally let him go. Dornberger found employment with the US Air Force and then Bell Aircraft in the US.

Arthur Rudolph had been the production manager for the V-2 at Mittelwerk and so had a direct link of responsibility for brutalization of prisoners there, with some evidence suggesting he had ordered executions. Although one of his interrogators tagged him as a "100% NAZI!" in his case file, Rudolph ended up helping build the rockets that America used to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. When he retired, questions about his past resurfaced and resulted in his deportation back to Germany in 1985. He had outlived his usefulness; some claim that he was a convenient scapegoat for the rest of the Paperclippers, with their shady secrets. He died in Germany a decade later.

* One of the odd footnotes to this story is that of Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien, one of von Karman's star students and a significant player in the history of early American rocketry. In 1950, at the height of Red hysteria in the US, his security clearance was revoked and he was arrested by the US Immigration & Nationalization Service (INS) for two weeks on suspicion of being a Communist spy. He was kept under virtual house arrest by the INS for years, and then finally deported to Red China in 1955.

The case the INS had against Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien was thin and there was no hard evidence that he really was a Red spy, but he returned to China with good reasons to be bitter over his treatment. The Red Chinese were absolutely delighted to get him. He became one of the founders of modern Chinese rocketry and an influential public figure. Almost as a bit of an apology, in 2008 the prominent American magazine AVIATION WEEK declared him "man of the year" for his work in establishing China as a space power. He was 96 and retired at the time; he died the next year.

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[2.6] SERGEI KOROLYEV & THE BEGINNINGS OF SOVIET ROCKETRY

* Developments in rocketry in America were paralleled by similar developments in the USSR. Although Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's ideas had not been widely appreciated when they were first published, following Hermann Oberth's DIE RAKETE ZU DEN PLANETAURUM the Bolshevik government had promoted Tsiolkovsky's work as a means of illustrating the progressive, futurist nature of the USSR. A group of rocket enthusiasts sprang up, with a rocket society established by Fridrich Tsander, a Latvian engineer who had been a Tsiolkovsky advocate from the start. In 1927, they put on an exhibition in Moscow that attracted a 20-year-old Ukrainian air and rocket enthusiast named Sergei Pavlovich Korolyev.

By 1930, the Soviet rocket enthusiasts had established a group to build liquid-fuel rockets, named the "Moscow Group for Study of Reaction Motion", or "MosGIRD" in its Russian acronym. It was partly funded by the "Osoaviakhim", a government organization that provided modest support to amateur aviation enthusiasts for technology development. There were also GIRDs in other Soviet cities, with one of the most prominent of these being the Leningrad GIRD, or LenGIRD. LenGIRD was founded by two space enthusiasts, Nikolai Alexevich Rynin and Yakov Isidorovich Perelmann, who both wrote detailed and popular works on spaceflight.

Leningrad was also home to the Red Army's own rocket-development program, the "Leningrad Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL)". In 1929, one GDL engineer, another Ukrainian named Valentin Petrovich Glushko, had begun a program to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine.

The head of the Red Army, General Mikhail Tukachevsky, was very interested in rockets, and so kept tabs on the activities of the GIRD network. He decided in 1932 that MosGIRD and LenGIRD showed enough promise to deserve military funding. MosGIRD, now working with the GDL, managed to perform the USSR's first working liquid-fuel rocket flight on 17 August 1933, which reached an altitude of 400 meters (1,300 feet) before falling from the sky. The rocket was mostly the brainchild of Mikhail Tikhonravov, a shy but brilliant engineer and a good friend of Korolyev.

MosGIRD, LenGIRD, and the GDL were merged a short time later into the "Scientific Research Institute of Reaction Propulsion", or "RNII" in its Russian acronym. The director was a former senior GDL official, Ivan Kleimenov, and Korolyev was appointed his deputy, becoming an officer in the Red Army. MosGIRD had been working in a Moscow cellar, but was now given use of what had been a diesel-engine factory on the outskirts of the city.

There were problems with the merger, however, since the GDL was a military organization and MosGIRD was group of amateur enthusiasts. They did not communicate well, and Korolyev quickly lost his post as deputy to Kleimenov, though Korolyev still remained a senior engineer in RNII. Georgi Langemak, who directed the development of the famed Soviet "Katyusha (Sweet Little Katie)" barrage rocket, became deputy in Korolyev's place.

* In the meantime, while Soviet researchers were working on rockets, another group was working on high-altitude balloon flights. Daring balloon missions were a high-profile international activity at the time, with flights making front-page newspaper headlines. The effort required development of pressurized manned gondolas, and design work was also conducted for high-altitude pressure suits, with prototypes being fabricated and evaluated. Flight operations required development of an organizational apparatus for planning, tracking, supervision, and recovery of flights, with the ground control system linked to the balloon by radio.

The first major Soviet high-altitude balloon flight took place on 30 September 1933, with the three crew of "USSR-1" reaching an altitude of 18,500 meters (60,700 feet). High-altitude balloon flights continued through the 1930s, though the flight of "Osoaviakhim-1" on 30 January 1934 ended in tragedy, with a failure to correctly handle ballast resulting in a crash that killed all three aeronauts on board. Despite the difficulties, the Soviet balloon program was a great adventure that laid the technical foundations for much more ambitious flights from the Earth a generation later.

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[2.7] KOROLYEV IN PRISON AND WAR

* Korolyev's political difficulties in the RNII would prove the least of his problems. Stalin had been consolidating his power through a series of purges, killing or imprisoning anyone who could be even suspected of disloyalty. In the spring of 1937, the purges hit the Red Army, provoked by documents fabricated by the Nazis and carefully "leaked" so that they would come to Stalin's attention. Tukachevsky was arrested and executed, as were Kleimenov and Langemak. Valentin Glushko was arrested and implicated Korolyev while under interrogation. Korolyev was arrested on trumped-up charges in June 1938.

Korolyev ended up at the Kolyma gold mines in eastern Siberia, where he was subjected to abuse and harsh conditions. He was saved by the intervention of Lavrenti I. Beria, head of the NKVD, the security service. Beria was as brutal a man as Josef Stalin, but he shrewdly realized that the prison camps contained many talented engineers and scientists who could still serve the Soviet Union, even if they were "traitors". Beria set up special technical prisons, called "sharashkas" or "sharagas", where the talents of the prisoners or "zeks" could be put to good use.

Beria set up an aircraft design sharashka, led by the great Andrei Tupolev, one of the grand old men of the Soviet aviation industry, who had also been arrested. The "Tupolev Sharashka" in Moscow brought in other engineers from the prison camps, including the venerated Vladimir Petlyakov, the "King of Fighters", as well as Korolyev, who had studied under Tupolev many years before and made a good impression. The sharashka wasn't a paradise by any means -- another inmate at such an establishment, the famous writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, wrote a novel of life there of the title THE FIRST CIRCLE, comparing it the first and least severe of the nine circles of Hell -- but had Korolyev not gone to the sharashka, it is unlikely he would have survived his captivity. He had already lost all his teeth and suffered a broken jaw at Kolyma.

* During the period between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Sergei Korolyev continued his labors as a zek in the Tupolev Sharashka, helping Tupolev design a new twin-engine bomber, the excellent Tupolev Tu-2. The Tu-2 distinguished itself both by its combat record and by the fact that it was one of the few aircraft ever designed by engineers who were all in prison at the time.

After the invasion, the Tupolev Sharashka was pulled out and sent far east to Omsk, where they helped relocate up Tu-2 production. Korolyev was not doing any work on liquid rocket propulsion working for Tupolev, and when he found out that his old colleague Valentin Glushko was running a sharashka in Kazan devoted to rocket engine development, Korolyev asked his NKVD masters for a transfer. His request was granted.

There were apparently some tensions between Korolyev and Glushko, Korolyev having learned that Glushko had denounced him to the NKVD, but the two men still worked well together, when in a fit of sanity the NKVD decided to free Korolyev, he remained in Kazan to work for Glushko. Korolyev had the title of "deputy chief designer of the People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry". Korolyev worked mainly on JATO rockets for aircraft up to the end of the war.

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[2.8] THE SOVIET V-2

* The technical bureaucracy established in the USSR before the war would remain a fundamental pattern for the rest of the life of the Soviet Union. The structure of this bureaucracy was in principle hierarchical, though in practice lines of power and authority were not necessarily as simple as they appeared on paper.

At the supposed top of the hierarchy were the NIIs, the scientific research institutes, which were under the direction of the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences. They performed basic scientific research. Although the NIIs were motivated to get practical results, a second level of organizations known as "design bureaus" or "KBs" in their Russian acronym, was empowered to translate the NII work into practical applications for production in state factories, the GAZ. Complex development programs of aircraft, weapon systems, and the like, were conducted by "experimental design bureaus" or "OKBs" in their Russian acronym. Both the KBs and OKBs had some degree of prototype fabrication capability of their own, though in many cases they needed a GAZ for help, and the GAZ system was responsible for mass production.

The OKBs worked on high-profile projects, such as the latest bomber or tank, and so they tended to be granted the most resources. The OKB chief designer had a lot of clout, acting as something of an entrepreneur in a system where the concept didn't otherwise exist. The NIIs and their associated KBs tended to be second in line for resources. The system was not efficient, tending to breed compartmentalization and rivalries; however, it would still accomplish great things, such as the development of postwar Soviet rocketry.

* The Red Army overran Peenemunde on 5 May 1945. The Soviets were masters of double-dealing, but the Allies outwitted them as far as the V-2 was concerned. Red Army observers arrived at Mittelwerk on 26 May. They were given a pleasant welcome that diverted their attention from Holger Toftoy's frantic looting of parts and assemblies, which was all very much in violation of agreements between the USSR and the Americans. When the Soviets took full possession on 5 July, all they got was table scraps. However, they had been picking up pieces of V-2s from wherever they could find them, and a team under Glushko was putting the pieces together, eventually building about a dozen rockets. The wide reach of the NKVD intelligence network in the West, which was still near its peak of effectiveness, also helped a great deal.

Korolyev and his colleagues toured Peenemunde and Mittelwerk in September 1945. Korolyev had acquired the rank of a colonel in the Red Army by that time, a startling change of fortune from having been a prisoner at hard labor a few years earlier. The British captured eight V-2s in the field, complete with their transportable launch systems, and fired three V-2s into the North Sea from Cuxhaven in October 1945. Valentin Glushko attended by invitation as an observer. Korolyev wasn't invited, but he watched the launch from outside the site perimeter.

* Although the USSR hadn't got the pick of Germany's V-2 technology and expertise, Soviet bureaucratic machinery went to work to squeeze whatever it could out of what was available. In May 1946, a formal decision was made to copy the V-2. Captured V-2 technicals helped set up a production line in East Germany to build 15 of the missiles and train their Soviet counterparts. When the Germans were done there, they were shipped without advance notice on 21 October 1946 to Moscow, and then parceled out to different technical establishments.

Some went to work at the "Scientific Research Institute & Experimental Factory 88 for Guided Missiles (NII-88)" at Kaliningrad, not far northeast of Moscow, where they were put to work setting up a local V-2 production line. Korolyev was a department head at NII-88, having become the "Chief Designer for Ballistic Missile Development" in 1946. He had met with Dmitri Ustinov, the armaments minister, and impressed Ustinov enough to be granted more authority. Ustinov would become one of Korolyev's political patrons.

The rest of the Germans were sent to the island of Gorodomliya in Lake Seliger, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) northwest of Moscow, where they worked on advanced rocket design concepts. The island location isolated them from the local population, which prevented the Germans from "contaminating" Soviet citizenry with foreign ideas -- and also protected the Germans from the citizenry, who for plenty of very good reasons bitterly hated all Germans.

The Germans were not prime movers. Later on, there would be a myth in the West that they would give the USSR an edge in rocketry, that "their Germans were better than our Germans". Although even some of the Soviet leadership had the prejudice that Western scientists were better than their own, the truth was exactly the opposite. The senior German designers like von Braun had gone West; the Germans under Soviet control were generally manufacturing specialists. Their main role was to simply help the Soviets tool up their effort. The real brains were Soviet researchers.

Not all of the Germans were there involuntarily. The senior manager of the German rocket technicals was Helmut Gottrup, who had turned down an offer from Holger Toftoy to go to Fort Bliss. The Soviets had offered him substantial authority and he signed up with the USSR, and when the Germans were relocated he acquired a villa and a chauffeur. Most of the other Germans lived in primitive accommodations, but in fact they were generally better off than their Soviet counterparts in rocket research, who were often housed in barracks and tents. When the Germans outlived their usefulness in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were sent back home.

The Soviets also set up a launch center at Kapustin Yar, about 1,050 kilometers (650 miles) southeast of Moscow on the Volga river. Conditions were primitive there at the outset, with personnel living in a tent city and most of the technical facilities installed into railroad cars. Korolyev launched the first Soviet V-2 from the site in October 1947. Stalin had been skeptical of the abilities of Soviet designers, since even they had admitted at the outset of the long-range rocket program that they were 15 years behind the Germans, but they had caught up with amazing speed.

Valentin Glushko, Korolyev's old rival, was in charge of a rocket-development center in Khimki, near the NII-88 site. Korolyev was not far behind in the race for authority. He was beginning to carry weight, and had greater ambitions. He never forgot his mistreatment by the system, which was prudent as long as the increasingly mad and whimsical Stalin lived, and regarded his work as a game played for survival. Korolyev formed an informal council of chief designers, including Glushko, where the technical leadership could compare ideas, make plans, and arrange collaborations. Korolyev would be the de facto chairman of the council. People who worked for him made a pun of his name, calling him "Korol (King)".

Soon the Soviets were launching their own long-range missiles. The first, the "R-1", performed its first flight on 2 October 1948. It looked almost exactly like a V-2, but it was much more robust by design -- the Soviets liked to build things rugged -- and it had a much more accurate guidance system. It would enter military service in 1950, the same year the first "R-2" was launched. The R-2 looked very much like a "stretched" V-2, with a more powerful engine and twice the range, 600 kilometers (370 miles). Neither could carry a nuclear warhead and they were much too inaccurate to be very useful weapons, but they were put into service to give the Soviet military experience in handling more sophisticated weapons to be built in the future.