They were here, and their rocketship was ready for them on the pad, pointed at the sky.
18
Baikonur, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic
The Syr Darya river winds for 1,400 miles, from its source high in the Kyrgyz Tian Shan, Mountains of Heaven, across the flat southern steppes of Kazakhstan, until it finally empties into the broad Aral Sea. The ice-fed headwaters gleam a surreal pale blue, carrying the reflective, finely ground silt of glaciers; the ancient Persians called it the True Pearl River. But by the time it twists down through the towns, reservoirs and endless agricultural irrigation schemes, its waters thicken to an opaque, oily brown. A nondescript-colored snake of a river bringing muddy water to soothe the thirst of the nomadic two-humped Bactrian camels.
The spring thaws and ice jams regularly cause it to overflow its banks, spreading its silt up across the surrounding gray land, turning the soil a fertile, rich brown. Kazakh farmers work its shores, growing crops and grazing their sheep, cattle and horses. Their word for the river’s fertile soil was the name given to the town at a long, sweeping bend in the river.
Baikonur. The rich, brown earth.
It wasn’t just the river that had flowed from the east. The invasion and conquest of the region by Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde was still visible in the high cheekbones, black hair and epicanthic eyelids of the Kazakh farmers. When the Tashkent railway opened in 1906, it brought a wave of different invaders, from the northwest: the round-eyed, pale-skinned ethnic Russians.
In 1955, the vast flatness of this southern land caught the eye of the Soviet space program; Chief Designer Sergey Korolyov ordered the construction of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. A new word, invented for a whole new idea. Not just an aerodrome, but a cosmodrome: a gateway to the cosmos.
Sputnik roared off the Baikonur launch pad and into orbit just two years later, its yellow rocket flame reflecting in the waters of the Syr Daria. Four years after that, Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin around the world in 108 minutes.
But a dozen years had passed since that triumphant day—years where the Soviet domination of the cosmos had waned, and decisive leadership from the distant city of Moscow had faded. Even the first spacewalk in orbit, by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, was soon eclipsed by the Americans who walked on the Moon.
Vladimir Chelomei, the current Chief Designer and the Director of Spacecraft Factory OKB-52, stared for a moment down his long, sharply pointed nose at his leather dress shoes and took a hard pull on his cigarette, welcoming the acrid smoke deep into his lungs. “Desyat lyet,” he muttered to himself. Ten years. And Korolyov’s been dead for seven of them. Chelomei shook his head slowly. But now Korolyov’s mantle was his to take, once the Almaz military space station launched.
He and his team had first conceived of the rocket needed to lift it in the early 1960s. It would be the Soviet answer to Apollo’s Saturn V, a way to win the space race and ensure that a Russian was the first man on the Moon. Gagarin had been the first to space, after all, and a Soviet man should have been the one to make the first footprints on the Moon.
But politicians aren’t engineers. They’d bet on a different rocketship, Vasily Mishin’s ridiculous N1, with its 42 rocket motors. Of course it had failed, during four agonizingly wasteful attempts in a row. It had even destroyed its entire Baikonur launch pad! Chelomei had tried everything within his power to change his nation’s course, all the way to appealing to Khrushchev himself. But Mishin’s political connections had prevailed.
Misplaced arrogance had cost Russia the Moon.
Not this time, Chelomei thought. They would win this second space race, not just for science, but also for something much easier to understand: the national security of the Motherland itself.
Almaz. A powerful Soviet orbiting spy telescope, to be operated by cosmonauts.
Chelomei was standing beside the rocket that would carry his spacecraft into orbit. It was 60 meters long, the enormous size seemingly amplified by the fact that it was lying on its side on railcars. As he waited for the Baikonur launch-pad train to start moving, he paced slowly past the six huge exhaust nozzles and down the length of the behemoth.
The UR-500K monster rocket they’d dubbed the Proton was a proven beast of a machine. His rocket. He stopped walking and looked to the left and then the right, taking in the sight. The Proton was still hollow and light, the huge fuel tanks kept empty until it was vertical on the launch pad, ready to receive the full load of volatile hydrazine. Chelomei knew every millimeter of it; he’d been key to the thousands of decisions that had brought it into existence. He and his engineers had solved one problem after another, even how to design it so it would fit on its railcars, able to squeeze through the railway tunnels between the factory in Moscow and the launch pad in Baikonur.