The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Shot into space – with just four dials
Soviet hardware was brutally no-frills, but with mightier rockets the space race was theirs to lose
BEYOND by Stephen Walker 502pp, William Collins, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £11.99
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On May 30 last year, the US astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley flew to the International Space Station. It was the first time a crew had left the planet from US soil since 2011. In the interim, something – not wrong, exactly, but certainly strange – had happened to space travel.
In 2011, it was Nasa, delivering the final mission of the American Space Shuttle programme. By 2020, it was SpaceX, with Behnken and Hurley in branded space suits looking like something I would throw together as a child, even down to my dad’s biking helmet. The stark interior of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was even more disconcerting. Poor Behnken and Hurley looked as if they were riding in the back of an Uber.
What goes around comes around, I suppose. The Soviet capsule that carried Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12 1961 boasted an almost ludicrously bare central panel of just four dials. Naysayers sniped that Gagarin had been a mere passenger – a human guinea pig.
By contrast, the design of the Mercury cockpit, which in May 1961 would carry America’s first astronaut into space, was magnificently, and possibly redundantly, fussy. As Stephen Walker, in his long and always thrilling blow-byblow account of the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s race into orbit, puts it: “Almost every inch of it was littered with dials, knobs, indicators, lights and levers just like a ‘real’ aeroplane cockpit.”
By 1963 America’s astronauts – the Mercury Seven – were global celebrities, almost absurdly overqualified for their task of being rattled around in the nose of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Their space programme was public – and so were its indignities, like the fact that virtually everything they were being asked to do, a chimpanzee – Ham the Astrochimp – had done before them, in January 1961.
It drove Alan Shepard – the man chosen to be the first American in space – into a rage. On one training session somebody joked: “Maybe we should get somebody who works for bananas.” The ashtray Shepard threw only just missed his head.
The Soviet Union’s space programme, on the other hand, was secret. Not even their wives knew what the Vanguard Six were up to, or even that a manned programme had existed since 1960. They won no privileges. Sometimes they had to polish other people’s floors to make ends meet.
Those looking for evidence of the gimcrack quality of the Soviet space effort will find ammunition in Beyond. Contrast, for example, Nasa’s capsule escape plans (involving a cherry-picker platform and an armoured vehicle) with the Soviet equivalent (involving a net and a bath tub). But Walker, whose research for this book stretches back a decade, won’t fall for such clichés. Instead, he shows how the efforts of each side in the race to space were shaped by the technology they had to hand.
Soviet hydrogen bombs were huge and heavy, and needed big, powerful rockets to carry them. Soviet space launches were correspondingly epic. The Baikonur cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan – a desolate, scorpion-infested region described in Soviet encyclopedias as “the Home of the Black Death” – was around a hundred times the size of Nasa’s Cape Canaveral base in Florida. Its launch bunkers were buried beneath several metres of reinforced concrete and earth because, says Walker, “a rocket the size and power of the R-7 would probably have flattened the sort of surface blockhouse near the little Redstone in Cape Canaveral”.
Because the US had better (lighter, smaller) nuclear bombs, its available rocket technology was – in space-piercing terms – seriously underpowered. When Shepard finally launched from Cape Canaveral on May 5 1961, 23 days after Yuri Gagarin circled the earth, his flight lasted just over 15 minutes. He splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles from the Cape. Gagarin, by contrast, had travelled some 26,000 miles around the planet.
The space race was the Soviets’ to lose. Once Khrushchev discovered the political power of space “firsts”, he couldn’t get enough of them. “Each successive space ‘spectacular’ was exactly that,” Walker writes, “not so much part of a carefully structured progressive space programme but yet another glittering showpiece, preferably tied to an important political anniversary.” Attempts to build a coordinated space strategy were rejected, or simply ignored. This is a book as much about disappointment as triumph.
Beyond began life as a film documentary, but the newly discovered footage that Walker was offered proved too damaged for use. Thank goodness he kept his notes and his nerve. This is not a field that’s starved of insight: Jamie Doran and
Piers Bizony wrote a cracking biography of Gagarin called Starman in 1998; the autobiography of Soviet systems designer Boris Chertok runs to four volumes. Still, Walker brings a huge amount that is new and fresh to our understanding of the Space Race.
Over the desk of the Soviet’s chief designer Sergei Korolev hung a portrait of the 19th-century Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and with it his words: “Mankind will not stay on Earth forever but in its quest for light and space it will first penetrate humbly beyond the atmosphere and then conquer the whole solar system.” Beyond shows how that dream – what US aviation pioneer James Smith McDonnell called “the creative conquest of space” – was exploited by blocs as a moral substitute for war – and how, for all that, it survived.