Glushko loved the ballet and classical music, and he enjoyed long, languid meals at Moscow’s few fine restaurants. Korolev had no interests outside of rockets and viewed food as fuel. “He ate very quickly,” a fellow OKB-1 engineer recalled. “After finishing the food on his plate, he would wipe it clean with a piece of bread, which he subsequently put in his mouth. He even scooped up the crumbs and ate them. Then he licked all his fingers. The people around him looked on with amazement until someone volunteered that this was a habit he had developed during his years in prison and in labor camps. No one who had ever gone through the gulag emerged physically or psychologically unscathed. Though the Chief Designer rarely spoke of it, the Great Terror had left indelible marks on both his body and his soul. Even decades later, he could remember the minutest details of his arrest in 1938: the rasp of the needle on the gramophone that kept churning its spent record while the men in black ransacked his apartment; the sound of the trolleybus bells ringing six stories below; the hushed whimper of his three-year-old daughter, Natalia as she clung to her terrified mother. At the Kolyma mines, the most notorious of Stalin’s Siberian death factories, his days had started at 4:00 AM, in sixty-below-zero darkness that lasted most of the year, conditions that killed a third of the inmates each year. The criminals administered justice in Kolyma, beating the political prisoners mercilessly if they dropped a pickax or spilled a wheelbarrow or missed their quota. They stole their food and clothes, and pried out the gold fillings the greedy guards had overlooked. Within a few months of his arrival at Kolyma, Korolev was unrecognizable. He could barely walk or talk; toothless, his jaw was broken, scars ran down his shaven head, and his legs were swollen and grotesquely blue. Scurvy, malnutrition, and frostbite had started their lethal assault and he seemed destined to die. And yet, like millions of other purge victims, he still held out the hope that Stalin himself would realize that a terrible mistake had been made and free him. “Glushko gave testimonies about my alleged membership of anti-Soviet organizations,” Korolev wrote Stalin in mid-1940, naming several others he claimed had borne false witness against him. “This is a despicable lie. . . . Without examining my case properly, the military board sentenced me to ten years. . . . My personal circumstances are so despicable and dreadful that I have been forced to ask for your help.” Korolev’s mother also petitioned Stalin directly. “For the sake of my sole son, a young talented rocket expert and pilot, I beg you to resume the investigations. But their letters, like the countless other pleas of assistance with Siberian postmarks that reached the Kremlin daily, went unanswered. What saved Korolev, ultimately, was Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the sudden drastic need for skilled military engineers. Transferred to one of the special Sharaga minimum-security technical prison institutes that Beria had set up to exploit jailed brainpower, Korolev slowly recovered, until, at war’s end, he was released and sent to Germany to parse the secrets of the V-2. Had Glushko and Korolev forgotten, or forgiven each other? Or had they simply buried their simmering recriminations and resentments beneath a thin veneer of civility? Another factor complicating their reconciliation was the persistent rumor that Korolev had engaged in a long-running affair with Glushko’s sister-in-law. The alleged romance—a source of contention among contemporary Russian historians—had predated the purges and apparently resumed in 1949, as the Chief Designer’s first marriage was falling apart. Whether Glushko knew about it, or how he felt about his brother’s deception and humiliation at the hands of his rival, is not a matter of the historical record. The only thing clear amid the unanswered questions was that Korolev and Glushko needed each other and had to find a way to work together. The first hurdle the pair faced in the wake of the Presidium visit was rocket power. To fling a five-ton thermonuclear warhead 5,000 miles, Korolev had calculated that he needed more than 450 tons of thrust. This represented a tenfold increase over the R-5 intermediate-range ballistic missile, whose RD-103 booster had already strained the limits of single-engine capacity. (Glushko had experimented with a mammoth 120-ton thrust engine, the RD-110, but the project had been abandoned.) To meet Korolev’s vastly increased power requirement, the R-7 would have to be powered by five separate rockets, bundled like a giant Chinese fireworks display.

The R-7’s rescheduled March 1957 test-launch deadline came and went, and Sergei Korolev was still not ready. He was becoming increasingly irritable, more prone to terrorizing his staff with his infamous flare-ups, and he wielded both the stick and the carrot to motivate his engineers. Breakthroughs were rewarded with on-the-spot bonuses, wads of rubles that Korolev kept in an office safe for just such a purpose. The most significant achievements earned holidays to Black Sea resorts or even the most sought-after commodity in the entire Soviet Union: the keys to a new apartment. Like all large factories and institutes, OKB-1 was responsible for housing its employees. For young and especially newlywed scientists living in dormitories without privacy, few incentives matched the prospect of skipping to the front of the long waiting list for a place of their own. “The capitalist approach was paying dividends, as glitches were progressively ironed out. Valentin Glushko had wanted no part in making modifications to the steering thrusters, so they were completed in-house at OKB-1. The addition of the tiny directional thrusters also solved the problem of postimpulse boost; the R-7’s main engines could now be shut down a fraction of a second early to compensate for residual propellant, while the little thrusters could be fired to adjust speed and position at the critical aiming, or “sweet,” point, as guidance specialists called cutoff. A backup radio-controlled radar guidance system was also installed to augment the accuracy of the onboard inertial gyroscopes. Boris “Chertok supervised the duplicate system, which had involved building nine tracking stations deep in the Kazakh desert over the first 500 miles of the R-7’s trajectory route, and another six stations within a 90-mile approach to the target area in the Kamchatka Peninsula, 4,000 miles farther. As the missile would fly over the first nine stations, radar would pick it up, plot whether it was on course, and send back telemetry signals for any needed adjustments to trim, yaw, or pitch in what essentially was a very large and costly version of amateur modelers flying radio-controlled airplanes. But with the R-7, the action would unfold at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour and span many time zones in a matter of minutes. The reentry problem, as Korolev would discover, was far from licked, but by late April the Chief Designer felt sufficiently confident that he moved his entire operation to the secret facility that had been built for the R-7 in Kazakhstan to finally take the ICBM out for its long-delayed test flight.

Originally known as Tyura-Tam and eventually as Baikonur (in yet another instance of Soviet misdirection), the installation was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Soviet Union. Correspondence to it was simply addressed to Moscow Post Office Box 300, and it figured on no map. The military construction crews that had built it had been rotated in short, highly compartmentalized shifts, and never told what they were doing in the middle of the broiling Kazakh desert, where temperatures soared to 135 degrees in summer and plunged to 35 below in the short, merciless winter. Dust storms clogged machinery with salty sand particles blown across the central Asian steppe from the Aral Sea. For hundreds of miles, there was not a single tree to offer shade or firewood. Soldiers slept in tents crawling with scorpions, and water had to be trucked in. “Besides the benefit of seclusion, the Tyura-Tam site had been selected because of the R-7’s guidance problems. Tracking stations could be built in the depopulated area along the route to Siberia, and rocket engineers didn’t have to worry about spent boosters falling on urban centers. A major rail spur also happened to run nearby, easing the transport of missile parts and building materials. The pace of construction at Tyura-Tam had been so frenetic, so filled with accidents and setbacks, that the young military officer responsible for erecting the Soviet Union’s first nuclear ICBM launch site had gone crazy and been carted away to a psychiatric ward. Only the rudimentary infrastructure had been completed in time for testing: a huge assembly hangar connected by rail to a fire pit the size of a large quarry to absorb the flames at liftoff; several underground propellant storage tanks; a cement bunker blockhouse; and a 15,000-square-foot launch platform “erected out of sixteen massive bridge trusses. Otherwise, and in every direction, there were only shifting dunes and the shimmering heat waves of the sun reflecting off the sand. There had been no time to build housing, cafeterias, recreation halls, laboratories, or even lavatories. Scientists lived four to a compartment in train cars that had been built in East Germany after the war and equipped with special labs for the storage and testing of delicate rocket components. The rocket was cleared for liftoff just after 7:00 PM MOSCOW time on May 15. The massive engines fired, the Tulip launch stand worked perfectly, and the R-7 rose to the whooping cheers of assembled engineers and VIPs. But ninety-eight seconds into the flight something went terribly wrong. The missile crashed, scattering debris over a 250-mile radius.

Back in Moscow, Sergei Khrushchev recalled the phone ringing after dinner at the family’s mansion in Lenin Hills. It was the white line, the German-made phone used for important government business. “That was Korolev,” said Nikita Khrushchev, looking particularly gloomy as he hung up. “They launched the R-7 this evening. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful. Korolev, though, was upbeat. First launches almost always failed. That had been the rule with the R-l, the R-2, and the R-5. And he had reason to feel optimistic: for the first minute and a half, the R-7 had performed flawlessly. The trouble had been with one of the peripheral boosters, block D, which had caught fire shortly before separation. The suspected cause of the explosion was excessive vibrations, what was known as the Pogo effect. Korolev and his team would figure out exactly what had happened and fix the glitch. Next time, he was certain, his missile would make it all the way to the target zone in Kamchatka, almost 5,000 miles away on Siberia’s Pacific coast. For a long, hot month, they tinkered. At last, on June 9, another R-7 was wedged into the Tulip launch stand. Voskresenskiy supervised all the preparations. Korolev trusted him implicitly, and on more than one occasion he had proven his loyalty and courage. Once, when a launch had misfired and the live warhead had been dislodged from its missile, dangling precariously over the pad, everyone had frozen in panic. But Voskresenskiy had calmly told Korolev, “Give me a crane, some cash, five men of my choosing, and three hours.” With wads of vodka-walking-around money bulging out of their pockets, Voskresenskiy’s men safely dismantled the one-ton warhead, after which they got royally drunk. “Like a great many test pilots and other people who push safety envelopes for a living, Voskresenskiy was deeply superstitious. So when the next R-7 failed to start, not once, not twice, but on three consecutive days before sputtering out with a smoky cough on the launchpad on June 11, Voskresenskiy decided it was cursed. “Take it away,” he ordered. “I never want to see it again.” The blighted rocket was hauled away in disgrace.

A dark, defeated mood settled over the exhausted R-7 team. They hadn’t seen their families in several months. They were working round the clock, seven days a week, and people were getting sick from the long hours and unremitting worry. Chertok came down with a strange ailment with similar symptoms to radiation poisoning. Eventually he would have to be medically evacuated to Moscow. Korolev developed strep throat and had to take frequent penicillin shots. His health had never fully recovered from the ravages of the camps, and he frequently took ill. “We are working under a great strain, both physical and emotional,” he wrote his second wife, Nina. “Everyone feels a bit sick. I want to hug you and forget about all this stress.” “Korolev had met Nina Kotenkova at OKB-1, where she served as the institute’s English-language specialist, translating Western scientific periodicals. It was through her that the Chief Designer had kept abreast of Wernher von Braun’s writings and exploits in the American media, and in the flush of lonely nights spent jointly hunched over the pages of Popular Mechanics they had fallen in love. Korolev had still been married to his first wife, Ksenia, when they had met, and their affair had led to a bitter divorce and estrangement from his teenage daughter, Natalia, who for years refused to see him and would never agree to speak to Nina. From his monastic hut at Tyura-Tam, a cabin without running water and only a bare lightbulb to illuminate the lonely gloom, Korolev wrote his daughter weekly, begging for her forgiveness. He tried calling on her twenty-first birthday, but she hung up on him. “It hurts me so much,” he told Nina. Even at the best of times, Tyura-Tam was a dispiriting place. But with two consecutive failures, growing friction between the different design bureaus over responsibility for the myriad malfunctions, and Moscow becoming increasingly irritated, the atmosphere was downright foreboding as Korolev lined up a third R-7 for launch on July 12. This time the countdown went uninterrupted, the engines all fired properly, and the missile lifted off without a hitch at 3:53 PM. Thirty-three seconds later it disintegrated. The strap-on peripheral boosters had separated early.

Watching the four flaming boosters slowly sail down into the desert just four humiliating miles from the launchpad, Korolev dejectedly shook his head. “We are criminals,” he said. “We just burned away [the financial equivalent of] an entire town.” “Fear now descended on the despondent scientists. The Soviet Union was not so far removed from the Stalinist era to presume that punishment might not be meted out for the catastrophic and costly failures. “What can they do to us?” a frightened Chertok asked Konstantin Rudnev, the deputy minister of armaments. “They are not going to jail us, or send us to Kolyma?” Though it didn’t appear that the U.S. missile program was going to overtake the Soviets anytime soon, for some reason Korolev was fixated on the notion that von Braun was going to launch a satellite at any moment. The Americans are on the verge, he kept telling anyone who would listen, and he obsessively scoured Nina’s translations of Western publications for any hint that might betray America’s orbital intentions.

The Chief Designer’s manic paranoia on the subject had begun to irk his exhausted colleagues at Tyura-Tam, where tempers were flaring and the blame game among the designers was reaching new heights. They had now had five failures, and everyone was pointing fingers. “Despite Korolev’s attempt to spread the bureaucratic blame, the message from Moscow was clear: it was his rocket and his responsibility, and the State Commission on the R-7 was getting ready to recommend pulling the plug. Korolev’s career, his dreams, his future—possibly even his freedom—hung by a thread. He was alone, literally sick and tired, stuck in the hellish Kazakh desert, and the vultures were circling. For the supremely self-confident Korolev, it was an unaccustomed and frightening predicament. “When things are going badly, I have fewer ‘friends,’” he wrote Nina with uncharacteristic humility. “My frame of mind is bad. I will not hide it, it is very difficult to get through our failures. . . . There is a state of alarm and worry. It is a hot 55 degrees [131 Fahrenheit] here. Despite Korolev’s attempt to spread the bureaucratic blame, the message from Moscow was clear: it was his rocket and his responsibility, and the State Commission on the R-7 was getting ready to recommend pulling the plug. Korolev’s career, his dreams, his future—possibly even his freedom—hung by a thread. He was alone, literally sick and tired, stuck in the hellish Kazakh desert, and the vultures were circling. For the supremely self-confident Korolev, it was an unaccustomed and frightening predicament. “When things are going badly, I have fewer ‘friends,’” he wrote Nina with uncharacteristic humility. “My frame of mind is bad. I will not hide it, it is very difficult to get through our failures. . . . There is a state of alarm and worry. It is a hot 55 degrees [131 Fahrenheit] here.”

Sergei Korolev hadn’t had reason to laugh for a long time. But he was in unusually high spirits on the August morning he visited Boris Chertok at Moscow’s Burdenko military hospital. “Okay, Boris,” he cheerfully chided Chertok. “You continue playing sick, but don’t stay out for too long.” A half dozen jubilant engineers crowded around Chertok’s bed, teasing and poking their infirm colleague. The suspected radiation poisoning had turned out to be simply an exotic Kazakh bug that manifested similar symptoms. “This is the best medication,” assured Leonid Voskresenskiy, the daredevil chief of testing, pulling a bottle of cognac out of a bag. “So,” he said, once Korolev had finished his pep talk and excused himself on the grounds of an important meeting. “Here’s the pickle we’re in. Everyone congratulates us, but nobody other than us knows what’s really going on. The rocket, as Chertok already knew, had finally worked. Korolev had been given one final chance to prove himself, and at 3:15 PM on August 21, the R-7 had flown all the way to Kamchatka, landing dead on target next to the Pacific Ocean. Korolev had been so relieved, so euphoric, that he had stayed up until 03:00am the next morning, jabbering away excitedly about the barrier they had just broken. There was a slight hitch, however. The heat shield had failed, and the dummy warhead had been incinerated on reentry. Apparently, the nose cone dilemma hadn’t been solved after all. And without thermal protection, the R-7 was not an ICBM, just a very large and expensive rocket. That was why Korolev had just rushed off to meet with a group of aerodynamic specialists: to see if they had any solutions to what Voskresenskiy called “Problem Number One.

“We need to take a break to make radical improvements on the nose cone,” Voskresenskiy told Chertok, leaning closer and lowering his voice to a mock-conspiratorial whisper. “While we’re working on it, we’ll launch satellites. That’ll distract Khrushchev’s attention from the ICBM.” On the morning of August 28, 1957, the same day that Boris Chertok and Leonid Voskresenskiy would sip cognac and swap conspiratorial jokes at the Burdenko military hospital in Moscow, ground crews at a secret airstrip outside Lahore, Pakistan, readied a mysterious plane for takeoff. The black, single-engine craft bore little resemblance to anything that had ever taken to the skies before. As with a glider that had been retrofitted for powered flight, its slender silhouette defied conventional design. The wings were disproportionately elongated and dog-eared at the tips. While the ground crews made their preflight rounds, another group of technicians, distinguished by their white gloves, fidgeted in a bay under the single-seat cockpit. There, next to three small-diameter portholes that contained the most sophisticated photographic lenses ever devised, they loaded a 12,000-foot-long spool of high-resolution Kodak film. The custom-made film and 500-pound Hycon camera were the only outward clues as to the plane’s true purpose. Otherwise, it had no markings, identification numbers, or insignias. No running lights winked under its dark fuselage, which had been painted dull black to better blend in with the night sky. Nowhere in its equally anonymous innards was there a manufacturer’s seal or anything else that would betray that the CL-282 Aquatone had been assembled at the top-secret Lockheed Skunkworks plant in Burbank, California.”

Officially, the CL-282—or the U-2, as it would eventually be called—did not exist. Neither did the pilot, E. K. Jones, who was going through his own preflight routine in a small, barrack-style building near the runway. Like the twenty-man Quickmove mobile maintenance team and the fuel drums they had brought with them, Jones had been flown in the day before from the U-2 main staging base in Adana, Turkey, to minimize American exposure to prying Pakistani eyes. At 4:00 AM a doctor measured his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure and examined his ears, nose, and throat for signs of infection. The medical exam was a formality; like every one of the two dozen U-2 pilots on the CIA’s payroll, Jones was in excellent physical condition.  Bissell’s boys operated under the cover of high-altitude weather research. Like the unmarked planes they flew, Jones and his fellow aviators carried no identification papers or dog tags, and no regimental crests or badges adorned their flight suits.” “Shortly before 5:00 AM in Lahore, E. K. Jones was “integrated” into a fully pressurized suit and began breathing pure oxygen for the hour prior to takeoff. He did this to lower the nitrogen level in his blood to avoid getting the bends, in much the same way deep-sea divers decompressed in special chambers before surfacing—only in reverse, as he would be climbing rather than descending. The pressurized suit Jones “wore would keep his body from boiling and exploding at the altitude he would travel, a height where the air is so thin that atmospheric pressure drops to one-twenty-eighth that of sea level.”

Jones would not be traveling into space. But at the height the U-2 reached, he would skirt the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, and his special orange flight suit would keep the gases in his intestines from expanding and bursting like overinflated balloons if the U-2’s cabin pressure suddenly failed or if he had to parachute out of the plane. At the Lovelace Clinic near Albuquerque, where pilot prospects were sent, Bissell had devised a very elaborate psychological profile of the sort of men he sought: patriots, naturally, but people who liked living on the edge, for whom death was not a deterrent.

Bissell’s pilots had to meet one other critical criterion: they had to be exceptionally gifted airmen, because the U-2 was among the most difficult aircraft to fly. Simply positioning the plane for takeoff required great skill. Its turning radius of 300 feet was nearly ten times that of a “regular fighter jet, and visibility from the cockpit was virtually nonexistent. The plane had another troublesome characteristic. At high altitude, where even the U-2’s 200-foot wingspan barely generated lift in the thin air, its 505-miles-per-hour stall speed and 510-miles-per-hour maximum speed converged in what pilots called the “coffin corner,” leaving a scant margin of error. On landing, the massive wings—three times longer than the sixty-foot plane itself—also required deft handling. To get the U-2 down safely, the pilot had to stall the plane precisely two feet off the tarmac, exactly on the center line, and keep the massive wings off the ground by flying the aircraft down the runway in perfect equilibrium. Soon the U-2 was a speck in the Pakistani sky as it continued its ascent beyond the range of telephoto lenses. At 70,000 feet, as the outside temperature dropped to 160 degrees below zero, Jones leveled the U-2. The skies above blackened and filled with stars, and over the horizon Jones could see the blue and white curvature of the earth. Beneath him, the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush unfolded like an accordion; beyond that, Afghanistan, and the endless orange plains of Soviet central Asia. He pointed the plane north and crossed into Soviet airspace.” “The first U-2 mission over the Soviet Union had coincided with a goodwill visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Moscow, on July 4, 1956. While Khrushchev toasted America’s 180th birthday with Ambassador Charles Bohlen, a U-2 snapped aerial photographs of the Kremlin before heading off to photograph the naval and air bases around Leningrad. Allen Dulles had worried about the timing of the mission and “seemed somewhat startled and horrified to learn that the flight plan”—which had included a pass over Poznan, the scene of Polish rioting only a few days earlier—“had covered Moscow and Leningrad,” Bissell recalled. “Do you think that was wise the first time?” Dulles asked. “Allen,” Bissell replied, “the first time is always the safest,” since the Soviets were not expecting the mission. But he was wrong. Bissell had presumed that because the U-2 had evaded most American radars during its test, the Soviets would not be able to pick it up either. What he didn’t realize was that the USSR had recently deployed a new generation of radar capable of tracking planes at much higher altitudes.

Khrushchev had immediately been informed of the flight and viewed the timing of the incursion as a personal affront. Khrushchev had immediately been informed of the flight and viewed the timing of the incursion as a personal affront. The way he saw it, the Americans had humiliatingly thumbed their noses at him, violating Soviet airspace even as he stood on U.S. sovereign diplomatic soil, and challenging him to do something about it. Worst of all, he had been powerless to respond. Soviet air defenses had nothing in their arsenal that could hit the U-2. MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighter jets buzzed like angry hornets under the U-2, catapulting themselves as high as possible, but their conventional engines and stubby wings couldn’t generate the necessary lift to reach it. Antiaircraft batteries sent useless barrages that also fell well short. Only the new P-30 radar had been able to track the intruder with a surprising degree of sophistication, as the diplomatic protest the USSR privately filed on July 10, 1956, indicated. For Khrushchev, this latest incursion had come on the heels of Curtis LeMay’s mock attack on Siberia. Only this time, the Americans had not overflown some remote corner of Russia’s empty Arctic wasteland. They had brazenly put a plane right over Red Square, the symbol of Soviet power, and the most heavily defended piece of airspace in the entire Communist bloc. It was a provocation designed to end any chance of rapprochement. “Certain reactionary circles in the United States,” the Soviets protested, in a thinly veiled swipe at LeMay and the Dulles brothers, were trying to sabotage “the improvement of relations” between the two countries. The Soviets openly blamed “renegade” elements in the U.S. Air Force, though, as John Foster Dulles had predicted, they were careful to keep their complaints quiet.

Secretary Dulles responded, disingenuously, that no U.S. “military” plane had violated Soviet airspace on July 4. Technically this was true, since the U-2 was a CIA operation. But it was also true that American military aircraft had been probing Soviet air defenses ever since the end of the Second World War. The forays, or “ferret” missions as they “were known, used a series of converted bombers—initially propeller-driven RB-29s, then the bigger jet-powered RB-47s—to search for gaps in Russia’s radar coverage and to determine how quickly the Soviets could scramble interceptors in response. Invariably, American planes would only brush up against Soviet airspace, making quick dashes across the frontier. Usually “ferret” pilots skirted the twelve-mile offshore territorial limit claimed by Moscow. Very occasionally, as in the case of LeMay’s Operation Home Run, they penetrated the deeper three-mile limit set by international law. And always they fled at the first sign of an answering plane. It was a cat-and-mouse game that could at times turn deadly. (The fate of 138 U.S. airmen shot down during the border overflights remains unknown to this day because Washington never inquired as to their whereabouts, and their families would not be told for forty years. “Representations and recommendations have been made to me by intelligence authorities,” wrote one State Department official after a C-118 with nine crew members aboard was shot down over the Baltic on June 18, 1957, “that no legal action be pursued.”) The sheer volume of ferret missions, several thousand a year in the mid-1950s, annoyed the Kremlin. But as long as the American planes stayed close to the borders, and the White House stayed silent if any of its planes were hit, the game was played within the acceptable limits of superpower rivalry. Of course, Washington might have had a different view of permissible cold-war norms if the situation had been reversed, and Soviet planes patrolled the American coastline, buzzing over New York or Los Angeles. “It would have meant war,” Khrushchev told his son.

The U-2, however, raised the intrusions to a different order of magnitude. With the maiden Independence Day flight, the United States had abandoned any pretense of respecting the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. U-2s didn’t take tentative steps along frontiers. They flew border to border in brazen 4,000-mile north-south sweeps. Khrushchev, naturally, was livid at the sudden change of rules. To add insult to injury, the CIA repeated the July 4 overflight the very next day and followed up with four more flights over the next six days. To the Soviets, the seemingly ceaseless parade of American planes over their two largest cities was a humiliating signal that the hard-line hawks in Eisenhower’s administration now intended to harass the USSR on a weekly basis. The notion that we could overfly them at will must have been deeply unsettling,” Bissell acknowledged. But the information the U-2s were bringing back was worth the risk, as a jubilant July 17 CIA memo indicated. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union on July 4, 1956,” wrote the analyst Herbert I. Miller.”

Broad coverage of the order of 400,000 square miles was obtained. Many new discoveries have come to light. Airfields previously unknown, army training bases previously unknown, industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed. We know that even though innumerable radar signals were detected and recorded by the electronic system carried on the mission, fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade. The medium jet bombers were also neatly aligned and not even dispersed to on-field dispersal areas. We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and “on the ready.” We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that small truck gardens were “being worked. These are but a few of the examples of the many things which tend to spell out the real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union. The “bomber gap,” the reconnaissance flights soon showed, was bogus. There were no new armadas of Bears and Bisons lining Russian runway, just row after row of smaller shorter-range Tupolevs that could never reach American soil. But Ike couldn’t confront Senator Symington with this information; it would mean blowing the U-2’s cover. Aside from the treasure trove of data it produced, the beauty of the U-2 lay in its deniability. As long as the Russians couldn’t produce hard physical evidence of the incursions, or were too ashamed to make a public fuss, the planes could operate with impunity. As a result, as Miller’s memo underscored, the CIA for the first time could eliminate much of the guesswork about Soviet weapons development programs and arms buildups. Craters at nuclear test sites could be photographed and measured to determine the size of the blasts. Missile launch sites could be examined for clues as to the capabilities of Russian rockets.  “Submarine pens could reveal the secrets of the Soviet underwater flotilla. Air base photographs could give an accurate picture of the number, strength, and battle readiness of bomber fleets. In a society so closed that it took six weeks for the CIA to get wind of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech (despite the mass protests that it set off in Tbilisi), the best way to peer past the Iron Curtain was from above. A lone U-2 could produce infinitely more useful data than all the previous reconnaissance missions combined. What’s more, the information could be targeted, aimed at a particular site the CIA wanted to know about. And on August 28, 1957, the highest-value target in the Soviet Union was Tyura-Tam.”

“If the R-7 was no longer a secret, it was partly Nikita Khrushchev’s fault. He had been unable to resist trumpeting the achievement, thumbing his own nose at the Americans a little, and had ordered TASS, the official Soviet news agency, to issue a vague but suitably ominous announcement on August 26 heralding the triumphant test flight. A few days ago a super-long-range, intercontinental multistage ballistic missile was launched. The tests of the missile were successful; they fully confirmed the correctness of the calculations and the selected design. The flight of the missile took place at a very great, hereto unattained, altitude. Covering an enormous distance in a short time, the missile hit the assigned region. The results obtained show that there is a possibility of launching missiles into any region of the terrestrial globe. The solution of the problem of creating intercontinental ballistic missiles will make it possible to reach remote regions without resorting to strategic aviation, which at the present time is vulnerable to modern means of anti-aircraft defense. After the humiliations of the U-2, Khrushchev had been only too happy to rattle his own saber for a change. But even if he had not wanted the Americans and the British to tremble at news of his new superweapon, the United States would have known about it anyway. The new National Security Agency, the sister organization to the CIA for signals intelligence gathering, had encircled the Soviet Union with an electronic moat. Huge dish and phased-array radar networks in Norway, Britain, Greenland, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Alaska intercepted Soviet communications and tracked weapons tests. An American installation in northern Iran, Tacksman 1, had been “monitoring the R-7 trials from the beginning and had been able to triangulate the general vicinity of the launchpad at Tyura-Tam.

From its dish network atop a 6,800-foot peak in Iran’s Mashad mountains, the NSA had been able to follow the initial failures at Tyura-Tam on its radar screens, but the success of Korolev’s fourth attempt had caused serious consternation in military circles. The R-7’s maiden flight had coincided, almost to the day, with the fourth consecutive launch failure of the U.S. Air Force’s intermediate-range Thor missile. Like the Soviets, American rocket scientists were grappling with the problem of warheads being incinerated on reentry, but, unlike Korolev, they had decided to test their thermal nose cone shield before perfecting the missiles that would carry the warhead. The Pentagon did not know that Korolev had put the cart before the horse, and that the Chief Designer did not yet have a working nose cone. The American military planners knew only that the Soviet Union claimed to have an operational ICBM, while the United States was still struggling to get a working IRBM.

“This alarming imbalance was why Jones was flying over the Kazakh desert in search of Tyura-Tam. He was following the thin outlines of rail spurs, since the CIA believed that the Soviets could move their big missiles only on trains. And he was using old World War II German maps to guide him, since much of the Soviet landmass beyond the Urals was a mystery to American cartographers. His was only the fourteenth U-2 overflight into the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had twice ordered the flights stopped: first after the Kremlin had filed its initial diplomatic protest, and then again after the sixth mission in November 1956, when the pilot Francis Gary Powers had experienced electrical problems over the Caucasus with MiGs hot on his tail. The scare had sobered some U-2 enthusiasts in Washington, who feared an international incident.  Despite the wealth of intelligence gleaned from the U-2s, the superpower tensions they provoked frightened Eisenhower. Put simply, they were driving Khrushchev insane with anger. “Stop sending intruders into our air space,” the Soviet leader had railed at a stunned delegation of visiting U.S. Air Force generals in the summer of 1956. “We will shoot down uninvited guests. . . . They are flying coffins. The grainy black-and-white photographs of Tyura-Tam taken by E. K. Jones on August 28 were flown to Washington the following day. There, in another nondescript office that Bissell had rented—this one above a Ford repair shop at Fifth and K streets—a team of optical experts with large magnifying glasses pored over the 12,000 feet of negatives. The  “Tyura-Tam shots showed a deep triangular fire pit that looked like a large terraced rock quarry. This excavation absorbed some of the R-7’s considerable exhaust blast at liftoff, and its sheer magnitude had given the CIA analysts pause. Perched over the pit was the near football-field-sized launch table with its towering Tulip jaws. Once again, the proportions appeared staggering compared to American launch stands of the period. From the Tulip, a gigantic berm with wide-gauge rail tracks ran toward an imposing assembly building about a mile away. The CIA could have drawn only one conclusion from the images: the R-7 was a monster.”

“The same 1954 Land report that had urged the creation of the U-2 had also made a recommendation for the development of another type of high-altitude reconnaissance craft, a satellite. The idea, at the time, had been met with skepticism by the National Security Council, owing to its technological complexity, though it was hardly revolutionary. The notion of using the cosmos as a surveillance platform had long stirred the imagination of rocket scientists and spies on both sides of the cold war divide. As early as 1946, a West Coast military think tank, the RAND Corporation, had envisioned successors of von Braun’s V-2 rockets one day carrying cameras beyond the stratosphere. Von Braun himself had made a similar pitch to the army brass in 1954. “Gone was the folksy fellow with rolled-up sleeves and Disneyesque props,” wrote the historian William Burrows of the meeting. “He was replaced by a grim-faced individual with a dark suit who puffed on cigarettes from behind a desk. This von Braun explained that a satellite in polar orbit would pass over every place on Earth every twenty-four hours, a perfect route for robotic espionage. He noted that maps of Eurasia were “five hundred yards off, and added that the error could be reduced to twenty-five yards. The implication was wasted on no one in the room: taking photographs of Earth from space not only would create an intelligence bonanza but would vastly improve targeting accuracy.”

Neither von Braun’s pitch nor Land’s recommendation to the NSC had received much traction in 1954 because American rockets were still too small and underpowered to contemplate sending up heavy spy satellites. By 1957, however, missile development had progressed sufficiently that the notion no longer seemed far-fetched. Though Bissell was working on a successor to the U-2—a new plane made entirely of titanium that could fly at 80,000 feet at a speed of 2,600 miles per hour, nearly five times faster than the U-2—he was also thinking that satellites might offer a simpler long-term solution. Who had the territorial rights to outer space? Did sovereign airspace extend beyond the stratosphere? There was no legal precedent for a satellite circumnavigating the globe, snapping photographs of foreign countries. Would it violate international law, like the U-2? The sooner a satellite was sent into orbit, the quicker a precedent would be set that would govern the legality of all future launches. In that regard, a purely scientific satellite, such as the Naval Research Center’s entry into the civilian IGY competition, was the perfect foil for establishing the open, international nature of outer space that would make extraterrestrial spying lawful. Legal issues aside, there was also the question of national prestige. One of the CIA’s principal tasks was to engage the Soviet Union in psychological warfare, and Bissell worried that if the Communists were first in space, they would score a significant victory over the capitalist democracies of the West in the battle for the hearts and minds of the developing, postcolonial Third World. Bissell was not the only one concerned about the propaganda value of a Soviet space milestone. The nuclear physicist I. I. Rabi, a future Nobel laureate, wrote to Eisenhower pleading for greater resources for the American IGY satellite “in view of the competition we might face” from Soviet science.” “Legal issues aside, there was also the question of national prestige. One of the CIA’s principal tasks was to engage the Soviet Union in psychological warfare, and Bissell worried that if the Communists were first in space, they would score a significant victory over the capitalist democracies of the West in the battle for the hearts and minds of the developing, postcolonial Third World.

Bissell was not the only one concerned about the propaganda value of a Soviet space milestone. The nuclear physicist I. I. Rabi, a future Nobel laureate, wrote to Eisenhower pleading for greater resources for the American IGY satellite “in view of the competition we might face” from Soviet science. Wernher von Braun, for his part, bypassed the reluctant administration altogether, taking his calls for greater action directly to what he thought might be a more sympathetic audience: the Democratic Congress. Employing the same tactic that Korolev had used to such effect on Khrushchev, he warned a Senate subcommittee that the Soviet Union was in the advanced stages of developing a satellite. The Soviet Union did not have the same urgent need for aerial reconnaissance as the United States. America was a far more open society, ridiculously easy to penetrate. Its Congress publicly debated minute details of defense budgets. Astonishingly accurate road maps that would be highly classified in the USSR were sold at every gas station. Security was so incredibly lax that Korolev had been able to read a translation of U.S. newspaper accounts of Atlas’s latest test, a fiery failure off the Florida coast, and of the successful recovery of a nose cone Wernher von Braun had blasted into space with his Jupiter C. Von Braun, conversely, did not even know that Korolev existed—a fact that apparently grated on the egotistical Chief Designer. For the Soviets, it was mind-boggling how much information the Americans naively left lying around for the KGB to scoop up. Russia’s generals didn’t need a satellite to find out what was going on in Washington. 

“Russia had virtually no computers in 1957 because Stalin had viewed cybernetics as a “faulty science,” not applicable to a dialectical society. By the time the military applications of the machines had become obvious, the USSR lagged hopelessly behind the West, and Keldysh, as the head of the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics, controlled access to the only civilian supercomputer in Moscow. Without access to Keldysh’s computer, Korolev would be stopped in his tracks because it could take months using manual six-digit trigonometry tables just to plug in all the variables needed to plot the parameters of an orbital trajectory. His engineers needed to calculate the exact speed of the rotation of the earth at the point of launch, which, at Tyura-Tam, was just over 1,000 feet per second. The direction of the launch, the azimuth, had to be factored in, since the earth rotates on a west-to-east axis and launching westward would be like swimming against a tide. The precise shape of the earth at the point of launch also had to be measured, since the planet is not a perfect sphere. The inclination of the equatorial plane, the angle between the equator and the azimuth, then needed to be calibrated to determine fuel load, which in turn affected the mass-to-thrust ratio critical to calculating the “escape velocity” that would propel PS-1 beyond the pull of gravity. This in turn determined the apogee and perigee—that is, the peaks and troughs of the satellite’s wavelike orbit —along with the duration of each revolution. These variables were all mercilessly interrelated, and the smallest mistake could result in the satellite crashing back to earth or escaping into deep space, never to be seen again. Even if PS-1 were catapulted to its proper celestial position, a tiny error in trajectory computations could result in a widely errant elliptical orbit that would either bypass the United States or appear over the North American continent at the wrong times. That, for Korolev, would spell disaster, because he wanted his little satellite seen in the night sky over enemy territory. It was why he had ordered PS-1 made entirely of a highly reflective aluminum material, polished to a mirrorlike sheen, and why he had gone to such lengths to insist on a spherical shape. 

his little satellite seen in the night sky over enemy territory. It was why he had ordered PS-1 made entirely of a highly reflective aluminum material, polished to a mirrorlike sheen, and why he had gone to such lengths to insist on a spherical shape. Korolev had shot down the cone, the cylinder, the square, and every design his frustrated satellite makers had proposed. “Why, Sergei Pavlovich?” one of them finally asked, exasperated. “Because it’s not round,” he had replied mysteriously.There was no real mystery, however. Spinning spherical objects simply caught the light better, and PS-1 would act like a bright mirror for the sun’s rays as it circled the earth, making it much more visible in the dark. Without this form of optical amplification, PS-1, at twenty-two inches in diameter, was too small to be seen from distances of up to 500 miles away. And seeing, as the old saying went, was believing.”

The same psychological reasoning applied to Korolev’s decision to sacrifice scientific instrumentation in favor of audio capability. Virtually all of PS-l’s 184-pound mass was consumed by two transmitters and their three batteries. The silver-zinc chargers alone weighed 122 pounds, providing power for only a few weeks of operation. As a redundancy, they operated two identical one-watt transmitters that broadcast alternatively on different frequencies using separate pairs of ten- and eight-foot antennae. This way if one system failed, a signal would still reach earth. Hearing was also believing. Sights and sounds from space would give even a crude little craft like PS-1 enormous propaganda and political value, Korolev argued. No one would be able to deny its existence, and even the “simple satellite” would be a Soviet triumph over the Americans, orbiting proof of the supremacy of Communist countries. There was a pervasive sentiment in Washington that a totalitarian state with communal toilets could not pull off something so technologically complex, as Senator Ellender had stated. A similarly derisive disbelief had greeted the initial news in 1949 that Moscow had detonated an atomic bomb. “Do you know when Russia will build the bomb? Never,” Truman had scoffed. When presented with incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets had indeed split the atom, Truman responded, “German scientists in Russia did it—probably something like that.” Even after the USSR had further narrowed the atomic gap with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in 1953, Moscow was still the butt of American jokes. Russia couldn’t possibly smuggle a suitcase bomb into the United States, went one popular punch line, because the Soviets hadn’t yet perfected the suitcase.

Khrushchev’s reform of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a single conspirator was shot or even arrested. Molotov was dispatched to Outer Mongolia, to serve out his sentence as the Soviet ambassador in dusty Ulan Bator. Kaganovich was appointed director of a remote potassium mine in the Perm province of the Ural Mountains. Malenkov was sent to manage the Ust-Kamenogorsk electric power station on the equally desolate Irtysh River in Kazakhstan, while Shepilov was dispatched to Kyrgyzstan to teach central Asian children the tenets of Marxist-Leninism. They were effectively banished into internal exile, but they would live out their natural lives. Korolev’s gambit had its desired effect. Opposition to the substitute satellite melted away almost as quickly as it had welled up at the previous meeting. The military men sat silent, and Glushko lowered his eyes in defeat.”Liftoff was scheduled for 10:20 PM on Sunday, the sixth of October, under the cover of darkness because American spy planes roamed the skies during the day. It also turned out that the late hour was ideal for PS-1 to attain its desired orbit. The launch itself would be strictly secret in case it failed, and Korolev took every precaution to ensure that Washington did not get wind of his intentions. In the huge assembly hangar not too far from the spartan little house the Chief Designer kept at Tyura-Tam, the R-7 lay prone on a train-sized dolly, its copper-clad exhaust nozzles burnished to a bright orange under its flared white skirt. It was model number 8k71PS, sixteen feet shorter than its predecessors, and technicians in surgical smocks were tinkering with the final modifications to its smaller, stubbier nose cone. The alterations gave the now ninety-six-foot rocket a stouter, more matronly look, but PS-1, Tikhonravov’s tiny prostreishy sputnik, or “simplest satellite,” did not require the same large and elongated thermal shield as a five-ton thermonuclear warhead that would reenter the searing atmosphere. The warhead’s cumbersome radio-guidance targeting system had also been removed, shaving another four feet off the final package, since it too was no longer necessary. The satellite, after all, was not being aimed at an American city; with luck, it would never touch solid ground again. To achieve orbital velocity, Glushko’s central sustainer core engine was being recalibrated to fire until it ran out of fuel, rather than to cut off at a predetermined point along a ballistic trajectory, and a new, more potent mix of hydrogen peroxide was being introduced to drive its turbo pumps faster.”

“A solemn procession began along the sandy mile-and-a-half-long berm that connected the assembly hangar to the launchpad, a tradition that would be repeated for every subsequent space launch and continues to this day. Heads bowed in silence, hands clasped behind their backs, the scientists, soldiers, and technocrats followed the locomotive that slowly, painstakingly pushed the R-7 on its transporter to the fire pit. A grainy and undated Soviet video captured the scene. In the front row, Korolev in a black leather jacket walked next to Voskresenskiy, his trusted chief of flight testing, looking like a portly French painter in the black beret that he used to seal liquid oxygen leaks with frozen urine. Farther back, the bemedaled generals, their olive green uniforms matching the military paint job on the 150-foot-long transporter. Behind them, Glushko, Ryabikov, and Rudnev, the deputy minister for military-industrial works. Then, bringing up the rear, the rest of the bureaucrats and lesser designers. In the video, no one is talking, and faces seem grim. The camera pans away to reveal a tableau of windswept dunes and a pair of camels on a ridge—though these have almost certainly been spliced in for exotic effect since it was highly unlikely that Kazakh herders were permitted to wander freely around Tyura-Tam. It was not until shortly before six the following morning, on Friday, October 4, that fueling could begin. By then, many of the launch crew had fallen ill from spending so much time in the unseasonably cold weather. An Arctic blast had descended over the Kazakh steppe from Siberia, bringing howling winds and freezing temperatures, but the personnel at Tyura-Tam were still dressed for the broiling summer. Huddled around a makeshift shack that served moldy salami and stale pastries but no hot tea, the soldiers and technicians shivered and cursed. “OK, dear,” said one, addressing the missile. “Fly away and carry our baby into space. Or at least crash. Just fly away, and don’t stay here,” he added, dreading the prospect of the additional days it would take to drain and dismantle a stalled rocket.”

“Rail tankers containing 253 tons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen pulled up to the hinged girders of the Tulip, and soldiers heaved huge hoses onto cables and pulleys that hoisted them up to the R-7’s intake valves. The troops manning the fueling operation wore no protective clothing other than gloves, and clouds of cryogenic condensate descended on them through the bleed valves that hissed frozen oxygen vapors as they pumped a small amount of liquid oxygen to cool and pressurize the rocket’s plumbing. Above them, powerful spotlights illuminated the frost-covered rocket, which glistened in the night like a giant icicle. Steam hissed from its bleed valves, enveloping the launch stand in thick, billowy clouds bisected by sharp beams of light. At 10:20 PM, the rocket’s automated guidance systems were switched on, and its inertial gyroscopes began spinning, emitting a low hum. Inside the crowded bunker, the military operators manning the dimly illuminated panels and dials of the various control stations scanned their indicators for signs of trouble. “Roll tape.” The telemetry readouts began rolling off the printer like a stock market ticker tape. “Purge the system,” Nosov called out ten seconds later. Inside the rocket, compressed nitrogen was blasted through the engine feed lines to flush out any gaseous residue from the fueling and testing. “Key to drainage.” Chekunov flipped the switch, and all the bleed valves closed. The hissing and steaming abruptly ceased, and the vapor clouds around the rocket disappeared as the last of the feed lines that topped off the evaporating liquid oxygen was automatically disconnected. Two minutes passed before Nosov issued his next command: “Pusk,” or “Launch.” Chekunov pressed the launch button, starting the automated sequence. Inside the R-7, compressed nitrogen rushed into the propellant tanks, pressurizing them to the bursting point. The umbilical mast with the ground electrical connections retracted and the missile switched to onboard battery power.” “Roll tape two,” Nosov commanded ninety seconds later. Every ground receiving station in the Soviet Union was activated to full power, ready to track the rocket. It was now 10:28 PM. Inside the R-7, valves opened, and the turbo pumps began sucking thousands of gallons out of the propellant tanks. “Ignition,” called Chekunov, reading the flashing light on the panel in front of him. From their periscopes Voskresenskiy and Nosov could see a cloud of orange smoke envelop the rocket, as flames poured out of the thirty thrusters. But the fire was languid and lazy, dancing, directionless. “Initial stage,” Nosov called out. The engines were only warming up; the turbo pumps that fed fuel to the combustion chambers were operating at a fraction of their capacity. This was normal and followed after a few seconds by a ground-shaking roar. “Primary stage,” Nosov shouted, as the R-7 went to full thrust. An ear-splitting din, like the sound of lightning as it strikes, penetrated the bunker’s thick concrete walls, and the light coming through the periscopes’ viewfinders was blinding as the flames shooting out of the rocket intensified to white-hot jets of superheated gas. They slammed into the bottom of the fire pit with such force that updrafts propelled them back up the sides of the missile 120 feet above. For a split second, the rocket sat there burning itself alive, and then it slowly rose from the pyre. “Liftoff, liftoff,” Nosov screamed, as a million pounds of downward pressure pushed the Tulip’s hinged pedals open and the R-7 was released.”

At 116 seconds a fiery cross appeared thirty miles above the Tyura-Tam test range. The four side boosters had jettisoned, creating the biblical effect, and miraculously the separation had occurred exactly on schedule. Relief swept through the control room. Only the central sustainer core was now firing, which meant that fewer things could go wrong. Glushko’s reconfigured engine had enough fuel for two more minutes of flight. Then they would know.”The control bunker was subdued; there were too many generals and colonels and deputy ministers present for the young lieutenants in the launch crew to display their emotions. But in the assembly hangar, where most of the civilian scientists and engineers listened to the action on a loudspeaker, it was a different story. There, emotions ran high; whoops and cheers greeted milestones, while announcements of glitches were met with moans and groans. For the next two minutes, all eyes were riveted on the clock. Then the loudspeaker sounded. “Main engine shut down.” A distressed murmur reverberated through the hall. The engines had run out of fuel at 295.4 seconds. That was more than a full second early, a result of the Tank Depletion System malfunction. Slide rules were whipped out and calculations hastily performed. Would the early cutoff affect escape velocity? The R-7 was supposed to be traveling at just over 8,000 meters per second—roughly 18,000 miles an hour—but it was making only 7,780 meters per second. It was also five miles lower than it should be, at 142 miles in altitude instead of 147 miles. Would it be enough to orbit? Another 19.9 seconds passed before the next announcement. Meanwhile, momentum had carried the missile, still traveling at twenty-three times the speed of sound, another one hundred miles higher. “Separation Achieved.” Inside the R-7’s nose cone, pneumatic pistons rammed PS-l’s steel cradle, pushing it away from the spent booster. A “spring-loaded mechanism popped off PS-l’s conical cover, and the sphere hurtled into the blackness of space. At 325.44 seconds into the flight, Nosov issued his last command. “Open the reflectors.” A plate on the central booster jettisoned, exposing prismlike mirrors on the rocket’s casing. Korolev had installed the reflective material, knowing that the ninety-foot central stage would follow PS-l’s celestial path like the blazing trail of a meteor, and he wanted to ensure that it too would be visible from earth as it circled the planet just behind the satellite. But was PS-1 really in orbit? Had the little orb survived the violent shaking and vibrations of takeoff? Had it overheated during its ascent, succumbing to the friction of slamming through the dense lower atmosphere at nearly 25,000 feet per second? Had the thin cover shields held? Everyone rushed to the communications van parked outside to find out. The van sprouted an array of antennae tuned to the two frequencies of PS-l’s twin transmitters. Inside the van, both operators hunched over their dials, cupping their headphones. “Quiet,” one of them yelled. “Be quiet.” So many people were pressing against the vehicle, clamoring for information, that the two operators couldn’t hear anything. Then, one of them raised an exultant arm. “We have the signal,” he shouted. “We have it.” Celebration erupted: dancing, laughing, hugging. Grown men cried and kissed one another. Glushko and Korolev embraced, their clashes momentarily forgotten. “This is music no one has ever heard before,” the Chief Designer cheered. Even the rigid military engineers inside the control bunker rose out of their seats in a rare display of emotion, though Chekunov, the young lieutenant who had pressed the launch button, would later recall that none of them would truly understand what had just happened until much later. Reports now started trickling in from the Far Eastern tracking stations. One after another, they were acquiring PS-l’s signal. It was on course, and its orbit seemed to be holding steady. Only a relatively minor altitude loss of fifty miles was reported. Once more cheering and shouting erupted, because that meant that the early engine cutoff had not had disastrous consequences after all. Already some of the State Commission members were reaching for the phones, ready to call Moscow with the good news. Korolev, though, was surprisingly subdued and silent. “Hold off on the celebrations,” he finally counseled. “It could still be a mistake. Let’s wait to hear if we can pick up the signal after a complete orbit. For an hour and a half they waited, smoking, pacing, and fidgeting. When the appointed time for PS-1 to reappear over Soviet territory came and went in silence, a deathly stillness descended on the anxious crowd assembled in the huge hangar. A sense of foreboding suddenly gripped the scientists. Maybe PS-1 had continued to lose altitude and had burned up in the atmosphere. Maybe they had failed after all.

At a few minutes after midnight, one of the westernmost tracking stations in the Crimea picked up something. At first faintly and with static, and then louder and clearer: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. Amid the pandemonium, Korolev turned to his fellow State Commission members. Now, he said triumphantly, we can call Khrushchev. As the cocktails were being poured and the secretary’s favor curried, ABMA’s public relations officer, Gordon Harris, abruptly burst into the bar. Clearly agitated, the young officer rudely interrupted McElroy and grabbed Medaris. “General,” he stammered, too loudly for discretion, “it has been announced over the radio that the Russians have put up a successful satellite! For a moment, the room was deathly quiet, so that only the soft sound of background music could be heard. “It’s broadcasting signals on a common frequency,” Harris went on, as hushed murmurs began rippling through the gathering. “At least one of our local ‘hams’ [amateur radio operators] has been listening to it. Then dozens of voices erupted in a spontaneous outburst of anger and pent-up frustration. “General Gavin was visibly shaken, and understandably so,” an aide to Secretary Brucker later recalled. Gavin, only days earlier, had tried to persuade Wilson one last time to take the Jupiter C as a backup for the problem-plagued Vanguard. Now he cursed Engine Charlie’s lack of foresight. “Damn bastards” was all Medaris said, and it was unclear whether he was referring to the Soviets or his own government overseers. Whichever the case, he was stunned. How could the Russians have done it? It was impossible. Only the week before, he had laughed when Ernst Stuhlinger, one of von Braun’s top engineers, had pleaded for him to approach Quarles because he was “convinced” that the Soviets were planning a launch. “Now look,” Medaris had replied, “don’t get tense. You know how complicated it is to build and launch a satellite. Those people will never be able to do it. Go back to your laboratory and relax. What Medaris, like most Americans, failed to understand was that conditions that made communism wholly unsuited as a producer of quality consumer goods made it an ideal system for promoting major scientific breakthroughs. The state could never compete with private businesses making sneakers, tennis racquets, or transistor radios. But no corporation could muster the vast resources, strict discipline, and unlimited patience that were required of huge scientific undertakings like the Manhattan Project, or the creation of a satellite-bearing ICBM. Stuhlinger and von Braun, as veterans of the state-run V-2 program, understood this and knew that science thrived under totalitarian regimes, even if free speech and commerce did not.”

“We knew they would do it!” von Braun exclaimed, his Teutonic Texas twang rising to a fevered pitch. “We could have done it two years ago,” he cursed, launching into the story of how Wilson had been so suspicious that the army might “accidentally” launch a satellite ahead of the navy, igniting an interservice war, that he had ordered Medaris to personally inspect the Jupiter C booster to ensure that the top stage was a dud. (The precaution, as it turned out, had been unnecessary. “There was no chance of an unauthorized attempt,” Stuhlinger later recalled. “We had our orders, and von Braun was very strict about following orders.”) Office politics had denied von Braun his lifelong dream. Unlike Korolev, he had been obsessed with the conquest of space since early childhood. He had sold his soul—first to the Werhmacht, then to the Nazis, and finally to the U.S. Army—to pursue his quest. He had endured Hitler, Himmler, five long years of purgatory in the hot Texas sun. All so that he could pursue his dream. And now, because of some idiotic bureaucratic imperatives, someone else had beaten him to it. Von Braun very nearly exploded with anger and frustration. “For God’s sake cut us loose and let us do something,” he implored McElroy. “We have the hardware on the shelf.” The gist of the press release was clear. Sputnik, as far as the White House was concerned, was not a big deal. If anything, it was a feat of Nazi engineering, not Soviet know-how—never mind that the Germans in question were beavering away in Huntsville, not Moscow. The tone thus set, administration officials lined up to spin the news. Sputnik was “without military significance,” said the White House aide Maxwell Rabb. “A neat technical trick,” shrugged Charlie Wilson. “A silly bauble,” scoffed Eisenhower’s adviser Clarence Randall. But much as the administration tried to downplay the significance of the Communist breakthrough, the media decided differently. Sputnik was a big story—a very big, shocking, scary story. “Listen now for the sound that will forever more separate the old from the new,” intoned NBC, broadcasting Sputnik’s beep on Saturday, October 5. “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space,” the New York Times trumpeted in the sort of six-column-wide headline usually reserved for declarations of war. “Sphere Tracked in Four Crossings over U.S.”

From the journalistic perspective, Sputnik had everything going for it: a historic milestone of human evolution, the element of surprise, the sting of defeat, and frightening ramifications as CBS’s Eric Sevareid somberly informed viewers in his October 6 telecast. Here in the capital responsible men think and talk of little but the metal spheroid that now looms larger in the eye of the mind than the planet it circles around. Men are divided in their feelings between those who rejoice and those who worry. In the first group are the scientists, mostly, in raptures that the nascent, god-like instinct of Homo sapiens has driven him from his primordial mud to break, at last, the bound of his earth. Those who are worrying tonight know that the spirit of man has many parts: and part of his spirit is not in space; it has not even reached the foothills. And so broken men still lie in Budapest hospitals because a form of ancient tyranny finds free thought a menace; and in mid-American cities bodies and hearts bear bruises because this part of the human spirit still fears and hates what is different, even in color. The wisest of men does not know tonight whether man in his radiance or man in his darkness will possess the spinning ball.” Sputnik contained one final element that no ambitious newsman could resist: fear. The missile that had lofted Sputnik into space had also shattered America’s sense of invulnerability. For the first time geography had ceased to be a barrier, and the U.S. mainland lay exposed to enemy fire. In that respect, Russia’s rockets were infinitely more frightening than the Japanese bombers that had attacked Pearl Harbor sixteen years before. It was not distant naval bases on Pacific islands that they targeted, but the impregnable heartland itself: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, places that had never before needed to worry about foreign aggression. Despite White House assurances to the contrary, satellites and ballistic missiles were inherently linked. ” The story, therefore, was ultimately about the security—or newfound insecurity—of the American people, as Sevareid made plainly clear: “If the intercontinental missile is, indeed, the ultimate, the final weapon of warfare,” he ended his broadcast ominously, “then at the present rate, Russia will soon come to a period during which she can stand astride the world, its military master.”

The warning was echoed by thousands of media outlets, big and small, conservative and liberal, in radio and television, magazines and newspapers. Sputnik was “a great national emergency,” declared Max Ascoli of the Reporter. A “grave defeat,” lamented the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune. US News & World Report likened it to the splitting of the atom.  The editors of Life made comparisons to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged Americans “to respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Sputnik was “a technological Pearl Harbor,” fretted Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. The sphere’s “chilling beeps,” echoed Time, were a signal that “in vital sectors of the technology race, the US may have well lost its precious lead. Editors seemed obsessed with the Soviet satellite, and pretty soon so was the general population, which had initially greeted the launch with mild to complete disinterest. “The reaction here indicates massive indifference,” a Newsweek correspondent had reported from Boston on October 5. “There is a vague feeling that we have stepped into a new era, but people aren’t discussing it the way they are football or the Asiatic flu,” another Newsweek reporter wired from Denver. In Milwaukee, it was the ballistic trajectories of the Braves’ pitching staff in Game 2 of the World Series against the Yankees that preoccupied most people, not the short news brief on page 3 of the Sentinel devoted to the Soviet satellite.” Within days the media barrage changed the public mood dramatically. People began holding nightly vigils to try to spot the passing satellite; they tuned their radios to its frequencies; and they grew anxious. Yet for the Democrats in Congress, Sputnik was simply too good an opportunity to let slip. The Little Rock crisis had left Eisenhower vulnerable, and the economy was weakening. The Soviet Union had handed the United States a setback that could be whipped up into a full-blown indictment of the administration. A National Week of Shame and Danger.” Sputnik, he said, was “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States.” Russell weighed in as well. “We now know beyond a doubt,” he warned on October 5, “that the Russians have the ultimate weapon—a long-range missile capable of delivering atomic and hydrogen explosives across continents and oceans. If this now known superiority over the United States develops into “supremacy, the position of the free world will be critical. At the same time we continue to learn of the missile accomplishments of the possible enemy. For fiscal reasons this Government, in turn, continues to cut back and slow down its own missile program. As rival Democrats battled over who could ring the alarm bells loudest, the orchestrated histrionics had their desired effect. Public reaction to Sputnik quickly shifted from blasé to terror-stricken. Everywhere around the country, people flocked to rooftops and held midnight vigils on their front lawns, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ominous orb whose signal was being blamed for a rash of mysterious  garage door openings. (The Washington Post speculated that these were the result of interference from coded messages to Soviet spies.) Local radio stations fueled the paranoia by broadcasting Sputnik’s expected over-pass times, and it was not unusual to have entire blocks of people gazing anxiously skyward at 3:00 AM. Eventually, some 4 percent of the U.S. population would report seeing Sputnik with their own eyes. (What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite, which could be viewed only with optical devices more sophisticated than the binoculars used by the average American.)”

This was a place where Eisenhower went wrong,” his loyal staff secretary General Andrew J. Goodpaster conceded decades later. “His expression was that this was nothing we didn’t foresee or know about, but the American people until that moment had not realized the vulnerability that had now developed. That they could be reached by long range rockets, which could be nuclear armed. And our country, for the first time, was exposed to that kind of danger. And so, where he brushed it off as something that we had foreseen, it really created great anxiety, almost panic within the United States. Eisenhower’s background as a professional soldier may have been partly responsible for his empathy deficit. As a military man, the president was accustomed to calculating casualties and collateral damage. From his experiences in World War II, he knew that in modern combat there was no longer any such thing as noncombatants; the United States had long targeted Russian cities, and it was not that shocking that the Soviet Union did the same. As a seasoned field commander, Eisenhower also knew that the ICBM, as a weapon, was still in its infancy, much like the airplane before World War I, and that years would pass before it became a real threat that could alter the balance of power. The president and the military men who served in his immediate circle were not attuned to the psychological effects of Sputnik as a symbol of nuclear Armageddon. “I can’t understand,” Eisenhower told Good-paster, “why the American people have got so worked up over this thing. It’s certainly not going to drop on their heads. Eisenhower knew he could not tell the American people that there was a silver lining to the Soviet breakthrough—that the United States would be able to phase out the secret U-2 overflights and spy on the USSR from space without violating international laws. This was the sound bite that everyone had been waiting for. Eisenhower’s dismissive “one small ball” would grace hundreds of headlines in the next day’s newspapers, reinforcing the impression that the president of the United States was at a loss as to why his nation was so traumatized. Pleased, the reporters pressed on. “Mr. President,” the Chicago Tribune correspondent queried, smelling blood, “considering what we know about Russia’s progress in the field of missiles, are you satisfied with our own progress in that field, or do you feel there have been unnecessary delays in our development of missiles? By dismissing Sputnik as “a small ball” without military implications, the man Americans trusted most to defend them seemed oblivious to the danger that millions now saw lurking in the night sky. Ike was correct that in itself the Soviet satellite posed no danger, but he failed to acknowledge that it represented a potential threat. Instead of projecting confidence, he was accused of being out of touch with reality, asleep at the wheel. The president must “be in some kind of partial retirement,” complained the hugely influential syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann.

TRINITY 2 

Dulles had warned Eisenhower in late September that a Soviet launch was imminent, and he and Nixon had proposed going public with the information to lessen the potential shock. Their suggestion had been rejected, and now Dulles listed the consequences. “Khrushchev has moved all his propaganda guns in place,” he said. Sputnik was merely “one of a trilogy” of public relations coups. “The other two being the announcement of the successful testing of an ICBM, and the recent test of a large scale hydrogen bomb at Novaya Zemlya. Incidentally,” he added, the Soviets had just exploded another big H-bomb “late last night. The close timing of the three feats, Dulles noted, was having “a very wide and deep impact” abroad. The Chinese, he said, were treating Sputnik as proof of Soviet military and technological supremacy over the United States. Similar statements were coming out of Egypt and other countries in the Middle East, and Moscow was giving “the theme maximum play” with its Eastern European satellite states. Even America’s Western European allies, Dulles reported, were rattled, and confidence in NATO, particularly in France, had taken a psychological hit. All in all, the situation on the foreign policy front was “pretty somber”. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the only one caught off guard by Sputnik. Nikita Khrushchev had also initially underestimated its hefty political payload. Before October 4, Khrushchev had been only partly paying attention to the proceedings at Tyura-Tam. “Just another Korolev launch,” he later conceded, recalling that an aide had needed to remind him that the Chief Designer, in a fit of paranoia, had moved up the date by two days. Since the R-7 had already proved itself on two successful trials, there was no longer any great sense of urgency as to the rocket’s viability. Its temporary incarnation as a space launcher, while intriguing from a scientific and competitive point of view, was not critical to the missile’s main mission as a weapon. The stakes, therefore, were not so high, at least as far as the first secretary was concerned. Khrushchev also had some pressing earthly problems to contend with. Like Korolev, he had fallen prey to paranoia and fear of rivals, both real and imaginary. In the weeks that followed the summer’s failed hard-liner putsch, “he had become increasingly convinced that another coup was in the works, and that once more dark forces were aligning to depose him. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, hero of the Great Patriotic War, conqueror of Berlin, savior of Moscow, and Khrushchev’s rescuer during the June coup, had simply grown too powerful. The man whose popularity had so intimidated Joseph Stalin that the old tyrant had not dared have him killed was once more impinging on the balance of power within the Kremlin. Nor, it seemed, could he help himself; he was just too large for life, and he kept threatening to overshadow his civilian masters. To ordinary Russians, Zhukov was a legend, a Soviet Patton and MacArthur rolled into one deliciously gruff and outsize package. Arrogant and abrasive, he had a soldier’s disdain for politicians, a seaman’s penchant for profanity, and a marine’s storm-the-beaches attitude toward bureaucracy. ”

Every celestial body suffers from what is known as orbital decay, a gradual loss of speed and altitude that brings the object either closer to or farther from its center of gravity. Decay can be imperceptibly slow, as in the case of the moon, which falls a few inches away from the earth every year, or catastrophically abrupt, like a meteor getting sucked in by the pull of gravity. Sputnik could thus stay in orbit for a day, a week, a month, a year, a millennium, or a million years, depending on that all-important rate of degeneration. From Sputnik’s first few rotations, Korolev’s team had been able to ascertain the satellite’s basic parameters: its apogee, perigee, speed, inclination, and duration of each orbit. The tiny sphere was hurtling on a 25,000-kilometer-per-hour (15,625-miles-per-hour) roller-coaster ride around the planet, crossing the equator every ninety-six minutes at a sixty-five-degree angle as it climbed to apogees (peaks) of 947 kilometers (587 miles) above sea level like a surfer on a wave and then plummeted to perigees (depths) of 228 kilometers (141 miles) as it fell to the bottom of a trough before rising again. But each time Sputnik hit a trough was like slamming on the brakes, because the atmosphere, even at that height, was still thick enough to cause friction. At such relatively low points of the orbit, fluctuations in the earth’s gravity due to differences in the shape and mineral composition of the globe, which is not a perfectly round sphere, could also adversely affect decay. Sputnik’s perigee was too low because of the malfunction during liftoff, which had resulted in an early engine cutoff. The question was, How much ground was it losing? If PS-1 fell back to earth within a few days, Korolev’s triumph would be short-lived, his record tainted, his masters in Moscow unhappy. Frantically, his mathematicians ran the numbers, trying to predict Sputnik’s life span. Finally, early in the afternoon of October 5, they came up with an estimate: two to three months. (The exact number would turn out to be ninety-two days.) Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Sputnik was safe, as far as the record books and politicians stood. Korolev and his chief designers could at last relax and go home to celebrate in earnest.”

The men responsible for the satellite would begin to grasp the importance of their feat only when they boarded their special flight from Tyura-Tam to Moscow on the night following the launch. Most of the exhausted engineers had passed out shortly after takeoff, Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh slumbering in their elegant and neatly pressed suits, while Korolev, shifting uncomfortably in his trademark black leather jacket and turtleneck sweater, stared wearily at the dim cabin lights. As soon as their big Iliushin-4 prop jet had leveled off over the orange Kazakh desert, the pilot, Tolya Yesenin, came rushing out of the cockpit. “The whole world is abuzz,” he gushed, grasping the Chief Designer’s hand and pumping it furiously. Korolev sat up, startled. He had been so preoccupied during the past twenty-four hours that he had had little contact with anyone outside Tyura-Tam other than Khrushchev, and had no idea that word of the launch had spread so far, so wide, so fast. Abuzz? The whole world? Really? Korolev couldn’t contain himself. He jumped out of his seat and made straight for the flight deck to use the plane’s radio. “When he returned some minutes later, he was unusually ebullient and emotional. Much like Korolev, it was not until the night of October 5, and only once he had returned to Moscow from his maneuverings in Kiev, that Nikita Khrushchev began to realize what a tremendous victory he had just scored against the United States. Throughout the day, Soviet embassies and KGB stations around the globe had been busy compiling foreign press clippings and political reactions to Sputnik. By the next morning, the reports had been translated, cabled to Moscow, sorted, and slotted into the thick folders Khrushchev received with breakfast every day at his government mansion in Lenin Hills. The files—green for foreign press clippings, red for decoded diplomatic traffic, blue for agency reports—must have made savory reading. “The achievement is immense,” declared Britain’s Manchester Guardian. “It demands a psychological adjustment on our part towards Soviet society, Soviet military capabilities, and perhaps—most of all—to the relationship of the world to what is beyond. The Russians can now build ballistic missiles capable of striking any chosen target anywhere in the world. Clearly they have established a great lead in missile technology.” “Myth has become reality,” crowed France’s Le Figaro, “commenting gleefully on the bitter “disillusion and bitter reflections of the Americans who have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain.”

Khrushchev leafed through the stack of diplomatic dispatches with increasing relish. “A turning point in civilization,” the New York Times declared, “that could only be achieved by a country with first rate conditions in a vast area of science and engineering.” An Austrian paper opined that “in contrast with the first steps in the atomic age which began with 100,000 deaths, mankind can rejoice without destruction on the conquest of cosmos by the human spirit.” China’s main daily hailed Sputnik as a “validation of the superiority of Marxist-Leninist technology.” Radio Cairo declared that “the planetary era rings the death knell of colonialism; the American policy of encirclement of the Soviet Union has pitifully failed.” Khrushchev was astonished by the reaction. It was as if, overnight, his nation had been vaulted to a preeminent position atop the global hierarchy. The Soviet Union, in the eyes of the world, had suddenly become a genuine superpower, not just a backward and brutish empire to be feared because of its sheer size, territorial ambitions, and aggressive ideology but a true and equal rival of the United States, a beacon of progress that deserved respect for its technological prowess and forward thinking. “With only a ball of metal,” as the historian Asif A. Siddiqi would succinctly put it, “the Soviets had managed to achieve what they were unable to convey with decades of rhetoric.”The cold war had suddenly taken on a new and, from Khrushchev’s perspective, eminently more appealing dimension. It was now the specter of Soviet supremacy rather than American dominance that haunted the global arms race. Moscow, for once, held the high moral ground in this new phase of the contest because Sputnik, as opposed to Hiroshima, could be touted as a purely peaceful and scientific achievement. That must have been the most delicious irony for Khrushchev. He had tried, and failed, to rattle the world with his announcement in August boasting of a deadly new weapon that would raise the scale of mass destruction to unprecedented levels. People had simply shrugged. Korolev, on the other hand, had placed a tiny transmitter on top of an R-7 and managed to put the entire planet on notice with its innocuous little beeps. “It will generate myth, legend, and enduring superstition of a kind peculiarly difficult to eradicate,” the USIA memo accurately predicted, “which the USSR can exploit to its advantage.”

The Soviet leader smiled. He had read enough. He may have lacked the formal education and erudition to intuitively grasp the historic context of man’s ascent to the heavens, but he was too well grounded a politician not to recognize opportunity when it knocked. “People all over the world are pointing to the satellite,” he exclaimed, as if struck by a revelation. “They are saying the U.S. has been beaten.” Pushing aside his breakfast, and all previous thought of the dearly deposed Zhukov, Khrushchev sprang into action. Get me Korolev! he ordered. If the Chief Designer resented talking heads like Sedov stealing his limelight, he did not say so. “People in the Soviet Union did not complain during that era,” Sergei Khrushchev laughed when asked if Korolev found the enforced anonymity grating. Korelev’s daughter, Natalia, however, recalled her bitter disappointment when the Nobel committee wanted the name of the scientist responsible for Sputnik so they could award him the Nobel Prize in Physics. It is the collective achievement of Soviet science, the Swedes were told. “I remember walking in Red Square,” Natalia Koroleva recounted decades later, “and seeing all these banners, and celebrations, and I wanted to shout, ‘My father did this.’ But I couldn’t tell anyone.”

Mao was veritably smitten with missiles and had openly marveled at Sputnik. Khrushchev, eager to bring the Chinese back into Moscow’s fold, had promised Mao missile technology, starting with the R-2, which was to be transferred in 1958. (The Chinese, in turn, would transfer the technology to their client states, and in time the R-2’s DNA would figure in virtually all future generations of Asian missiles.) “Soviets Orbit Second Artificial Moon; Communist Dog in Space,” screamed the headlines on the morning of Monday, November 4, 1957, as Americans awoke to another media riot and fresh rounds of recriminations.“What next?” demanded the New York Herald Tribune incredulously. “A Man on the Moon?” “Moscow Mission to Mars in Near Future?” the Washington Star speculated, its editorial dripping with defeat and resignation. “Shoot the Moon, Ike,” urged the feistier Pittsburgh Press, suggesting defiantly that the White House blow the offending Soviet satellite to smithereens.” CHAPTER 10 YOU HAVE REACHED. 

Epilogue “When told that Explorer was in orbit, Nikita Khrushchev reportedly shrugged. The race, he well knew, would no longer be so one-sided, now that a sleeping giant had been roused; and for the Soviet Union, it would be a contest of diminishing returns. But it did not matter. Moscow had already scored its biggest gains by the time Juno soared into space, and those all-important early victories could never be pushed aside. In the eyes of the world, Sputnik made the Soviet Union a genuine superpower and America’s equal, and this new status would persist regardless of whose future rockets flew farther, faster, or higher. The triumph was psychological and irreversible, and would endure until the Soviet Union itself disappeared into the dustbin of history one wintry day in 1991. Then, just as swiftly, Moscow’s international image would revert to its pre-Sputnik reputation as a brutish and backward land. Russia’s dominance of the space race did not peak in 1958. Moscow was able to hold its lead for another three years, culminating with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s ride into orbit atop an R-7 on April 12, 1961. But by then the element of surprise was gone. America had learned not to underestimate its Communist adversary, and Washington had embarked on its own ambitious and long-term space program. The shock value was therefore not the same as with Sputnik, though the historical significance of Gagarin’s flight was probably far greater and did indeed resonate throughout the rest of the world, particularly in developing countries.

“The Soviet Union and Khrushchev, however, paid a steep military price for the early space triumphs. The R-7, for all its success as a heavy-lift vehicle and propaganda tool, was a failure as an ICBM. “It represented only a symbolic counter threat to the United States,” Khrushchev later conceded, and was “reliable neither as a defensive nor offensive weapon.” The very qualities that made it so adept at hurling large payloads into orbit rendered it almost useless as a fast-strike strategic weapon. It was just too big and unwieldy for war. It couldn’t be hidden in silos, moved on mobile launchers, or adequately protected. It took too long to fuel, and the huge infrastructure it required made too inviting a target. Khrushchev exaggerated somewhat when he boasted that his factories would roll out R-7s like sausages. In the end, only seven were ever deployed, and only four launchpads were built capable of handling the mammoth missile, which meant that Moscow could realistically depend on getting off only four shots in a first-strike scenario. If the United States attacked first, only one or two of the big missiles might be fired in time. “Or possibly none. Whichever the case, the R-7 would not keep America at bay. As a security shield, it was a failure. Ultimately, the R-7 cost Russia its missile lead because Moscow had to go back to the drawing board to develop an entirely new ICBM. In that regard, Korolev’s ploy to distract Khrushchev from the R-7’s failings by launching satellites worked all too well. By the time the Soviet leader fully realized that he did not have a reliable intercontinental rocket, the United States was pumping billions of dollars into its neglected missile programs because of the Sputnik scare, rapidly making up the lost ground. Khrushchev’s bluff ended up backfiring. When Dwight Eisenhower left office in January 1961, the United States had 160 operational Atlas ICBMs and nearly one hundred Thor and Jupiter

IRBMs stationed in Europe to Moscow’s meager reserve of four vulnerable R-7s. Ironically, the additional Jupiters that were produced to mollify Lyndon Johnson and the jittery American public after the Sputnik scare now haunted Washington. “It would have been better to dump them in the sea than dump them on our allies,” Ike later commented. But the need to find a home for the superfluous missiles preoccupied Washington, exasperating superpower tensions. Great Britain had the Thors, which could hit only the Warsaw Pact countries and the westernmost parts of European Russia. But no frontline NATO allies wanted the Jupiters. In the end, Italy and Turkey reluctantly agreed to accept them in late 1959, and since they were geographically closer to Soviet borders, the Kremlin reacted furiously. “How would you like it if we had bases in Mexico and Canada?” fumed Khrushchev, angrily denouncing the deployment.” “Tensions escalated further still, six months later, on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 was finally shot down over Soviet territory. Eisenhower, who was playing golf that day, as he had on the day of the very first U-2 mission four years earlier, would initially deny the incident, presuming that the pilot was dead and that the fragile aircraft had disintegrated, leaving little incriminating evidence. But as the Soviets kept pressing the issue, on May 5 the State Department would be forced to concede that a “civilian pilot of a weather-research plane” had indeed experienced problems with his oxygen supply over Turkey. “It is entirely possible that having a failure in the oxygen equipment, which would result in the pilot losing consciousness,” the statement coyly reasoned, “the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.” A few days later, Washington would be further forced to eat its words when a beaming Khrushchev. The incident caught Eisenhower in the devastatingly embarrassing lie that he had long predicted and feared, and spelled the end of manned reconnaissance flights into Russia. But just a few months later, on the same day that a Moscow court convicted Francis Gary Powers of spying, a new era of robotic, outer-space espionage began. On August 19, 1960, Richard Bissell’s spy satellite successfully jettisoned its first batch of photographs of Soviet territory. Corona’s film canister reentered the atmosphere off the shores of Hawaii, deployed its parachute, and was snagged in midair at 8,500 feet by grappling hooks attached to the front of a C-119 military plane. And yet Bissell’s triumph would be short-lived, as he was undone by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the following year. Begun under Eisenhower and executed under the new Kennedy administration, the botched attempt to topple the Cuban president Fidel Castro would prove even more embarrassing than the U-2 shoot-down. As the failed mission’s architect and primary planner, Bissell—along with his patron and boss, Allen Dulles—would be forced out by the newly elected president, who would soon find himself baptized by rocket fire and international crisis.”

“Those friggin missiles,” as John F. Kennedy derisively referred to the Jupiters, finally caused Khrushchev to snap when they became operational in Turkey in late 1961. From their Turkish bases, they could hit military installations in the heart of the Soviet Union, effectively restoring the very same strategic imbalance that had prompted Moscow to build rockets in the first place. The net result was the Cuban missile crisis.” As it turned out, it would be a U-2, and not the top-secret Corona, that snapped the incriminating photographs of Soviet launchpad preparations on Castro’s island that would spark the most dangerous showdown of the cold war. For Khrushchev, the attempt to station intermediate-range rockets on Cuban soil in the autumn of 1962 was a desperate gambit to redress the R-7’s shortcomings. By placing smaller missiles within striking distance of America’s shores, he sought to buy time for Yangel’s R-16 to finish trials and go into mass production. The Soviet military, by then, had long switched its allegiance from Korolev’s R-7 to rival missile designs, but the R-16 had suffered a series of developmental setbacks, including a catastrophic explosion of Glushko’s acid propellant that claimed the lives of Marshal Nedelin and 112 other Soviet rocket scientists in 1960, when Nedelin disregarded Glushko’s advice and ordered repairs performed on a fully fueled missile without draining it first. Only after the R-16 was fully ready, Khrushchev reasoned, would the balance of power be restored and security reestablished. To achieve that balance, he would risk confrontation.