This New Ocean Read online

  “Painstakingly and exhaustively lays out the history of the human quest for space.… Provides much new information from the Russian side of the race, having been given unprecendented access to records there.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Arguably the most comprehensive history of rocketry and space travel ever.”

  —Booklist

  “Burrows brings to the effort a style that is by turns eloquent, witty, sardonic, and simple. He is never dull, not even when describing complicated technology or bureaucratic mucking about. This New Ocean is a dandy piece of writing. And it tells a dandy tale.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “An incisive and lucid account of humanity’s leap into space … an illuminating study of Cold War machinations.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “An encyclopedic history of space exploration by an insider and veteran reporter who has lost nothing in his enthusiasm and respect for what humankind has wrought.… Likely to be the bible for those tracking a unique period in Earth history—the ‘first’ space age.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This New Ocean is a valued resource for the reader fascinated by the topic of spaceflight and eager to catch up as the second age gets under way.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A very solid and weighty tome detailing our fascination with space and the great beyond.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Displays a refreshing wit and a somewhat ironic attitude about humanity’s struggle to escape the confines of Planet Earth. This is no puff piece from NASA.… Frustration, failure, tragedy, and bitter competition are intertwined in this story with the glorious moments when something worked as planned. My guess is that readers will be amazed, as I was, by the fact that there is so much to learn about the story of space exploration, and by the sheer number and quality of people who have contributed so far.”

  —Sunday Republican (Springfield, MA)

  “Distinguished by its comprehensiveness—the author’s extensive research is obvious—and its evenhandedness … likely to stand as a worthy history of our ‘first space age’ well into our second.”

  —Savannah Morning News

  ALSO BY WILLIAM E. BURROWS

  Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World (with Robert Windrem)

  Exploring Space: Voyages in the Solar System and Beyond

  Mission to Deep Space: Voyager’s Journey of Discovery

  Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security

  On Reporting the News

  Vigilante

  Richthofen

  1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  TITLE PAGE ILLUSTRATION: In this hypothetical future scene, a camera-carrying astronaut in a Manned Maneuvering Unit is on a maintenance visit to the Hubble Space Telescope. (To Extend Our Vision, by Tom Newsom, NASA Art Program)

  Copyright © 1998 by William E. Burrows

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1998.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  AMERICAN ASTRONAUTICAL SOCIETY: Excerpts from History of Rockets and Astronautics. This material was originally presented at the 17th History Symposium of the International Academy of Astronautics, Budapest, Hungary, 1983, and was originally published in the AAS publication History of Rocketry and Astronautics, American Astronautical Society History Series, vol. 12, John L. Sloop, editor, pp. 70–71, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by American Astronautical Society. This material is reprinted here by permission of the AAS.

  Aviation Week & Space Technology: Excerpt from the editorial “Voyager the Intrepid” from the August 28, 1989, issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology. Reprinted by permission of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

  FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, INC. AND INTERNATIONAL CREATIVE MANAGEMENT: Excerpts from The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Copyright © 1979 by Tom Wolfe. Rights in the British Commonwealth are controlled by International Creative Management. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and International Creative Management.

  MRS. MILDRED K. LEHMAN: Excerpts from This High Man: The Life of Robert H. Goddard by Milton Lehman [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1963 (hardcover) and New York: Da Capo Press, 1988 (paperback)]. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Mildred K. Lehman.

  THE MCGRAW-HILL COMPANIES: Excerpts from The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, edited by Esther Goddard and Edward Pendray (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1970). Copyright © 1970. Reprinted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

  WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY, INC.: Poem from pages 57–58 of A Baker’s Nickel by William Cohen. Copyright © 1986 by William Cohen. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Company, Inc.

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY: Excerpt from “Columbia’s Landing Closes a Circle” by Tom Wolfe from the October 1981 issue (vol. 160, no. 4, p. 474) of National Geographic. Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Society.

  The New York Times: Excerpt from “The New Soviet Arms Build-up in Space” by Robert Jastrow (October 3, 1982). Copyright © 1982 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burrows, William E.

  This new ocean: the story of the first space age/William E. Burrows.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76548-2

  1. Outer space—Exploration. 2. Astronautics. I. Title.

  QB500.262.B87 1998

  629.4—dc21 98-3252

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  To Galileo, Magister of the glass eye.

  Thanks for everything.

  Foreword

  Carl Sagan once rhapsodized about having lived at the perfect time. If he had been born fifty years earlier, the eloquent astronomer explained, he would have missed planetary exploration entirely because it would have been only “figments of the speculative imagination.” Born fifty years later, he would have been just as unlucky because he would have missed the thrill of the beginning of travel to other worlds.

  “In all the history of mankind there will be only one generation which will be the first to explore the solar system, one generation for which, in childhood the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night, and for which in old age the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration,” Sagan said in a lecture in 1970. “There will be a time in our future history when the solar system will be explored and inhabited by men who will be looking outward toward the first trip to the stars. To them and to all who come after us, the present moment will be a pivotal instant in the history of mankind.”

  Sagan spoke for many, including myself, who believe that along with the inevitable afflictions of advancing age comes the infinitely greater reward of having been privileged to witness one of the truly great and lasting human endeavors: the beginning of the migration to space.

  Sagan’s words came back to me on the evening of May 15, 1997, as I sat in the darkened IMAX auditorium of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and watched American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, standing side by side under a spotlight, being heartily applauded—congratulated—by eight hundred people who knew they had bravely led humanity off the planet for the first time in what no one in the room doubted was the beginning of the same kind of en
dless odyssey that drives other creatures on Earth to their own immense journeys. Everyone who was there that night knew that they were sharing a historic moment. The first space age was over. The second was under way.

  There were Glenn and Titov, Shepard and Leonov, Stafford and Shatalov, Lucid, Popovich, Conrad, and others who, with many in the audience and countless others who were not there, had dueled in space and in the process accomplished the beginning. The occasion was a formal dinner that launched a permanent exhibition, called “Space Race,” which traced four decades of competition and some cooperation between the two superpowers. That race did nothing less than open a new dimension of infinite size and endless wonder for all mankind. “We all turn out to be cosmonauts,” said Glenn, the gracious master of ceremonies and a U.S. senator, “and Earth is our spaceship.” It was like being in Barcelona when Columbus returned from his first expedition to the New World.

  I went back to the museum the next morning, back to the spot where I had stood in black tie the night before, watching as Glenn showed his wife the silvery space suit he wore when he made his historic flight in Friendship 7 in February 1962. Schoolchildren whose parents hadn’t even been alive when Glenn became the first American to fly an orbit around the world (in the process scoring a propaganda victory on the order of Doolittle’s brazen raid from the Hornet to Tokyo in 1942) took a cursory look at the old relic and raced on, as they always do. Gagarin’s orange space suit was beside Glenn’s. The helmets were there, too, and so were Wernher von Braun’s and Sergei Korolyov’s slide rules, both of them made by the same German company, which figured. There was Kennedy being quoted by U.S. News & World Report as saying that “We are behind” the Communists in the race to space. There were scale models of the huge Saturn 5 Moon rocket and the Soviet Union’s ill-fated N-1 counterpart. And there, too, was a once-top-secret spy satellite picture shot from more than a hundred miles up that clearly showed a line of ants in Red Square waiting to enter the Lenin Mausoleum to pay their respects to the great Bolshevik. Diary entries by Vasily Mishin, the chief designer who succeeded Korolyov and who therefore lost the race to the Moon, were displayed, too.

  For the kids who were swarming around me that morning, the flights of Friendship 7 and Apollo 11 might as well have been John Cabot’s voyage in the Matthew or Admiral Byrd’s trek to Antarctica. They were ancient history, dead as the Peloponnesian War and Trafalgar. But I had been around even before the cold war. So I remembered Sputnik and the shock and humiliation that swept the country as one American rocket after another turned into a greasy fireball down in Florida. I was seven days into my first newspaper job as a clerk on the Foreign Desk of The New York Times when the Cuban missile crisis erupted and the possibility of my premature demise hung in the air like the sword of Damocles. Seven years later, I was a reporter who covered part of the Apollo story and who, in any case, witnessed the momentous process that led to the historic landing. Like Sagan and most of the rest of cognizant humanity, I actually got to watch the first travelers from my planet set foot on another world in living black and white. And I remember it vividly to this day. It lives in my memory, not as a story that was told to me or as words on paper, but as a series of real events that I witnessed.

  I was also privileged to be alive and paying attention when NASA was born, when the aerospace industry walked off a cliff after the Moon was abandoned, when the shuttle and the station were hammered into the space program’s bedrock, when Reaganomics nearly killed solar system exploration, when Voyager 2 made it to Neptune against all odds, when Galileo reported that it had found ice water, possibly containing life, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, when the Hubble Space Telescope sent back pictures of stars being born billions of years ago in gas clouds that were trillions of years high, and when little Sojourner romped around Mars.

  I came to understand, at firsthand and up close, that however the politicians postured and however many people got killed in wars in Asia and Africa and while trying desperately to make it over the Berlin Wall, the cold war was an unmitigated blessing for both sides’ rocketeers and the rest of the space fraternity because they fed off and were nourished by the competition. Rockets were almost always developed for the wrong reason during the cold war. But they were developed. And most important of all, four trips to Russia after the war and some reflection about what I had witnessed during those years convinced me that there were startling similarities, parallels, not only between the two programs, but between the individuals who propelled them. I learned that those who led the greatest odyssey in history were ultimately indivisible. They were simply earthlings. Seen from that perspective—from a vantage point that includes a visceral feeling for the compulsion to reach ever higher, a clear recollection of how it was finally realized, and some understanding of the powerful political currents that energized it—the journey to space becomes a collective human enterprise that I believe is leading to a planetary civilization and the spread of the human seed to other places.

  That’s what struck me at the National Air and Space Museum that night: eight hundred people had come together to celebrate a perfect time. This is the story of how that time happened.

  Stamford, Connecticut

  January 20, 1998

  Acknowledgments

  What follows is the result of a collaborative effort between me and a couple of hundred other people over the course of almost three decades. I am proud to say that many of them—scientists, engineers, and scribes—have become my friends over the long course of this story. They are American and Russian, military and civilian, and they are the best in the world at what they do. Knowing them, including those who are no longer here, has enhanced my life beyond measure.

  There are some 175 taped interviews alone, going back to Margaret Mead in May 1969, each representing a generosity with time that was taken from crowded schedules. Some of the interviews went directly into this book; others provided a wider background from which it grew.

  Jeffrey T. Richelson, undoubtedly the country’s leading civilian expert in overhead reconnaissance and other technical intelligence collection and a very generous individual, voluntarily supplied a stream—no, a mountain—of documents relating to military intelligence operations for more than a decade. More recently, so has Dwayne A. Day, the bright, energetic military space analyst at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Things just kept coming in the mail from the two of them, like presents from guiding angels.

  Four others have been my wise men and muses for a decade or more, guiding me through the technical and political shoals whenever they were called. Bruce Murray, Caltech geologist, former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director, and as astute an observer of space culture as there is, shared his valuable insights many times and became an unwitting and valuable guru. So did Mert Davies at RAND, a true American hero for his role in the creation of the nation’s space reconnaissance capability, who is as endlessly generous as he is congenial. At a time in his life when most people would have headed for retirement, Mert headed for Jupiter on the Galileo mission and is still there. “Robert,” the Third Man, has led me through a series of tutorials on intelligence from the political, philosophical, and occasionally technical standpoints since the Deep Black days. They have been invaluable for my understanding of the culture of intelligence collecting, processing, and use. Now he is my respected friend. Mac Bundy was always there, too, sometimes filling in historical detail, other times pointing me in new directions, and still others just cheerfully massaging ideas and poking at the world over lunch at our common establishment. He is missed. These four trusty horsemen have my deepest, lasting gratitude.

  Saunders B. Kramer, the ubiquitous presence in the U.S. space program and one of the true experts on the subject of this book, is in a class by himself. He is that rare individual whose broad technical knowledge is leavened with a soaring imagination, a wonderful sense of humor, daunting wisdom, and short patience for knaves and buffoons. His promptly reading a manuscript I only
half jokingly said I couldn’t pick up, and then returning a pile of corrections, additions, and helpful suggestions, greatly enhanced this work. Similarly, Dave Morrison, the director of space at NASA’s Ames Research Center, yet again volunteered his services and took on the task of scrutinizing the two chapters that concentrate on solar system exploration, as he did with all of Exploring Space. A hint of what my astronomer and friend knows about the subject can be gleaned in the sources section. Gratitude does not express my lasting debt to these wise and pervasively knowledgeable gentlemen. And as usual, any mistakes that made it past them belong to me alone.

  I also deeply appreciate the generosity of many others who shared their time, energy, and spirit. As innumerable science writers and JPL scientists and engineers know, the legendary Jurrie van der Woude was always there. He has long provided material I did not know I needed with the unfailing dry humor for which he is widely loved and respected. Like his friend Mert Davies, Jurrie’s vocabulary does not contain the word “no.” And like Mert, he is a valued friend. So is Brenda Forman, who loosed me on an innocent U.S. Space Foundation in 1992, and has given me the benefit of her extensive knowledge of spaceworld, dazzling intelligence, and guileless ethic. I will always be grateful to Pete Scoville, who is no longer here, for grounding me in space reconnaissance (if I can put it that way); to Nick Johnson, a former senior analyst of the Soviet space program and now NASA’s orbital debris expert, for doing the same; and to Sergei Khrushchev for providing a movable feast in Bodø, Oslo, and Providence on what it was like on the other side of the curtain. Grigori S. Khozin did the same in Moscow. Gresha also put in many hours setting up interviews there, being my faithful native guide from Kaluga to Star Town, and helping me navigate the Leninsky Prospekt bus route and Metro. Meanwhile, his wife, Tanya, kept my body and soul together with the infinite inventiveness that is the hallmark of the Russian cook.