Golden Years
There were glasses raised in jubilaon in Moscow and drained in frustraon in Washington on February 3rd 1966, when the Soviets demonstrated that they were well ahead in the space race. They had been ahead from the beginning, of course: Sputnik 1, the first man‐made satellite, blasted off on October 4th 1957, to be followed by Sputnik 2 a month later, whereas the Americans couldn’t launch Explorer 1 unl January 31st 1958. On April 12th 1961 Yuri Gagarin pipped Alan Shepherd by only 23 days to be the first man in space and the Soviets rubbed it in by being the first to orbit the earth, having the first woman in space and compleng the first spacewalk. Now they were ahead in the race for the Moon, too, the race that President Kennedy had declared that America must win within the decade. But aer a flawless launch and three‐ day flight, Luna 9 touched down gently on the rocky floor of Oceanus Procellarum, extended its camera array, and started making a complete panorama of its surroundings. Even the fact that Jodrell Bank intercepted the signals and the Daily Express published the pictures before Pravda could didn’t spoil the party. It was the first successful rocket‐assisted controlled landing on the Moon, and the extent of the Soviet lead was only confirmed on February 21st when the American probe Ranger 8 crashed; but the lead was less solid than it
M 50 Y A by Ted Bruning
seemed and it evaporated on February 26th with America’s first successful Saturn rocket launch. Actually, the Americans had had the lead all along but didn’t know it. Aer the war they had more or less kidnapped Germany’s V2 team and its director, Werner von Braun, but for five years the Germans were only allowed to supervise the compleon of captured V2s and train the Americans in their use. In 1950 the military sacked von Braun and packed him off to the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama where he could dream his intergalacc dreams in peace while the US Navy worked on its main project, the Vanguard missile launch vehicle, a task in which it failed. Only when Sputnik was launched did Washington realise that Moscow had a viable missile delivery system and it didn’t. Then someone remembered that maybe von Braun had something the military could use? He had. His Redstone rocket was originally intended as the launcher for Explorer, but in 1955 Eisenhower had decided to use Vanguard instead. Now the military turned back to Redstone. Explorer was hasly adapted to fit its new launcher, and the US was back in the game. So was von Braun; Vanguard was scrapped and the development dollars went his way instead. His giant Saturn rocket that would take America to the Moon had its first launch only weeks aer the triumph of Luna 9. Meanwhile the Russians were dividing their resources between two new launch vehicles, N1 and Proton. But N1’s designer, Sergei Korolev, died suddenly in January 1966 and the project faltered. Proton wasn’t ready either and when Apollo 8 became the first manned lunar orbiter on Christmas Eve 1968, the heart went out of the Russian effort and aer four failed aempts to launch N1 they gave up. The Soviet moon‐shot was suspended in 1974 – two years aer the last American had walked on the Moon – and scrapped in 1976.
Please menon The Lymington Directory when responding to adversements 59
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