Devil’s Venom
April 1, 1960
A Soviet colonel arrived at Plesetsk Cosmodrome just above the Arctic Circle in a large American K-car. He wore civilian clothes, smoked German cigarettes and stayed mostly in the shadows. The base manifest identified him by the enigmatic letters SP, but the ranking officer, Marshal Nedelin, addressed him simply as Chief. His real name was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the anonymous Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, and he was here to witness what had become a very familiar sight in the Soviet Union these days – a rocket launch. The Chief stood behind the reinforced concrete bunker with the collar of his blue overcoat up and the brim of his brown fedora down, whether to protect himself from the frigid air or to conceal his features nobody really knew. Patiently and silently, he waited for the wingless monolith on the launch pad to fire up into the night.
“It is precisely this sort of delay which will cause us to fall behind the Americans,” Marshal Nedelin said abruptly and then swore. He pulled out his silver pocket watch, a sixty-year-old relic from Russia’s Tsarist past, and swore again. It wasn’t a very fierce curse or easily translatable, something about baby birds of questionable parentage and loose virtue. The Chief, who had worked among rocket mechanics, political prisoners and hotshot air force pilots most of his life, almost laughed. Fortunately, he caught himself in time. To laugh at a major general and a senior member of the Communist Party was political suicide, more certain than drawing a mustache on Premier Khrushchev’s portrait in Red Square.
“We cannot allow ourselves to become complacent, to rest upon the success of our past endeavors. You may have put Sputnik into space, Colonel, but last year, the Americans had two suborbital launches with live subjects.”
“Monkeys,” the Chief clarified but Nedelin did not hear him.
“And the Atlas Rocket - - ”
“Has not yet had a successful launch.”
“But it is only a matter of time.” Nedelin fumed, the Chief’s sanguine demeanor only serving to add fuel to the flames. “Mark my words, Colonel, the Americans are on the verge of sending a Mercury astronaut into space.”
The Chief assumed a grim expression. “Delays are necessary.”
“You have no idea what pressures I’m under. Premier Khrushchev – ”
“Premier Khrushchev suffers delays poorly,” the Chief interrupted, his words bordering on treason. “But he suffers failure not at all. Besides, it is not the R-16 that I am here to see.”
“No? Then what?”
“It is the test pilot,” the Chief said simply.
As if on cue, the preliminary launch warning sounded over the loudspeakers and a man in a bright orange flight suit emerged from the distant blockhouse. He was not an unusual man at first glance. He had a thin face, for a Russian, wavy brown hair and a faint scar on his otherwise attractive chin. He stood about even with the busy flight technicians who flanked him on either side carrying his life support equipment. But there was an air of confidence in his brown eyes that distinguished him from any other man on the tarmac. His was the look of the master bullfighter or the lion tamer entering the ring – the consummate professional. He was a man marked for death, yet there was no apparent fear at the prospect of riding a fireball into the stratosphere. He strode casually towards the awaiting rocket, and the milling engineers, soldiers and technicians parted in awe. He stopped before the gantry to give his final salute and only the Chief noticed as he made a very quick movement with his left hand to touch something under his collar. And then he was up the gantry elevator and into the capsule.
Korolev turned back to Nedelin. “I would like to talk to him . . . if he survives.” Nedelin was appalled by the Chief’s pessimistic attitude, but Korolev merely shrugged. “The R-16 is not my rocket. General Yangel has a new design team at NII-88, mostly Germans. They abandoned my R-7 Semyorka booster in favor of a modified V-2 rocket design.” Korolev had often wondered where Yangel had really found his design for the R-16. It was quite a departure from the V-2 rockets that they had captured from Germany after the war and unlike anything they had worked on together. Korolev couldn’t imagine that Yangel was smart enough to come up with a new idea on his own, at least not one that worked. So where did the R-16 come from? “It’s sleek, radical and revolutionary,” Korolev continued, “but highly unstable.” The Chief lifted his fedora and looked directly at Nedelin with his cold, gray eyes. “They’re using devil’s venom.”
Nedelin raised an eyebrow, but did not respond.
Devil’s venom, otherwise known as nitric acid hydrazine, was a propellant so volatile that it burned whatever it touched and ate the very metal that housed it. Many attempts had been made to safely harness the lethal rocket fuel, but sooner or later they all ended in disaster.
“You know those German engineers,” Korolev continued casually. “They’re all so convinced that their alternative fuels will provide more thrust. I prefer more conventional approaches, small improvements on tried and tested designs. I find we go through fewer test pilots that way. But I have been over-ruled on this one. It is out of my hands.”
Nedelin was tempted to argue with the vaunted Russian rocket scientist. After all, as Marshal of Artillery, it was his decision to turn the manned-flight program over to General Yangel. It wasn’t that he doubted the Chief Designer’s genius. After all, this was the man that had put Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space. But Nedelin was an impatient man, nervous of his superiors, and especially the Americans. He was convinced that Wernher von Braun, Korolev's opposite number in America, was about to send a man into space. Von Braun was on the verge of designing functional ICBM’s sixteen years ago. Who knows what he could have accomplished by now with the almost unlimited resources of the United States? Certainly more than the cautious and secretive Russian engineers like SP Korolev.
Marshal Nedelin was about to make a bold statement to this effect when white steam billowed from the R-16’s starter rockets and the final countdown began. Nedelin and the Chief slipped on their protective goggles and all conversation ceased. Nedelin wanted very much for Yangel’s rocket to succeed, not so much for the life of the brave test pilot, but to prove that the Chief Designer’s delays were unnecessary. Hadn’t the Soviet Union already had countless successful rocket launches? If they could put a dog in the nosecone of a rocket and launch it into space, surely they could do the same thing with a man. It did not concern him too much that they had not yet found a safe and reliable way to bring the dogs back alive. Such details were best left to lesser men.
The ground shook as the massive first stage engine ignited and condensation crystals cascaded down from the metallic cylindrical body in a shower of white. Billowing clouds of smoke filled the million-square-foot stadium as the R-16 rose slowly under its powerful rocket to a height of nearly a thousand feet. Nedelin opened his mouth to congratulate himself on his wisdom and foresight when the powerful rocket veered slowly to the horizontal and exploded in a brilliant fireball like the fireworks on May Day. Moments later, the stars above were obscured by an impenetrable wall of black smoke. The air was thick with the smell of burned rocket fuel.
Nedelin felt robbed of his opportunity to make his point and then suddenly remembered the Chief’s unfortunate test pilot. “I’m afraid, SP, that you have just lost another future cosmonaut,” Nedelin gloated.
The Chief rubbed his chin thoughtfully, but it was difficult to read the expression on his grim, intelligent face.