[FPSPACE] Book summary - Pervushin on (pre)history of space age

[William C. Keel]

Here I come again, a few weeks after getting a bit of reaction by posting
a summary of the second volume of Anton Pervushin's _Bitva za Zvezdy_.
Here's a summary of volume 1, speeded along by a couple of cloudy
nights at Kitt Peak and fortunately finished just before our classes statr
for the fall. Once again, I shamelessly stress material that is new
to me or puts familiar events in a different light.

Bitva za Zvezdy, tom 1: Raketnye Sistemy Dokosmicheskoi Ery
(Battle for the Stars: Rocket systems before the space age)
subtitle page Cosmonautics in the pre-space age
2003, AST (Moscow) (www.ast.ru), ISBN 5-17-015662-6

__________________________________________________________________________

Introduction - he comes clean on his particular interest in the projects
that never made it to metal, illustrating the point by way of a bit of
alternative history:

USSR orbits "Sputnik" in 1957. World press yawns, seeing it as simply a
response to US Orbiter of 1956. Cognoscento note that it is much larger,
carries biological specimens.	Korolev follows with actual Sputnik 1
and openly discussed these plans beforehand. It is clearly a prototype
spaceplane with space for a pilot.Eisenhower counsels caution, sets meetings
and lays out a decade plan, trying to restrain public opinion. Lyndon
Johnson pushes for a faster program, including Dyna-Soar. Lavochkin 
announces a booster - Pobeda - based on an ICBM - which can launch
a winged spacecraft fromanywhere on Earth. Vladimir Ilyushin becomes the
first man in orbit in 1959, in the 5-ton Krasnaya Zvezda spacecraft.
Overshoots landing sote by 1000 km. Eisenhower publicly announces
commitement to Dyna-Soar. Meanwhile Ilyushin's world tour causes a global
sensation. Six more Vostok booster flights follow in 1959-60. One cosmonaut
is lost on re-entry; a second, Sergei Shiborin, dies when retrofire
fails and his spacecdraft remains in orbit.
USSR showers European press with information and plans, wielding great
political influence. Nixon elected in 1960; the space rac isn't a major
campaign issue. USSR announces a new kind
of armed force, tactical space forces as well as nuclear-armed satellites
in high orbit. As a show of force, 15 such military spaceplanes are
launched , maneuvering to make clear the potential of targeting New York.
Penkovski provides details on the system, executed for treason.

US administration panics. Nixon personally pushes Dyna-Soar.
1961 - Cuban fiasco as contras are repulsed. USSR seriusly damages
carrier Enterprise with conventional space-based weapons. Their
trajectories do not allow determination of a point of origin.
Nixon gives a speech on May 25, 1961, arguing in familiar words for
the importajce of space to the US. Commits to a lunar progtram.
UN discusses treaty on outer space, derailed by US/USSR maneuvers.
This leaves territorial claims possible.
1966 - Gemini 2 approaches Karansnaya Zvezda 5, revered by USSR as a hero's
tomb, interested in intelligence value. This begins the Lunar War,
as ity is foired on by sacepanes iwth Nudelmann cannon. Gemini 2 is
destroyed. US attacks and overwhelms Soyuz-3 station in low equatorial
orbit. Sotka, B70, and Blackbord all used to launch small spaceplanes
as things heat up.
1969 - Nixon announces impending lunarmission. Meanwhile, Gagarin and
Leonov become first on Moon, declare it a soviet socialist republic.
Bases are established, USSR announces relocation of its strategic
deterrent to lunar surface.
Young US Communist Dennis Tito gains notoriety as first American to
work at Soviet Selena-1 base, becvomes as well known as Elvis, who
sings "Cosmonaut Love". NASA moves forward with LUNEX plan on its
own. USAF pushed "High Frontier" program, commencing with (failed)
Apollo-X mission to attack Soviet lunar assets.
President Johnson hopes to gain in next step, announcesw
NERVA mission to Mars. But again - Gagarin and Leonov ride what's
basically a pair of Salyuts there, proclaim anotherSSR.
Meanwhile, in the US, the Presidency is won in 1976 bu the candidate of
the Communist Party, Dennis Tito, and a new aera in world relations begins...

(it's way too dense for me to have done justice so tersely)
He notes that this whole scheme involves space systems that were
seriously proposed and designed).
__________________________________________________________________________

ch 1 - spaceships before the space age
Reviews early SF, especially from Russian authors. Loving details on how they
imagined the technology, with a uniforlmy drawn set of cross-sections and
views. Starts with discourse on where space begins, arguing that intent
is important in looking at plans and schemes. Says he traces ideas
more than names, but does bring up a slew of Russian writers I was
unfamiliar with.
Jules Verne and the Columbiad
Le Faure (?) and Graf's three space cannon novels

Cosmic slings (catapults)
Graffin's cosmic ballista
Andrei Platonov's 1926 lunar passenger projectile centrifugally launched

Aerostats and dirigibles (mentioned how little understood was extent of
our atmosphere).
Sokovnin's jet dirigible

Gravitational shields
Dumas, HG Wells
Alexander Bogdanov and his 1908 minus-material
Kurt Lasswitz's Martian polar stations

Light-powered craft
Boris Krasnogorskii's "On Ether Waves"

Electric craft
Radioactive propulsion

The emperor's rockets and Wan Hu
A short history of ancient/mediaeval rockets

Rocket-powered planes
Interplanetary rockets

(I seem to recall a story about Pushkin - the writer, not some sort of
artillery - witnessing a demonstration of military rockets being fired
from a submerged craft in a Russian river circa 1840, an invention which
was still sadly lacking any means to navigate underwater. Where is an
index when you need one, so I could be sure that's what was reported?)
__________________________________________________________________________

2. The Third Cosmic Reich
Grip of their engineers on the imagination illustrated by a tabloid
piece originally in English, but which seems to have real legs
in Russia:
"On April 2, 1991 (there are no chance dates in mythology) a
US Coast Guard cutter fished out of the Atlantic a downed space
capsule with a crew of three. Imagine their surprise to discover that
the crew were Luftwaffe officers who had left our planet 47 years
earlier at the height of World Ear II. The flight was undertaken 
on Hitler's direct orders, using a modified V-2. They spent all
47 years in suspended animation"
This attests to the fascination with the admitted technical prowess of
the Reich's engineers.

VfR, HermannOberth
Max Walse's rocket planes
Franz von Heft's rockets
Rocket-powered planes and Fritz von Opel's rocket glider
Frau im Mond
VfR to Raketenflugplatz
Peenemunde (it was here that I realized what the "Fau-2" mentioned
	here and there was, a phonetic expression of the German V-2)
V-1 and V-2 in test and in war
    A-3s were regularly recovered for reuse
Piloted rockets, rumors of a few launched A-9/10s based on mystery
	agents with radios killed in boats off US East Coast
V-3 long-range artillery
Heinkel experimental rocket planes (He-176)
Glider Institute rocket planes
Messerschmidt, Me-163 development
Competing rocket planes
	Arado E-348
	Bachem BP-20, which became the Natter
Saenger space bomber
Flying disks of the Third Reich
	circular-winged craft date at least to 1915 in US; in 1909,
	Anatoli Ufimtsev built (but never successfully flew) the Spheroplane 1/2.
	In Germany: Schreiver and Gabermol built model 1 ("winged wheel"), 
	with test flight in Feb 1941 near Prague. Model 2 ("vertical plane" or
	V-7), larger, space for two prone pilots, test flown 17 May 1944
	Reached 288 km/hr, near record, 200 horizontally. Another variant
	("Diskolyot") was built by the Chesko Morava factory, using
	Walter rocket engines. Model 3 (Bellontse disk) (Bellontse,
	Schriever, and Mite). Huge design, diameters 38 and 68 meters,
	to use 12 jet engines (probably Jumo-04 or BMW-003). Looks just
	like the C-57D or Jupiter II. a Describes first and last test
	flight on Feb 19, 1945. Claims 15 km altitude and 2200 mn/s
	after 3 minutes, and during flight it was maneuvering back and forth 
	The multimillion RM object was destroyed at war's end. In 1958,
	the engine builder Schauberger wrote that the model which had
	flown was destroyed by explosives experts. Mentions reported
	extremely-high-performance disk Haunebu 2, which resembled nothing
	so much as the Millennium Falcon.

"Alternative 1 - Nazis in space?" - concludes that any alternate history
in which the first in space were Nazis would be unrecognizably different
from ours, no matter what the UFOlogists say. (alright, stop that chortling
and humming tunes from Tom Lehrer in the back row!)
__________________________________________________________________________

ch. 4 - Rockets and rocket planes of Soviet Russia

USSR was already worried by mid-1930s about aerial bombardment, since existing
fighter planes could not reach even then-current bombing altitudes within
feasible warning times. Several groups worked at rocket-powered boost
gliders or rocket-boosted piston fighters. These projects were all,
as they say in this part of the US, snakebit.

The RNII winged rockets, with Korolev playing a key role, are described 
in great detail. The piloted RP-318 suffered an amazing series
of setbacks - above all, the arrest of key engineers during the
Stalinist terror.

Moving on to the BI-1 rocket interceptor, whose development was
interrupted by relocation of the factory and personnel beyond the
Urals, it was given a piloted flight test by Bakhchivandzhi in
May 1942, which was successful as a flight but ended with a flaming
plane after a landing-gear failure. Development continued, claiming 
the life of Bakhchivandzhi in 1943 (for which he was made Hero of the
Soviet Union 30 years later). Additional models (up to BI-7) were
built up to the end of the war, but the military situation gave
little need for the unique point-defense role of rocket interceptors
by that time. (Oddly enough, the final models were glide-tested being
dropped from a Lend-Lease B-25J). GIRD also developed a rocket interceptor,
the 302, which was developped through drop tests from a Tu-2 and B-25.

Attempts to boost aircraft performance continued with a rocket-assisted
bomber, the twin-engine Pe-2. Variants with rockets in the tail or
added to the wind engine pods were examined. Similar modifications were
tested on the La-7 fighter as well.

Ts-1 (or LL-1 flying laboratory) rocket plane. Verions with
forward and backsewpt wings were tested. Mikoyan's bureau enjoyed
some suucess with their I-270 (Zh-1) rocket interceptor, except
that by the time it performed satisfactorily, the Mig-15 had similar speed
and altitude and much greater endurance.

D-346 inherited from German scientists, was a sleek swept-wing vehicle
intended for supersonic flight. At various times, its glide tests
sued drops from a Ju-388, Tu-4, and B-29 (some kind of international
record). There's a photo under the starboard wing of what's described
as a B-29, although I certainly couldn't tell the difference from a Tu-4. 
This reached 950 km/hr, and may have gone supersonic during divs
in its final flights (1951).


Pervushin also muses about a difference in historical approach - in the USSR,
the way to the stars clearly began on wings.

Alternative 2 - the aerospace forces of Comrade Stalin?
Nope, way to many "ifs".

__________________________________________________________________________

ch. 5 - The race for leadership

The impact of Sputnik 1, East and West. Russian citizens now tend to see
this as a triumphal human achievement, forgetting that at the time
thre was a purely political spin. He quotes a Steven King novel attesting
to the impact in the West, and wonders whether the Americans' sense of
entitlement blinds them to reality, even to missing the areas in which
they didn't have to gloss over anything.

He makes what is either a grossly misleading generalization or an insightful
observation (perhaps both) about the reaction to SF tales of space flight,
claiming that while in the USSR fan clubs understood themselves to be
about literary criticism, in the US they were about dreaming of making the
unreal real. (Actually his spin on the US situation is less flattering
than that phrase, maybe more like deliberate confusion of fantasy with
reality).

Goddard's work, patents, and his striking lack of influence on US rocket
development in spite of having his name on a space flight center, medal,
and all over the history books. The role of what became JPL. WAC-Corporal
flights, Viking, Bumper. Vanguard and Explorer 1. He describes many of
these launches in Novosti Kosmonavtiki-level detail.
__________________________________________________________________________

ch. 6 - on the question of priority 

The first satellite, revised version. Eisenhower and the problem of
satellite overflight and national sovereignty (and why should he
worry about overflights after authorizing the U-2 program over the USSR?).
He certainly underestimated the impact of the first satellite on world
opinion - and so, for that matter, did the Soviet leadership.

So back in the USSR - the role of captured V-2 parts and their reconstruction 
on Korolev et al., as they were still struggling with rocket planes. This 
experience and a visit to postwar Germany redirected Korolev's interest to 
"pure" rockets. Ten years of Soviet rocket development, starting with the
V-2 analog R-1. The 1952 programs Geran' and Generator, which studied
the spread of radioactive materials by exploding R-2 warheads over
northeast Kazakhstan and studying the dispersal of liquid or pelletized
radioactive tracers.

The G-series rockets and their origins with the competing efforts by USSR 
and USA to gather in Germany the harvest of wartime technology. Korolev,
Glushko, and Chelomei are already important players.

Geophysical rockets in the USSR, 1949-1970. Those odd things on the sides of
the intermediate models must be the separable-in-flight instrument units.
One of these, a V-5A, reached a single-stage altitude record of 473 km
in February 1958.

Dogs were first (hmm, our black Lab seems to perk up his extensive ears
at that). Beginning, apparently, with a V-1V in 1951 carrying Dezik and Tsygan 
to 101 km and their parachute descent. Later flights woth the V-1D
tested high-altitude ejection and parachute descent. Some dogs were
flown multiple times (Otvazhnaya four times), and showed that their 
physiological reactions were less stressed on later flights. Belyanka 
and Pestraya reached 473 km, and were examined very closely with 
electrocardiograms and X-rays (today we can forget how little was known 
and how much was feared about physiological reactions to even brief 
journeys into space). In addition to dogs, they also flew rabbits,white rats,
and mice (which were especially used in reaction-time and response tests)
in the suborbital program.
 
The R-7 on the ground and in flight. Construction of the Baikonur facilities
as the R-7 was developed into an operational missile system. Satellites 
"Object D", PS-1, and PS-2, and Korolev's campaign to prepare and launch
one after Vanguard was announced. Pervushin reports that the September
1956 US launch in fact carried a satellite secretly but a third-stage
failure kept it from orbit. (Doesn't everyone else claim that it was
a dummy weight and was not intended as an orbital attempt??) In fact,
on the next page, he writes that it was unconnected with the US space
effort and was a purely military test of the Jupiter-C. (I'm confused).
The Soviet tradition of placing electronics in pressurized vessels
goes right back to PS-1 (whose launch also inaugurated the tradition of
satellite boosters giving the controllers quite enough glitches to worry 
about). Oddly enough, like the Soviet leadership, even the people of OKB-1
didn't realize at first what a strong resonance the launch would
produce worldwide, making space achievements, at least for a time, more
important than ICBMs. PS-2 carried Laika shortly thereafter, and
the "double" of object D made it the next year (after the original
was lost in a launch failure on April 28).

Alternative-3: The first American satellite.
Could the US have orbited the first satellite? He feels Eisenhower
made only one mistake, the huge one of not relying on von Braun's
talent and experience. In his view, the American sense of entitlement 
(that could lead to the Pentahon plan for "closed skies" by orbiting
myriads of metal shards to make satellites unworkable) also led to
a failure of imagination and perception. Still, the perceived economic
advantage of the US might have meant that Soviet reaction would have
been muted, but their first satellite might then have been "Object D".
Further reactions are sheer speculation - and it doesn't matter, since
in the real world the space age was announced to all the world by that
high-pitched call of "BEEP...BEEP...BEEP..."



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William C. Keel                                 205-348-1641 (office)
Physics and Astronomy                           205-348-5051 (fax)
Box 870324                                      205-348-5050 (dept.)
University of Alabama                           http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0324                       keel at bildad.astr.ua.edu
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