Space Race

The Battle to Rule the Heavens (text only edition)

Deborah Cadbury

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007388936
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the author of ‘Seven Wonders of the Industrial World’, the ebook edition of the TV tie-in charting the shocking but true story behind the space race – and the ruthless, brilliant scientists who fuelled it.

PART ONE

The Race for Secrets

‘It will take 30 hours to get to the moon and 24 hours to clear Russian customs officials there …’

BOB HOPE, 1959

CHAPTER ONE

‘The Black List’

In the mid-winter of 1945, the war in Europe had reached its final stages. Germany was crumbling under continued heavy Allied bombing. Cities were being obliterated, magnificent buildings returned to their original elements of so much stone, sand and lime. The massive Allied raids had demolished towns and cities on such a scale that Bomber Command was running out of significant targets. The attack on the Western Front was unrelenting, the dark shapes of Allied soldiers slowly advancing across occupied lands. The Rhine would soon be in Allied hands. From the east, with an unstoppable fury, the Soviets were approaching. In January 1945, the Red Army launched a massive offensive as 180 divisions overran Poland and East Prussia. Berlin was in their sights.

Right in the path of the advancing Soviets, at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, lay a hidden village housing some five thousand scientists and their families. Discreetly obscured by dense forests at the northern tip of the island of Usedom, it was here that Hitler’s ‘wonder weapons’ were being developed. The trees ended suddenly to reveal a chain-link fence and a series of checkpoints. At the local railway terminal a notice reminded passengers: ‘What you see, what you hear, when you leave, leave it here.’ Across a stretch of water known as the Peene River, a large village could be seen. It looked like an army barracks with regimented rows of well-built hostels. The sound and smell of the sea were never far away but remained invisible. About half a mile further on, hidden among the trees, was a scene from science fiction at the very cutting edge of technology, known as ‘Rocket City’.

The world’s largest rocket research facility was created by a young aristocrat named Wernher von Braun. At thirty-two, he was head of rocket development for the German army. A natural leader, he possessed the ‘confidence and looks of a film star – and knew it’, according to one contemporary account, although what people remembered most about him was his charm. He had a way of lifting the most ordinary of colleagues to a new appreciation of their worth. His organizational skills had turned Peenemünde into a modern annexe of German weaponry. However, very few people were allowed to see beyond the practical engineer, who dreamed not of destructive weaponry, but, improbably, of space. He was driven by the ambition of building a rocket that could achieve ‘the dream of centuries: to break free of the earth’s gravitational pull and go to the planets and beyond’. He envisaged space stations that would support whole colonies in space. ‘In time,’ he believed, ‘it would be possible to go to the moon, by rocket it is only 100 hours away.’ But in Hitler’s Germany he was forced to keep such visions to himself. These were dreams for the future – a future that was increasingly in doubt.

Hitler had pinned his last desperate hopes of saving the Third Reich on von Braun’s greatest achievement: a rocket known as the A-4. Even those working with von Braun were overawed on seeing this strange vehicle for the first time. In 1943, his technical assistant Dieter Huzel remembered being taken to a vast hangar which loomed above the trees. Once inside, the noise was deafening, a combination of overhead cranes, the whir of electric motors and the hiss of compressed gas. It took a second for Huzel’s eyes to adjust to the strong shafts of sunlight, which cut across the hangar from windows high in the far wall. ‘Suddenly I saw them – four fantastic shapes but a few feet away, strange and towering above us in the subdued light. They fitted the classic concept of a space ship, smooth and torpedo shaped…’ Painted a dull olive-green, standing 46 feet tall and capable of flying more than two hundred miles, the A-4 was the most powerful rocket in the world. ‘I just stood and stared, my mouth hanging open for an exclamation that never occurred. I could only think that they must be out of some science fiction film.’

Far removed from any fanciful notion of space exploration, for Hitler this rocket represented the ultimate weapon that could save the Third Reich and prove German superiority to the world. In July 1943, Wernher von Braun had been summoned to Wolfsschanze, the Führer’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in Rastenberg, East Prussia, to give a secret presentation. Walter Dornberger, the army general who ran rocket development at Peenemünde, had not seen Hitler since the beginning of the war and was ‘shocked’ at the change in him. The Führer entered the room looking aged and worn, stooping slightly as though carrying an invisible weight. Living in bunkers for much of the time had given his face the unnatural pallor of someone who spent his days in the dark. It was devoid of expression, seemingly uninterested in the proceedings, except for his eyes, which were worryingly alive, touching everything with quick glances.

Hitler’s original response to the rocket had initially hampered von Braun’s team. He had had a dream that no rocket could ever reach England, and simply refused to believe in the idea. Now, in the half-light, as he watched footage of the first successful launch of the A-4 shooting faster than the speed of sound over the Baltic Sea, his concentration became intense. With apparent satisfaction he took in an impression of the blond, blue-eyed von Braun, a perfect specimen of his ‘master race’ talking with uncontained enthusiasm as he outlined technical details of assembly, mobile launching facilities and testing. Here was the perfect terror weapon that could carry a 1-ton warhead, could be launched from any location and was undetectable on approach.

As von Braun finished his presentation, it was clear that Hitler had been greatly affected. His former listlessness vanished as he fired questions with increasing excitement. He had found the weapon that could win him the war. ‘Why could I not believe in the success of your work?’ he said to Dornberger. ‘Europe and the rest of the world will be too small to contain a war with such weapons. Humanity will not be able to endure it.’ His next demand was that the A-4 – soon renamed the V-2, or Vengeance Weapon 2 – should carry a warhead not of 1 ton, but 10 tons, and be mass-produced with output of rockets raised to 2000 a month. As though recharging that core of nervous energy that responded to ideas of destruction, he continued: ‘What I want is annihilation – an annihilating effect.’ Recklessly, he was to gamble his dwindling resources on experimental rocket science. ‘What encouragement to the home front when we attack the English with it!’ With its deadly warhead it would surely turn the tide of the war and ultimately allow a German victory.

Eighteen months later, this was looking less certain. With the Eastern Front collapsing, the Soviets liberated Warsaw on 17 January 1945. The Red Army swept across the country in little more than a week and reached the Oder. Berlin was only one hundred miles away. At Peenemünde, von Braun and his men could hear the steady barrage of the Soviet guns, increasing in volume as the wind changed, imparting a feeling of urgency. Outside, the streets teemed with the human flotsam and the debris of war as refugees fleeing the Red Army trudged through the freezing Baltic winter like some ragged army.

With the death of well over twenty-seven million Soviet citizens caught up in Hitler’s war, the Russian appetite for revenge could not be satisfied. Writers such as Ilya Ehrenburg, who drafted Soviet propaganda broadcasts and articles, constantly urged retaliation against German civilians, unchecked by Stalin. ‘We now understand that the Germans are not human,’ he raged. ‘Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you …’ As the Soviet army swept across Europe from the east, there were endless reports of brutality. In countless villages, houses were plundered and torched, civilians summarily shot. ‘The tales of horror were as constant and unvarying as the unending stream of pitiful humanity,’ wrote Dieter Huzel. ‘Pillaging, burning, wanton killing – and worst of all rape and murder of old women, mothers to be and young women.’ German civilians fled leaving villages abandoned with no attempt at defence against the Soviet onslaught.

Von Braun could hear the workforce of Peenemünde, the civilian engineers being trained in the use of rifles in the forlorn hope of defending the town before the great tidal wave of the Soviet army engulfed them. Any hope of trying to defend the town seemed futile – yet it was almost impossible to escape. The SS were trained in the brutal suppression of all opponents of the regime and were effectively in control of Germany. Roadblocks were being set up to catch deserters; even relatives of deserters, it was rumoured, could be sent to concentration camps. Some of von Braun’s engineers who had openly expressed their doubts about defending Peenemünde were now dead, their bodies strung up by piano wire and hanging stiffly from trees in the main street. They bore placards that read: ‘I was too cowardly to defend the homeland.’ Their SS murderers had left their bodies hanging as a warning to others.

Confronted with this perilous situation, von Braun feared for the loss of his staff and his life’s work. He was determined to find a way to evacuate his entire team to a relatively safer part of Germany, but the scale of such an operation could hardly be concealed from the SS. It would require the movement of thousands of workers as well as their families and truckloads of heavy equipment. There was also a treasure trove of documents: 65,000 technical drawings and blueprints alone had been required simply to bring the first V-2 from drawing board to test site. This included data from thousands of painstaking hours of trial and error testing, together with meticulous drawings of each component. There was nothing like this in the world. Whoever acquired these blueprints would inherit the cutting edge of rocket research. More important still, for von Braun the drawings of the A-4 – and its descendants the A-9 and A-10 – represented his vision of space flight. He had guarded these documents against sabotage, theft and air raids, and now he still hoped he could find a way of saving his work and his men.

He was confronted by several conflicting orders on how to cope with the advancing Red Army: from the local defence commander, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, the Ministry of Armaments, the army ordnance department in Berlin. Some directed von Braun and the rocket team to stay and fight to the death with the home guard ‘in defence of the holy soil of Pomerania’. Others ordered immediate evacuation. ‘I had ten orders on my desk,’ von Braun admitted to his team. ‘Five promised death by firing squad if we moved and five said I would be shot if we didn’t move.’

For Wernher von Braun the operation at Peenemünde represented the culmination of a vision that had started in childhood. His first experiments in rocketry began when he was a boy of twelve. With his younger brother, Magnus, he had created a glorified go-cart powered by six enormous skyrocket fireworks. Zooming down Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin in a haphazard course, it had frightened all the summer-frocked housewives before crashing into a grocer’s shop. His aristocratic parents, Baron Magnus von Braun and his wife Emmy, both from families that were very much guardians of tradition, were surprised at their son’s appetite for science. In the hope that he would stop firing his rockets among the tenant farmers on the family estate in Silesia and follow more gentlemanly pursuits, they bought him a telescope. It had the opposite effect, merely inflaming his interest. With it he explored the moon and wondered at the stars, new worlds that, one day, could be explored by rockets.

‘I was deeply disappointed by the sketchy information I could glean from my space gazing,’ he wrote later, perhaps frustrated by the small size of his telescope. Then one day he came across an essay ‘which showed how a certain Professor Hermann Oberth claimed it would be possible to fly to the moon and the planets on rockets. It seemed to me that this was a much better way of learning about our nearest planets than that offered by the telescope.’ Born in Transylvania, Hermann Oberth had studied mathematics and physics before he set out his startling vision of space travel in 1923 in his book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, in which he claimed it would one day be possible for rockets to carry men into space. Oberth’s ideas were subsequently incorporated into a popular 1929 film by Fritz Lang, Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon).

For the young von Braun – poring over Oberth’s studies showing the possibility of launching a satellite into the earth’s orbit or building a space station – it was a revelation. Here at last were the calculations that would allow humankind to defy gravity, and he was enraptured at the idea of flying to distant planets. Oberth described a ‘recoil rocket’ based on principles first defined by Isaac Newton in his third law of motion: for every action there must be a reaction of equal force but in the opposite direction. It is not unlike the firing of a bullet from a gun. When the trigger is squeezed, the bullet rushes out of the barrel creating a recoil which jolts the rifle butt back on the marksman’s shoulder. In a similar way, a rocket is like the barrel of a gun – and the gases ejected from the back are like the bullet creating a recoil which propels the rocket upwards. The power of the rocket can be measured in tons of recoil – or thrust. To achieve liftoff, the thrust must exceed the weight of the rocket. And just as a shell rapidly reaches a certain speed and then coasts through a curved path towards its target, so a rocket needs a considerable initial speed before it is carried by its own momentum. For the young von Braun the message was clear: gain enough speed and space could be within his grasp. He just needed a powerful enough engine.

By the time he was nineteen, von Braun had joined the Society for Space Travel based at the optimistically entitled Raketenflugplaz, or ‘Rocket Airport’. Here, in a disused army dump outside Berlin, a group of rocket enthusiasts met to experiment with rocket design. They developed small prototypes and attempted test firing. Oberth had argued that rather than solid-state fuels like gunpowder, which, once alight, burn uncontrollably, liquid fuels were the future. The flow of a liquid fuel to the engine can be turned on and off and regulated like a tap, allowing for more controlled combustion. He recommended alcohol or gasoline fuel combined with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. Von Braun and the other enthusiasts experimented with these ideas in their first rocket known as the Mirak, or ‘Minimum Rocket’.

The first flights were dogged by explosions or wildly erratic firing – a million miles from any dreams of space. Yet by 1932, von Braun, never one to lack confidence, and his colleagues were ready to demonstrate their test rocket at the army’s artillery range at Kummersdorf, south of Berlin. Although the rocket rose just 100 feet before veering off course and crashing, von Braun’s technical knowledge impressed Captain Walter Dornberger, who ran the rocket programme for the army. By the time he was twenty, while still a student at the University of Berlin, von Braun was recruited by the army and charged with building a rocket that was superior to the largest guns.

Von Braun began designs on his first rocket, known as the A-1. They were ready to test it in 1933 – the year Hitler came to power – but the liquid-fuelled engine blew up on launch. That same year, von Braun’s father exchanged his senior government position as Minister of Agriculture for a quiet country life on his estate in Silesia and invited his son to join him. Wernher von Braun, however, was absorbed by plans for the more elaborate A-2, which successfully flew about one and half miles. By 1936, as Hitler’s new, enlarged army marched to reoccupy the demilitarized Rhineland, von Braun was hard at work on the A-3 and then, even more ambitiously, on the A-4 – a rocket of such size and significance that secret new launch facilities were to be developed at Peenemünde. The army wanted a rocket that could travel 160 miles bearing a 1-ton warhead which would land within half a mile of the target. For von Braun it was the perfect opportunity: it would be the largest and most powerful rocket ever created. ‘We were only interested in one thing – the exploration of space,’ he claimed later. ‘Our main concern was how to get the most out of the Golden Calf.’

Research for the A-4 proceeded slowly at first as von Braun’s team tried to introduce major innovations. The engine, designed by the brilliant Dr Walter Thiel, was to incorporate several original features that would enable it to achieve more thrust. The fuel was ejected into the engine combustion chamber as a fine spray, which allowed it to mix better with the liquid oxygen. This improved mixing of the propellants gave more efficient combustion and reduced the risk of explosions. Thiel changed the design of the combustion chamber to give greater volume and incorporated a pre-chamber where the propellants were mixed: these innovations also facilitated a smoother burn. Pumps were used to direct the fuel to the engine at a faster rate to give yet more thrust. The result was an engine producing about 56,000 pounds of thrust, seventeen times more powerful than any previous design.

Apart from the new engine design, the shape of the rocket itself was more aerodynamic, with large fins for stability and rudders at the bottom of the fins for control. The guidance system was greatly improved. It was based on an inertial guidance system, a spinning gyro or wheel which could measure the position and acceleration of the rocket and then regulate guide vanes in the exhaust which could deflect the thrust to control direction. There was even a radio transmission system to communicate data to the ground – the first developments in telemetry. With a growing staff of several thousand at Peenemünde to help him accomplish this, in the space of a few short years von Braun had progressed from amateur enthusiast to the technical director of the largest rocket facility in the world. And as more funds conveniently flowed through, von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937. If Kristallnacht – ‘the Night of Broken Glass’, the smashing up of Jewish homes and businesses in November 1938 – did anything to make him question his party membership, his work was so absorbing that he did not act on it.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, research for the army assumed a new urgency. Despite high hopes, the initial testing on the A-4 in 1942 ended in midair explosions, but by 3 October they were at last rewarded. The rocket flew about 120 miles at a speed of 3500 mph, and, with an altitude of almost sixty miles, was the first to reach the fringes of space. This was an extraordinary achievement. At a celebration later that day, Dornberger triumphantly announced that rocket propulsion was indeed ‘practical for space travel’. It was the dawn of a ‘new era of space transpor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part One: The Race for Secrets
• Part Two: The Race for Supremacy
• Part Three: The Race to Space
• Part Four: The Race to Orbit
• Part Five: The Race for the Moon
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index
• P.S.
• About the Author
• Praise
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher