146
3 A Brief History of Space Flight
great events provided the chips for the Soviet Union in the confrontation against
the West, and enough shocked the United States. On 1 November 1952, the United
States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb at a large atoll called Eniwetok of
the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean and accelerated to develop the largesize liquid rockets. Under the context of the Cold War between the East and the West,
the United States and the Soviet governments attached great importance to the development of new weapons, as well as large-size and long-range vehicles, which has
created conditions for speeding up the development of launch vehicles and artificial
satellites. In the postwar, from the perspective of scientific research, there were scientists in many countries, studying the feasibility of launching man-made satellites. In
September 1951, at the 2nd IAC in London, many scholars put forward the initiative
of launching artificial earth satellites and manned space stations, and Gatland from
the BIS presented the proposal that the man-made satellites could be launched by
using three-stage rockets. At the same time, the International Radio Science Association (IURS) and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) had
adopted a resolution to launch an artificial earth satellite during the International
Geophysical Year 1957−1958. This resolution had been positively responded to by
the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries.
After Stalin passed away on March 5, 1953, Nikita Khrushchev (1894−1971), who
then served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came
to power over the USSR and set out to reform and reverse many aspects of Stalin’s
wasteful doctrine on the military. Despite all this, Khrushchev would continue and
even accelerate the rocket development program, as the only hope for the USSR to
overcome the U.S. air supremacy. For this reason, he strongly supported Korolev’s
idea on the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
While developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, Korolev modified the
German Groettrup’s concept that started out as a cluster of engines, and conceived
of a lengthened core sustainer stage, well known as the R-7 missile, which would
allow all engines to be ignited on the launch pad, eliminating the problems of air
start in Groettrup’s design. The R-7 faced enormous development problems that
Glushko’s RD-105/RD-106 engines had seemingly insoluble combustion chamber
instability. Since the weight of the thermonuclear warhead to be carried was increased
from 3 metric tons to 5.5 metric tons, the entire vehicle had to be scaled up proportionately. It meant that Glushko’s troublesome single-chamber engines had to be
replaced by newly designing RD-107/RD-108 engines, with a cluster of four nozzles
sharing common fuel pumps and with liquid oxygen and kerosene as propellants. It
could assure stable combustion but greatly increased the complexity of the booster,
with a total of 20 main motors and sixteen vernier motors firing at lift-off. Under
Korolev’s enormous drive and personal attention to detail, all obstacles were overcome ultimately. The R-7 adopted the two-stage rocket design, of which the first
stage consists of four strap-on boosters using the RD-107 engines and the second
stage is a long core rocket using the RD-108 engine. The R-7 has a 31.07m length
with a warhead, and 280 metric tons lift-off weight. On August 21, 1957, The R-7
rocket was launched from the Baikonur launch site and perfectly flew nearly 8800 km.
Despite the warhead disintegrated at an altitude of around 10 km over the Kamchatka
3 A Brief History of Space Flight
great events provided the chips for the Soviet Union in the confrontation against
the West, and enough shocked the United States. On 1 November 1952, the United
States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb at a large atoll called Eniwetok of
the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean and accelerated to develop the largesize liquid rockets. Under the context of the Cold War between the East and the West,
the United States and the Soviet governments attached great importance to the development of new weapons, as well as large-size and long-range vehicles, which has
created conditions for speeding up the development of launch vehicles and artificial
satellites. In the postwar, from the perspective of scientific research, there were scientists in many countries, studying the feasibility of launching man-made satellites. In
September 1951, at the 2nd IAC in London, many scholars put forward the initiative
of launching artificial earth satellites and manned space stations, and Gatland from
the BIS presented the proposal that the man-made satellites could be launched by
using three-stage rockets. At the same time, the International Radio Science Association (IURS) and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) had
adopted a resolution to launch an artificial earth satellite during the International
Geophysical Year 1957−1958. This resolution had been positively responded to by
the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries.
After Stalin passed away on March 5, 1953, Nikita Khrushchev (1894−1971), who
then served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came
to power over the USSR and set out to reform and reverse many aspects of Stalin’s
wasteful doctrine on the military. Despite all this, Khrushchev would continue and
even accelerate the rocket development program, as the only hope for the USSR to
overcome the U.S. air supremacy. For this reason, he strongly supported Korolev’s
idea on the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
While developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, Korolev modified the
German Groettrup’s concept that started out as a cluster of engines, and conceived
of a lengthened core sustainer stage, well known as the R-7 missile, which would
allow all engines to be ignited on the launch pad, eliminating the problems of air
start in Groettrup’s design. The R-7 faced enormous development problems that
Glushko’s RD-105/RD-106 engines had seemingly insoluble combustion chamber
instability. Since the weight of the thermonuclear warhead to be carried was increased
from 3 metric tons to 5.5 metric tons, the entire vehicle had to be scaled up proportionately. It meant that Glushko’s troublesome single-chamber engines had to be
replaced by newly designing RD-107/RD-108 engines, with a cluster of four nozzles
sharing common fuel pumps and with liquid oxygen and kerosene as propellants. It
could assure stable combustion but greatly increased the complexity of the booster,
with a total of 20 main motors and sixteen vernier motors firing at lift-off. Under
Korolev’s enormous drive and personal attention to detail, all obstacles were overcome ultimately. The R-7 adopted the two-stage rocket design, of which the first
stage consists of four strap-on boosters using the RD-107 engines and the second
stage is a long core rocket using the RD-108 engine. The R-7 has a 31.07m length
with a warhead, and 280 metric tons lift-off weight. On August 21, 1957, The R-7
rocket was launched from the Baikonur launch site and perfectly flew nearly 8800 km.
Despite the warhead disintegrated at an altitude of around 10 km over the Kamchatka