Abstract
Once he had arrived in the White House, America’s new President John F. Kennedy had to address the problem of restoring lost pride and prestige back to the nation, after the double setback and humiliation of being beaten to put the first man into space by Yuri Gagarin’s mission on April 12, 1961, and then, five days later, the failed Bay of Pigs military invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s biggest ever fiasco.
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Notes
- 1.
Taken from Cunningham [2004] p.21. When reporters asked Shepard what he had thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket awaiting liftoff, he replied “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.” Kranz [2000], pp. 200–01.
- 2.
Some objected to this description, calling Gagarin ’s flight an “incomplete orbit”, since he had landed west of his take-off point and, strictly speaking, had not completed one full orbit .
- 3.
Even in the USSR, space scientists approached Kennedy’s Moon challenge warily. Boris Chertok , the brilliant engineer who designed most of Sergei Korolev’s guidance systems, reported in his book “Our first thought was ‘Is this a bluff, or is he serious?’ Our impression was that it was not a bluff. The feeling within the engineering community was that it was realistic and could be done. And it gave us satisfaction, because we were sure it would force our leadership to pay more attention to the Soviet space program.” (Chertok [2009], p.250)
- 4.
See Yuriy Kondratiuk. Space conquering, in http://see-you.in.ua (accessed in March 2018). Yuri Vasilievich Kondratyuk (real name Aleksander Ignatyevich Shargey) was born on June 21, 1897, in Poltava, Ukraine. In 1914, the 17-year-old apprentice began a fundamental work, To Those Who Will Read in Order to Build, dealing with rocket flight basics, without any previous knowledge of world science achievements in this field. The 104-page manuscript, full of new astronautical-related ideas, with strong scientific and technical background, was first published only in 1964 by the Institute of Natural History and Technology (USSR Academy of Sciences).
Shargey was unable to graduate from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute as he was enlisted to fight during the First World War. During the Civil War in Ukraine after the 1917 revolution, he was first enrolled in the White Guard and then to the Denikin Army that fought against Bolsheviks. As a pacifist, Shargey actually fought against no one but was still considered an enemy of the new communist power. In order to escape political persecution, Shargey changed his name to Yuri Kondratyuk . In 1927, he went to Novosibirsk (Russia) as a hoist builder. Two years earlier, he had sent his work “The Conquest of Interplanetary Space” to Moscow where, despite the enthusiastic appraisal of many scientists, publication of his work was suspended. Kondratyuk published 2000 copies at his own expense, doing much of the typesetting and operating the press himself, not only to save costs but also because the equations in the book posed problems for the printer. Kondratyuk’s discoveries were made independently of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the acknowledged ‘Grandfather of Spaceflight’ who was working on the same issues at that time. The two never met.
Applying his engineering skills to local problems, Kondratyuk designed a huge, 13,000-ton grain elevator (quickly nicknamed ‘Mastodon’), built of wood and without a single nail, since metal was in short supply in Siberia at that time. His ingenuity would come back to haunt him when he was investigated as a saboteur by the NKVD in 1930. The lack of nails in the structure was used as ‘evidence’ that he had planned it to collapse. Convicted of anti-Soviet activity, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in a gulag. During his imprisonment, Kondratyuk learned of a competition to design a large wind-power generator for the Crimea and, without any previous experience in this field, submitted a design for a concrete tower capable of generating up to 12,000 KW. His project was acknowledged as the best, ahead of two other projects worked out by two specialized scientific schools. As a result, Kondratyuk was transferred to Kharkiv to proceed with the project. In Moscow, after meeting with Sergei Korolev , who was impressed by his research, Kondratyuk was offered a position as chief theoretician in a secret ‘Jet Lab’ but turned it down, mindful of his now-hidden past. He never saw his giant wind-electric power generator in operation as its construction was stopped and never finished. Disillusioned and completely disappointed, Kondratyuk joined the Soviet army soon after the beginning of WWII and was killed in battle in February 1942.
- 5.
Chertok noted in his book: “Sleep in space! If anything, that was one of the most important experiments. If a person could sleep in space in a spacesuit in weightlessness, without a comforter and pillows, that meant he could live and work! This is why Korolev had fought with Kamanin , arguing in favor of a 24-hour flight. For three orbits, one could forego sleep and all the other physiological needs, including a tasty dinner, until returning to Earth.” (Chertok [2009], p. 188).
- 6.
Actually, the LOR concept had first been fully developed in December 1958 as ‘Manned Lunar Landing and Return’ (MALLAR) by Thomas Dolan, an American engineer working at Vought Astronautics. At the time, it was largely ignored by NASA administrators (Courtney [1979], p. 66). The fundamentals of the LOR concept had already been outlined years earlier, by Yuri Kondratyuk in 1916, by Hermann Oberth in 1923 and by the British scientist and Interplanetary Society member Harry E. Ross in 1948. It is likely that Houbolt had read the Kondratyuk manuscript “To Those Who Will Read in Order to Build” (that had been published in Russian in 1964) only when it had been translated into English in 1965 (David Sheridan: “How an idea no one wanted grew up to be the LEM”, Life magazine Vol. 66 No. 10 [Mar 14, 1969], pp. 20–24).
- 7.
More details may be found in the study by Paul C. Bulver, Dr. Reuben A. Ramkissoon and Lester E. Winick: Study of Suspect Space Covers, 2nd Edition, ATA Space Unit, 2001, which is the most comprehensive publication on this topic ever produced .
- 8.
The space motion sickness experienced by Gherman Titov during Vostok 2 indirectly led to the premature return of Pavel Popovich ’s Vostok 4. Prior to the Vostok 3/4 group flight, it had been decided that the cosmonauts would use the phrase “observing thunderstorms” to communicate to ground control that they were experiencing a serious attack of motion sickness and needed to land as soon as possible. Having launched on August 12, Popovich was supposed to return to Earth on August 16, one day after Andrian Nikolayev on Vostok 3, but at one point, Popovich reported “observing thunderstorms,” triggering the decision by ground controllers to bring him home early. It later turned out that this had been a misunderstanding. Popovich had genuinely been observing thunderstorms while flying over the Gulf of Mexico and was actually feeling excellent. The story is partly corroborated by excerpts from the diaries of Nikolai Kamanin published in 1991. (Hendrickx [1996], pp. 46–7.)
References
Race to the Moon 1957–1975, Greg Goebel, in vc.airvectors.net, Chapter 13 (accessed in February 2018).
Rockets and People – Vol. 3: Hot Days of the Cold War, Boris Chertok, NASA SP-4110, Washington D.C., 2009, p. 79.
The Russian Space Bluff – The inside story of the Soviet drive to the Moon, Leonid Vladimirov, Dial Press, London, 1973, p. 107.
Reference 3, pp. 174–78.
Reference 1, Chapter 14, (accessed in February 2018).
Reference 3, pp. 109–110.
Reference 2, p. 193.
Reference 3, p. 110.
Reference 3, p. 14.
John Houbolt, pivotal figure in reaching the Moon, Umberto Cavallaro, in AD*ASTRA, no. 21, June 2014, p. 15.
Designer Mishin speaks on early Soviet space programmes and the manned lunar project, interview with Vasiliy Mishin in Spaceflight, Vol. 32, March 1990, pp. 104–6.
Reference 3, pp. 121–2.
Personal communication between Chris Calle (Paul Calle’s son) and the author. The full story can be found in The Secret Mercury Stamp is Fifty Years Old, Umberto Cavallaro, in AD*ASTRA, No. 12, March 2012, pp. 19–20.
Charles R. Chickering – Cachetmaker – Part I, Mark Lerner, in First Days, Journal of the American First Day Covers Society, #384’ July 2010, pp. 15–16.
The Giori Difference: The ‘Top Secret’ Project Mercury Stamp, in postalmuseum.si.edu (accessed in February 2018).
Search continues for secret stamp honoring John Glenn’s historic spaceflight, www.collectspace.com (accessed in February 2018)
Was this Noa Cover Backdated? Ross J. Smith, Astrophile, May 2007, pp. 108–111; see also The Day the John Glenn and the U.S. Postal Service Shook the World, Douglas A. Kelsey, American Philatelist, February 2002, pp. 130–143.
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Reference 3, pp. 115–117.
Women Spacefarers: Sixty Different Paths to Space, Umberto Cavallaro, Springer Praxis Books, New York, 2017, pp. 1–8.
Un bluff le immagini del rientro dallo spazio, Fabrizio Dragosei, Corriere della Sera, March 7, 2007, p. 24 (in Italian).
Korolev Facts and Myths, Bart Hendrickx, Spaceflight Vol. 38, February 1996, pp 44–48.
Reference 21, pp. 9–16.
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Cavallaro, U. (2018). The Space Race changes direction. In: The Race to the Moon Chronicled in Stamps, Postcards, and Postmarks. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92153-2_3
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