A tale of two rockets ... with a happy ending

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

In this 50th-anniversary year for the space age, Tuesday marks a critical date in two stages of the "Space Race."

On May 15, 1957, the Russians recorded their first-ever launch of the R-7 space rocket, a design that became (and remains) the mainstay of Russian orbital transportation. That first rocket flew for only a minute or so before exploding, but months later, Moscow officially initiated the space age on Oct. 4 with the triumphant launch of the Sputnik satellite atop an R-7.

Tuesday also marks the 20th anniversary of a Soviet launch — mercifully unsuccessful — that easily could have reset the planet’s space trajectory onto an orbital weapons race that would have wiped out all of the scientific, diplomatic and cultural benefits of the space age.

The first liftoff of the R-7 rocket began a competition that witnessed the grandest conversion of "swords into plowshares" in human history. Weapons of war — the intercontinental ballistic missiles such as the Soviet R-7 and the American Atlas and Titan rockets — were paid for and perfected from military budgets, but fortunately were never used in anger. The missiles soon morphed into carrier rockets for space exploration. 

It might have turned out otherwise, and almost did. The first flight of the Soviet Energia super rocket on May 15, 1987, carried a top-secret military payload called Skif-DM — a name that derives from the Russian word for the Scythians, the fierce nomadic horsemen of the Eurasian steppes. The satellite was supposed to have been the opening round of the Soviet "Star Wars" program, aimed at beating the Americans to the deployment of space-to-space missiles and lasers in orbit.

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Had this prototype actually reached orbit successfully and performed preliminary tests, the United States would have correctly identified its purpose, and a vigorous military response would have been politically unavoidable.

On that still-little-known lift-off, the Energia super booster performed well, clearing the way for its use to carry a Buran shuttle on autopilot the following year. But the 100-ton black-painted cylindrical payload suffered a mysterious control malfunction. This made it perform its final rocket thrusts in the wrong direction, and it fell in flames over the Pacific Ocean.

There was no second attempt. Under growing financial strain, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist government delayed and eventually canceled any new "Star Wars" launches.

The Skif-DM debacle was the most beneficial and blessed space failure in the history of the space age, closing off a path that seemed all too unavoidable in the tense closing years of the Cold War. Thirty years earlier, the first R-7 failure was merely a temporary setback, soon overcome gloriously as its successors opened paths into orbit, to the moon and to the nearest planets. May 15 marks both anniversaries.

The flight of the Semyorka
Long before 1957, Russians had dreamed of spaceflight as enthusiastically as had Americans, West Europeans and other imaginative people around the world. But it took a Russian named Sergey Korolev to make the dream into metal with the seventh in a series of each more powerful military missiles.

RKK Energia An early R-7 rocket is surrounded by exhaust during its launch in this archival photograph.

The R-7 (R for "raketa," or "rocket") was called "semyorka" in Russian slang ("sem" is Russian for "seven"). It was paid for by Moscow in order to enable the slaughter of millions of Americans in a nuclear war. But Korolev, a lifelong spaceflight nut, had other intentions. He built into the rocket features that would prove invaluable for space missions. Many of these features, it turned out, made it such a clumsy weapon that it was deployed only in small numbers and was soon replaced by new generations of missiles from other factories.

It looked different from every other rocket ever built by humans up until then. Neither long and sleek and finned, or stacked stage upon stage in a tapering tower, it resembled nothing so much as a bundle of fat asparagus stalks. The long central core was flanked by four independent boosters, identical at the business end to the central core but tapering to a point near the top of the core.

This design allowed the missile to have maximum thrust where it needed it most, at launch, when it was lowest, slowest and heaviest. It then could cast off the excess weight of emptied fuel tanks and overpowerful engines when it got higher, lighter and faster.

The “strap-ons” — and the R-7 used the first system of that design — appeared on the U.S. Titan 3 booster a few years later. Strap-on boosters became a key design feature of vehicles such as the Delta, Atlas and even the space shuttle, as well as European, Japanese and Chinese heavy boosters now in use.

But Korolev’s R-7 didn’t just go in for multiple parallel staging — even its rocket engine was "multiple." When the engine designers found they couldn’t build a large thrust chamber with the desired power, Korolev had them build an engine with one set of pumps but four separate nozzles — another innovation that has stood the test of time.

The design proved so robust that it has been upgraded and refined for half a century, and its latest incarnation — the Soyuz-2-1B booster — was introduced only last year. A Soyuz launch pad is being built in French Guiana, making South America the third continent to host the rocket. The production line at the factory in the city of Samara on the Volga River probably will keep building this design for decades yet to come.

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