Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

We all think we know the story of space...

NEIL ARMSTRONG: OK, I'm going to step off the LEM now.

..that it was conquered by the Americans.

But that's not the real story.

The actual conquerors of space were a dedicated group of men, and women,

from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

After decades of secrecy,

they are now free to tell the extraordinary stories

of how they risked everything to take the first steps into space.

TRANSLATION:

A treasure trove of unseen footage from the Russian archives

reveals how, time and again, the Soviets beat

the more sophisticated American programme into second place.

But along with the triumphs, there have also been tragedies

and disasters that have carried on to the present day.

BEEPING

This is the remarkable, and at times terrifying,

story of the Cosmonauts.

TRANSLATION:

On April 12th, 1961,

Yuri Gagarin ushered the human race into the Space Age.

Gagarin's flight was one of the great moments in human history.

For the first time, we had left our home planet

and entered the cosmos.

We saw our world in a completely new light.

Their Cold War rivals, the Americans, looked on, amazed.

They assumed that the first man in space would be an American -

and certainly not Russian.

The ordinary American couldn't understand

how this country which had always been presented as being backward,

you know, a nation of potato-farmers,

um, could do something so astoundingly perfect

in a technological and scientific sense.

CHANTING

But how had they done it?

How had this nation of potato farmers

beaten the Americans into space?

The origins of the Soviet Space programme

lie in the aftermath of Hiroshima.

Desperate to keep pace with American technology,

the Soviets soon produced an atomic bomb of their own.

But at over five tonnes,

it was more than twice as heavy as the American devices.

It was this massive bomb that would kick-start the space race.

Because to launch it all the way to America,

the Soviets would need the most powerful missile ever built.

The man charged with building that rocket

was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.

He was so important to the Soviets

that to protect him from the threat of assassination,

his identity was kept secret.

He was known simply as the Chief Designer.

Sergei Korolev was known as the founding father

of the Soviet space programme.

I wouldn't call him necessarily a scientist -

he was really a genius manager. That's what he really was.

He was manager, engineer, inspirational figure,

politician. He knew how to get the job done,

he knew how to work the levers of power.

He was all these things moulded into one.

For 10 years after the war, Korolev experimented,

building bigger and bigger rockets.

Until, by 1957, he had created his masterpiece -

the R7 Semyorka.

34 metres tall, weighing 280 tonnes,

and powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene,

it was nine times more powerful than anything that had been built before.

One of the launch team

was a 26-year-old engineer called Georgi Grechko.

After a string of failures,

a final test was scheduled for August 21st, 1957,

This time, it was a complete success.

The world's first intercontinental ballistic missile.

With it, Korolev, at a stroke,

had transformed the Russians into a global superpower.

Though the R7's ultimate destiny would not be as a weapon.

GRECHKO:

Korolev had always had other plans for the R7.

Ever since he'd started building rockets in the 1930s,

he'd dreamt of using them to go into space.

Now he had his rocket, he wasted no time.

His engineers were already working on a simple satellite -

nothing more than a radio transmitter

encased in a metal sphere.

Korolev called it Sputnik, or "fellow traveller".

If he could launch it into orbit,

he would be the first to prove that space travel was possible.

Less than six weeks after the R7's first successful test,

he had another rocket on the launch pad,

ready to send Sputnik into orbit.

It seemed that the launch had gone perfectly.

But the only way to know that Sputnik had made it

safely into orbit was to wait for the radio signals

beamed from the tiny satellite.

BEEPING

CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYS

Around the world, people went Sputnik-crazy.

They queued up to try to catch sight of the Earth's second moon

crossing the sky.

But not everyone was looking up with admiration.

In the United States, the appearance of Sputnik

only fuelled their Cold War paranoia.

America was already consumed by the threat of Communism.

It's a conspiracy to take over our government by force.

If I had my way about it, they'd all be sent back to Russia,

or some other unpleasant place.

And this Soviet star passing overhead

was surely another sign of that Communist threat.

Somebody's falling down on the job. Badly.

We fear this. We fear that they have something out there

the majority of people don't know about.

For the Russians, Sputnik was a brilliant propaganda coup.

And the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev

was desperate for more.

It seemed an impossible task.

Khrushchev had given Korolev just five weeks

to launch another mission.

In his secret headquarters,

Korolev leapt at the chance to demonstrate his plans

for the domination of space.

Within the month, he would launch another satellite -

but this one would carry a passenger.

The first cosmonaut would be a stray dog called Laika.

Loaded into a specially built capsule,

complete with food and water trays.

It was a massive leap for animalkind.

But, for Laika, it would be a one-way trip.

For many years, the Russians claimed

she survived in orbit for several days.

But in 2002, they finally admitted

that the climate controls had failed

and she died of overheating after only six hours.

But Laika's sacrifice provided the Russians

with a second precious propaganda victory.

For the Americans, it was another kick in the teeth.

They're still reeling from what Sputnik says,

but suddenly the programme has been taken in a completely different

and unexpected direction.

It's not about satellites any more, it's about space travel.

Because...if the Russians are able to put a living being,

a dog, into a space capsule, and launch them into orbit,

that also suggests that they'll be able shortly to do so

with a human being. So this again underlines to the Americans

just how far behind the Russians they are.

It was now the Americans' turn to play catch-up.

At the beginning of December 1957,

they were ready to launch their first satellite.

Millions tuned in to live pictures of the Vanguard rocket lifting off.

It was a total humiliation.

It underlined just how comprehensively the Soviets

had won the first stage of the Space Race.

The next stage of the contest

would be to see who could put the first man into orbit.

By the early 1960s, 20 potential cosmonauts

were training in total secrecy in the Russian countryside.

Among them was a young airman called Alexei Leonov.

TRANSLATION:

But as well as extreme fitness,

the cosmonauts also had to train for the rigours of space.

No-one knew what to expect, so they prepared for everything.

They had to be able to withstand the high G-forces

expected on take-off and landing.

They were locked in soundproof rooms for days at a time

to train them for the psychological isolation of space.

And, worst of all, they had to prepare for the possibility

of being trapped inside a wildly spinning capsule.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain,

the Americans were also feverishly working to send a man into space.

And they'd been rapidly catching up with the Soviets.

So much so that astronaut Alan Shepard

was scheduled to become the first man in space on March 6th, 1961.

Alan B Shepard, from East Derry, New Hampshire.

I don't think there's any question

that we are on the threshold of space travel.

But before they launched a human,

they planned one final test flight carrying a chimp called Ham.

But the mission did not go as well as expected.

A mistake in the navigation system

sent the rocket on to the wrong trajectory -

and the capsule splashed down in the ocean, 100 miles off-target.

By the time the retrieval vessel reached the capsule,

Ham had almost drowned.

In response, Shepard's flight was postponed.

The delay gave the Russians a crucial chance.

But they had no time to lose if they were going to beat the Americans.

Within weeks, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin

was suited up and taken to the launch pad

to be strapped into the Vostok capsule.

Of the seven unmanned test flights of Vostok,

only two had returned to Earth safely.

Some feared they were rushing to launch before they were ready.

They were taking an incredible risk

launching Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.

It was an extremely risky mission.

Rockets were constantly exploding -

there was a fair-to-good chance that he might not survive that launch.

On just after nine in the morning,

the vast engines ignited.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

On that morning in 1961,

Yuri Gagarin went where no man had gone before.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

To everyone's relief, the rocket delivered him safely into orbit.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

It would take him an hour and a quarter to circle the planet.

Cocooned within Vostok, this was in many ways

the easiest part of the mission.

The real challenge was to return him safely to Earth.

The flight of Yuri Gagarin was a very dramatic flight,

and there were many points where things certainly went wrong,

and that could have ended the flight in disaster,

including, most significantly, the re-entry.

At 10:25, as he passed over West Africa,

with 8,000km still to go,

Vostok's retro-rockets fired, slowing the capsule down

and sending it back towards the Earth.

In order to safely re-enter the Earth's atmosphere,

the spherical landing capsule had to separate

from the rest of the spacecraft.

But the straps didn't release...

..and the whole craft started spinning dangerously

towards the Earth.

As it re-entered the atmosphere,

the friction of the air tore at the capsule.

Gagarin reported seeing flames pass the windows

and a burning smell in the cabin.

Finally, the straps melted,

freeing the landing capsule, allowing it to stabilise.

At an altitude of 7,000m,

Gagarin ejected and parachuted to the ground.

He landed several hundred kilometres off-course

in a field near the Volga River.

Gagarin was given a hero's welcome.

BAND PLAYS, PEOPLE SING

Promoted to Major,

and wearing a borrowed jacket two sizes too big,

he was greeted at the airport by Nikita Khrushchev himself.

He toured the world.

The first man OFF the planet became the most famous man ON it.

The symbol of the Soviets' unchallenged mastery of space.

The world was captivated as it waited to see

where the next battle in the Space Race would be fought.

This is OK. Rate of descent is reading about 35 feet a second.

Alan Shepard became the second man in space just four weeks later.

My condition is still good, I'm getting ready for impact.

But his 15-minute sub-orbital flight

was a damp squib compared to Gagarin's triumph.

Even though they had made it into space less than a month

after the Soviets, it was yet another embarrassing defeat.

President Kennedy desperately needed to find a way

to beat the Russians and restore his country's battered prestige.

We choose to go to the moon!

We choose to go to the moon...

We choose to go to the moon in this decade

and do the other things, not because they are easy,

but because they are hard.

The race to the moon would dominate the rest of the decade.

But before the Soviets began work on their own lunar programme,

Korolev would launch a string of other missions on his R7,

culminating in the most spectacular of them all.

On March 18th, 1965, on a freezing morning in Kazakhstan,

another R7 was being prepared for launch.

Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov

would both have to squeeze into the tiny capsule,

which had been renamed Voskhod.

The plan was that, once the capsule reached orbit,

the crew would extend an inflatable canvas airlock,

and Leonov would crawl through that airlock

to become the first man to walk in space.

Leonov had started preparing for the mission two years earlier.

By the time they reached orbit,

the crew should have been prepared for anything.

As Leonov pushed himself through the airlock

he became the first man to drift free in space...

..nearly 500km up.

It was the furthest and most isolated

any human had ever been from the surface of the Earth.

As he drifted in the vacuum of space,

the greater air pressure inside his suit was causing it to expand

like a balloon.

But as Leonov tried to deflate his suit,

he ran the risk of starving himself of oxygen.

After their ordeal,

Leonov and Belyaev landed safely in the remote Russian forest,

where they waited for two days

before the recovery teams found them.

For eight years, the Russians had blazed a trail

through the Space Race.

But Leonov's spacewalk marked the end of the first

golden age of the Soviet space programme.

The Americans' lavish spending on their moon programme was paying off.

Within days, they would welcome back the first manned mission

of their Gemini Program.

And many more would soon follow.

Their astronauts were oozing confidence.

But while the Americans' space programme prospered,

things were about to go horribly wrong for the Russians.

Sergei Korolev had been the driving force

behind the entire Soviet space programme.

An inspirational leader to an army of engineers and cosmonauts.

In January 1966,

two days after his 59th birthday,

he was admitted to hospital for a routine operation.

Three days later, he'd still not regained consciousness.

But even without Korolev, the Soviet programme continued.

They'd been working on Soyuz,

the new capsule that would take a crew to the moon.

But it's development had been a disaster...

..beset by delays and a catalogue of testing failures.

The parachute system alone had failed on two of its seven tests.

The cosmonauts due to fly in the craft were understandably concerned.

The ship is clearly not ready because

it's had three failed missions in a robotic mode.

But they still went ahead and put a human being on board.

You have to understand

that the Americans, NASA,

had just flown ten highly

successful Gemini missions,

during which period the Russians had flown not a single mission.

So there's a lot of pressure

and the engineers internally felt that pressure.

But there was nobody who could stand up and say, "We shouldn't do this."

On April 23rd, 1967,

Vladimir Komarov, a highly respected engineer and test pilot,

prepared for launch.

He was about to become the first cosmonaut to go into space twice.

To everyone's relief, the launch was a total success.

But then things began to go wrong.

One of the solar panels didn't deploy, so they had power problems.

Other systems on the ship didn't work, so they said,

"Just bring Komarov back."

Of course, bringing him back proved to be very difficult

because there was so many problems on the ship,

including the automated attitude-control system

that positioned the ship properly for re-entry.

So he had to do all this manually, which he didn't train for,

but he did it very well.

But as the Soyuz re-entered the atmosphere,

a final, fatal error emerged.

Once again, the parachute system failed.

The Soyuz was heading towards the ground at 700mph

with nothing to slow it down.

Komarov was killed instantly, as the capsule hit the ground.

The remaining fuel on board set fire to the wreckage.

But worse was to follow.

In March 1968,

a routine training flight crashed in these woods outside Moscow...

..killing Yuri Gagarin...

..the smiling symbol of the Soviet's mastery of space.

MUSIC: Destination Moon by Nat King Cole

# Come and take a trip in my rocket ship... #

But despite these losses, the race to the moon was still on.

The American programme was going from strength to strength.

# ..Destination moon... #

During the Gemini missions, they had perfected

in-flight docking manoeuvres and spacewalks.

-RADIO:

-This is the greatest experience. It's just tremendous.

And now they were preparing

to launch the first manned Apollo missions -

the missions that would take them to the moon.

# ..Destination moon! #

The Soviets were also preparing for their moon landing.

MAN SINGS IN RUSSIAN:

The cosmonauts were learning how to use the spacesuit that had

been designed to walk on the moon.

This bizarre test rig was built to mimic the one-sixth gravity

felt on the moon's surface.

And they were already working on the lander

that would deliver a single cosmonaut onto the moon's surface.

But a successful lunar mission needed one more crucial element...

..a rocket powerful enough to carry a crew all the way to the moon.

The Americans answer was their vast Saturn V,

still the most powerful rocket ever built.

And the Russians were also working on a behemoth.

The N1.

With 30 separate engines,

it would be 16 times more powerful than the R7.

It had been designed by Korolev,

but starved of funding and beset by political in-fighting,

it took years to get from the drawing board to the launch pad.

The hopes of the entire Soviet space programme

were resting on the success of this rocket.

The explosion destroyed the entire launch complex.

Without a rocket or launch pad,

the Soviets had no way of getting a crew to the moon.

After several more failed tests,

the giant rocket built by this nation of potato farmers

ended up housing their pigs.

With the Russians out of the race,

the Americans now had a clear run at the moon.

Less that three weeks after the N1 explosion,

on July 20th, 1969,

Apollo 11 made its final approach to the moon's surface.

The cosmonauts could only watch and admire.

NEW SPEAKER:

The moon race was perhaps the greatest period

of international competition in space.

But it's what happened next that would define

the future of space exploration

right up to the present day.

Over the next few years,

the Americans landed five more missions on the moon.

But as they drove around the moon's surface,

and even played a bit of golf,

they seemed to have lost their purpose.

When the Americans landed on the moon,

it causes a great crisis for NASA,

because the moon has always been a race, space was a race,

and the thing about a race is that it has a finishing line,

and a finishing line implies an end.

And that's really the way the American people saw it, too.

And so, from that day forward, NASA's been a bit lost in space.

It's not really had a purpose that has been able to inspire

the American people in the same way.

In contrast, the Soviets quickly forgot about the moon

and found a new purpose that would resurrect their space programme -

colonisation.

They would find a way not just to visit space

but to live and work there.

In April 1971,

the world's first space station, Salyut 1, was launched into orbit.

On June 6th, Georgi Dobrovolski,

Vladislav Volkov

and Viktor Patsayev were sent to become its first occupants.

For three weeks, they lived and worked in orbit,

performing experiments that were broadcast nightly

to an audience of millions.

It was the longest anyone had ever been in space

and the crew became national heroes.

On June 29th, they re-boarded their Soyuz for the journey home.

Their capsule parachuted down to Earth exactly as planned.

But when it was opened,

the three crew members were found dead in their seats,

suffocated when a faulty valve caused the capsule

to catastrophically depressurise.

Despite the tragedy, it was still a triumph for the Soviets.

They'd shown that it was possible to live and work in space.

For the rest of the 1970s, the Russians continued to send crews

to a series of Salyut space stations on longer and longer missions.

These cosmonauts would be the guinea pigs

who would learn the skills needed to live in space for extended periods.

By the mid-1980s,

while the Americans were still concentrating on

short-duration flights in their Space Shuttle...

..the Russians were ready to take their next step -

the first permanent orbital space station.

Mir.

Over the years, it would become a vast orbiting laboratory...

..allowing teams of cosmonauts to live and work in space

for over to a year at a time.

It was, by far, the greatest achievement yet made in space.

But just as the cosmonauts had finally mastered life in orbit,

it would all go wrong for them...again.

In 1991, as Mir orbited silently overhead,

the Soviet Union fell apart.

And the political turmoil on the Earth was soon felt in space.

The Soviet space programme became the Russian space programme.

But it was so short of funding that its very existence was threatened.

It was a prospect that terrified the Americans.

Their worst fear was that it would leave

an army of rocket engineers jobless

and they would go to work for Iran or North Korea.

So, instead, the American government offered to go into partnership

with the Russians.

This is an historic moment and I'm just very excited.

Mr Kopchev, I want to give you a hug.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

After decades of rivalry, the two space super-powers

would become partners.

The first step was that American astronauts,

like British-born Michael Foale, would go to live and work on Mir.

To be really honest, I don't think Americans

were really keen to be involved in Mir.

They were told to be involved by the White House.

I look back on it and it was a very positive thing,

but I had to be told.

And the general feeling amongst American engineers was,

"Why's the money going to Russia? It should come to our company

"so that we can build the Space Station on our own.

"We don't need the Russians."

In May 1997, six years after the break up of the Soviet Union,

Michael Foale travelled on the Space Shuttle to dock with Mir.

The plan was that he would spend six months on the station

with its Russian crew -

Alexander Lazutkin

and Vasily Tsibalyev.

He was about to experience first-hand

the impact of the Soviet cuts.

Every few months, Mir received supplies on an unmanned cargo ship.

It was guided by an automated but expensive system,

provided by a Ukrainian company.

About 2 million was being paid, each flight, to the Ukrainians,

and the Russian government didn't want to pay this.

And so they had come up with an idea, a bad idea,

to try and do this experiment where they would put the cargo ship

five kilometres away, and then fly it in using a cosmonaut,

remote control, looking through a TV camera.

The new system was like a computer game.

Tsibalyev, the station commander,

used a camera on the cargo ship to guide it towards the station.

He had trained with a simulator on Earth.

But in orbit, he and his flight engineer, Sasha Lazutkin,

were having difficulty even locating the cargo vessel.

CRASHING SOUND

The walls of the Space Station Mir are only 3mm thick aluminium.

I heard a crunch and I waited to see the walls separate

and just see the depths of space.

And I thought, "I've got to breathe out

"so I don't have an embolism and die from an embolism."

Not really considering the fact

that I would die ten seconds later anyway from no air.

ALARM BEEPS

The cargo ship had struck the Spektr power module.

If the crew were to survive, they had to seal it off.

Sasha knew there was a hole in there.

And he said, "It's hissing in there."

So Sasha, feverishly, started to try and take away cables that

were preventing a hatch to close on the Spektr module.

ALARM CONTINUES BEEPING

But though they successfully sealed the hatch,

they now faced another problem.

The impact had knocked the station out of alignment

and the damaged solar panels were no longer pointed towards the sun.

I remember the three of us looking out at the Galaxy.

It's utterly beautiful.

You have the centre of the Galaxy -

maybe there's a million civilisations there.

And I remember saying to Vasily, "This is a beautiful sight."

And he goes, "Yes, but it's been a terrible day."

For 24 hours, they drifted silently around the planet,

while the crew devised a plan to save the crippled station.

Using the thrusters on the Soyuz escape craft,

they painstakingly realigned the station

so the solar panels once again caught the sun's rays.

Mir was back online, but the station's days were numbered.

Just six months later, it was announced that Mir would be

decommissioned and eventually brought down from orbit.

As Mir fell back to Earth, it was torn apart

in the upper atmosphere as it made its final fiery farewell.

The death of Mir marked an end for the Russian space programme.

But it also signalled a new beginning.

Mir's replacement, the International Space Station,

was already taking shape in orbit.

The first truly international venture in space.

A collaboration between 15 different space agencies

to build a station four times bigger than Mir.

Though not everyone regarded it as a positive development.

But in reality, the ISS is the greatest testament

to the achievements of the mighty Soviet space programme.

Its very existence depends on technology and expertise

built up by the Soviets and Russians over 50 years of space exploration.

The station's crucial life support systems

are based on those developed on Salyut and Mir.

The spacesuits they use are Russian-made -

descendants of the suit Leonov wore on the first space-walk...

..and those designed to walk on the moon.

And, since 2011, the only way to get to the station

has been in a Soyuz capsule mounted on the top of an R7 rocket...

..updated versions of the originals

designed by Sergei Korolev half a century ago.

The Soviets may have lost the race to the moon,

but our continued presence in orbit owes everything

to the Russians' determination to conquer space.