Space

My contact drove us to Oleg Ivanovskiy’s home in a large block of relatively new six-story Moscow apartment buildings. We entered the building through a heavily built door into a tiled foyer with dim light. On the fourth floor, where we got out of the elevator, several doors lined the landing; they looked as if they could have withstood a siege, and at second glance, some looked as if they already had.

Ivanovskiy’s daughter opened his door and graciously waved us in, smiling. Inside the apartment, the transition from grim city mass construction to handcrafted comfort was complete. I felt I might have been transported to a well-appointed dacha deep in some northern pine forest. There was no noise from outside, and the room we sat down in was bright and spacious, dominated by a massive round dining table.

We sat around that table for two hours, talking. He dove into his memory with an intensity undiminished by half a century. Nothing he said was by rote or offhand, and although I knew he had said many of these things before, he delivered his narrative so vibrantly I might have thought I was hearing him recount his feats for the first time.

To this day, Oleg Ivanovskiy says he has no idea why he was chosen to oversee the final preparations of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik’s launch on October 4, 1957, began the era of spaceflight—and famously sparked the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States that was to last until the final days of the Communist empire.

I had some doubts about my experience, but Korolyov shrugged his shoulders and asked if we thought he had any experience flying to the stars

“Better to ask Korolyov,” he gruffly responds in Russian when asked, via a translator, why the head of the Soviet space program, chief designer Sergey Korolyov, had personally directed him to take charge of Sputnik. Of course, as we both know, Korolyov died more than 40 years earlier.

Given the circumstances that Korolyov found himself in 50 years ago, it is possible to imagine why he turned to Ivanovskiy. Korolyov’s primary problem was the sheer size of the task. In launching Sputnik, the chief designer had to build the launch rocket, develop guidance and communications equipment, construct ground processing facilities, establish a tracking network, and build the satellite itself. The rocket had already had two successful test launches, so that last challenge remained the biggest.

The reason for the push to get a satellite, any satellite, into orbit was because of information coming from overseas about the Americans, says Ivanovskiy. They, too, were in a rush—and “the respected Wernher von Braun, now working for the Americans, wanted to be first to create a satellite.”

Korolyov needed a “Sputnik czar,” one man to tie together all the various team efforts, to integrate all the fabrication and test schedules, and to decide—without bothering Korolyov—what to do about the inevitable glitches. “Korolyov entrusted me with the entire responsibility for preparation of Sputnik in its manufacture, tests, and preparation for sending off to [the launch base],” he says. Ivanovskiy, then 35, had worked at Korolyov’s rocket plant for 10 years, first as a technician and later, after finishing his university degree, as a radio engineer. He had been a cavalry rider from 1941 to 1945 and was wounded in action. His selection as Sputnik czar was settled in a brief meeting. “In the evening, two of us—[my boss] Khomyakov and me—entered Korolyov’s office,” Ivanovskiy remembers. “Korolyov glanced at us over his gilded eyeglass rims and asked, ‘Have you come into agreement?’ Khomyakov said, yes, we had agreed, but I had had some doubts [about my experience]. Korolyov shrugged his shoulders and asked if we thought he had any experience of flying to the stars. . . . Thus, that issue was decided on.”

Today, at age 85, Ivanovskiy is proud of his role in the Sputnik story. “I am among those few people still alive who personally took part in that event, the 50th anniversary of which we’ll celebrate this year,” he says. “What I can tell you is based upon what I saw, what I lived through, what I felt 50 years ago, and in what I directly took part with my brains, with my hands.”

At first, Ivanovskiy recalls, Sputnik was just another engineering job. “At that time, we did not attach any colossal, global significance to the works. On the one hand, it was just another design production order. On the other hand, all our production activity was so secret, and we became aware that that activity was associated with the classified intercontinental ballistic missile R-7 [used as Sputnik’s launch rocket]. But we did not focus on something created ‘for the first time in the world.’. . . It was ordinary, everyday work.”

He pauses and admits upon reflection that the work wasn’t, perhaps, all that ordinary. Even the manufacturing workshop got the red-carpet treatment. “The two hemispheres of the Sputnik had to be laid onto supports upholstered with velvet—and that had never been done in rocket engineering before, with rocket elements laid onto such supports. Once Korolyov came into the workshop where fabrication of the first Sputnik was going on and saw some disorder. Shortly afterwards an individual separate room appeared [for Sputnik fabrication], with white silk valances hung onto windows and plush curtains, emphasizing the unusual things going on in that room.

“After everything had been done at the factory, checked out and tested, we flew off to—at that time the word ‘cosmodrome’ did not exist yet—the base or ‘polygon.’” Everything there was focused on the impending launch. “The process of preparing for flight was divided into two big parts. The first and the biggest and most responsible part lay with the rocket engineers. We knew that not all launches of the R-7 had been successful. That means nobody could guarantee that everything would go out all right. We, the ‘Sputnikovists’ [Sputnik engineers], had less responsibility because the scope of design and development was smaller.