MICHAEL PORTILLO:
The fact that the Russians dominated the early years of space exploration may come as a surprise to those too young to remember the technological achievements of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s and for much of the 1960s they were ahead in the Space race.

ARCHIVE: CBS news report:
That sound’s a report from man’s furthest frontier, the radio signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik, the first manmade satellite as it passed over New York earlier today.

ARCHIVE: BBC news report:
All Moscow is waiting to give a hero’s welcome to the world’s first spaceman, Major Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
And the Russian successes didn’t end there. Alexei Leonov was the first human being to walk in Space. In 1965 the Russians achieved another first that ought not to be wholly overshadowed by the later achievement of Neil Armstrong.

IAN MORRISON:
At the very beginning of 1966 they produced the Lunar 9 craft, which made the first soft landing on the surface of the Moon and sent back the very first close up pictures of the surface, and that was a major achievement.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
And you at Jodrell Bank were like very privileged spectators watching this match. Were you, were you cheering on either side?

IAN MORRISON:
I think we were trying to be quite neutral. The Russians basically used us to prove that they were doing what they said they were doing. There, initially there was some scepticism in America that the Russians really hadn’t the capability to do the things they said they’d done, like send a spacecraft to the Moon or crash one on the surface, but we were able to show they really did do it.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
But it was four years earlier, in 1961, that President Kennedy had taken dramatic steps to establish supremacy in Space over the Soviets.

ARCHIVE: CBS news: President Kennedy:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space..

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
The Lunar race was chosen by Kennedy, because his advisors told him that this was one area where Americans actually could beat the Soviets, because the Soviets did not have the technological capacity to implement that project within the timeframe that the Americans would be able to do it.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Slava Gerovitch, a Russian Space historian now working in America,

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
The area was specifically chosen as one that would require complex electronics, which the Soviet industry at that time was not producing. That didn’t mean that the Soviets couldn’t catch up and develop electronic industry within few years to, to an extent that would have allowed them to be serious contenders in the race.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
So Kennedy wasn't delivering an impossible challenge, though he was setting his sights very high. Meanwhile the Russians, according to space author David Harland, took until 1964 to make their moon shot plans.

DAVID HARLAND:
There were two programmes that they started. One was to use a fairly modest rocket to send a capsule on a loop around the moon, without going into orbit, just a loop round the back and straight back to earth. Another programme with a brand new rocket, which was to send a spacecraft equivalent to Apollo, part of which would land on the Moon with a man in it, then he would return, they’d dock in lunar orbit and the er main part of the spacecraft would return to earth. They were trying to do the circumlunar, the loop around the moon, trying to do that ahead of the Americans.

JIM LOVELL:
I heard about Kennedy’s announcement that we planned to go to the Moon before I was part of NASA. I thought to myself er he wants to do this by the end of the decade, 1970, an impossibility I thought.

MUSIC: Stars and Stripes Forever

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Young test pilot, Jim Lovell.

JIM LOVELL:
When I got into it I saw that the people er had rallied around that concept, thousands of people, hundreds of businesses, and also there was a competition with the Soviet Union at that time as to who had the technological lead. And sometimes that’s very good because it brings out the best in everybody.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
For Doug Millard, chief curator at London's Science Museum, talk of healthy competition and racing makes it all sound a bit too gung-ho.

DOUG MILLARD:
What these astronauts and cosmonauts went through was supremely dangerous. They were sitting on thousands of tons of high explosive, but when you then consider the hostile environment of Space, the extremes of temperature, the remoteness, there was constant danger and all the programme developers could do were minimise the risks, but the risks were always there.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Doug had invited me to the Museum to have a privileged look at the inside of their most prized exhibit, the command module of the Apollo 10 Moon orbiter. And the visit was made all the more special when we were joined by one of the men who'd flown missions on its sister ships, Apollos 9 and 15, astronaut David Scott.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Well I'm now in a very unusual position which is with David Scott leaning through the hatch door of the Apollo 10 command module, and the thing that strikes me is that we are looking at a very claustrophobic, very confined space. We’re looking at three men lying side by side in a space I would say for each person that’s less than a single bed, and then the top of the capsule is probably only about er three, three and a half feet above their noses, a very tight space. Do you have a memory of feeling claustrophobic in here?

DAVID SCOTT:
Well not actually because you get used to living inside these quarters. We spend a lot of time in our training in simulators which look exactly the same, and the crew works together as a team side by side, and we’re lying on our backs looking forward at the switches and controls on the panel in front of us and on the side.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
They’re really above, above your faces yes?

DAVID SCOTT:
Yes above our faces and to our elbows as well, and the reason being we have to be able to reach all of the critical controls, switches and dials from a single position strapped in during launch and during re-entry.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Looking in here helps me to remember the era we’re talking about, because we’re not looking at a whole lot of digital readouts, we’re not looking at computer screens, we’re looking at basically a whole lot of metal switches which, you know, presumably have an on and an off position. I mean this is 60s’ technology that took us to the moon and back.

DAVID SCOTT:
Yes indeed it is and the switches were mechanical, we also had circuit breakers and certain knobs you could twist, but we did not have all the push buttons you have on a computer these days, although we did have a small computer that did have some buttons on it and it was very efficient. However as you point out it was 60s’ technology, in fact the onboard computer on Apollo, which was designed to bring us back from the Moon if we lost communications with Mission Control, had a total memory capacity of only thirty-six thousand words, or bits, so it was thirty-six k less than your mobile phone, but it did a great job.

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
The Apollo guidance computer was the first computer to use integrated circuits. On the Soviet scale there was nothing that could have matched that, but the Soviets tried to make up for that by employing maybe simpler technologies that would have still allowed them to perform a mission, maybe not so spectacularly as the Americans but still perform it and still accomplish the Lunar landing and the circumlunar flight.

  < previous   next > Page 2 of 4

Comments