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Rockets and People
from a height of 80 meters along the bank of the Moscow River, to the delight of
all the Muscovite spectators and numerous foreign guests who would be coming
to the capital to celebrate the twenty-eighth anniversary of the October Revolution.
This festive fireworks display would be quite an addition to the already
customary victory salutes!
Presumably Stalin himself would want to feast his eyes on such an unusual firing
performance. And after that decisions regarding the development of missile
technology, despite all the postwar difficulties, would pass quickly through the
Politburo.They would of course be interested in who organized all of this, and the
organizers of the firing spectacle would be commissioned to head the development
of this new type of weaponry. This assignment immediately shifted the
primary responsibility from the assemblers to the engine specialists.
By that time, September 1945, the primary group of engine specialists had also
settled down as an independent organization in Thuringia, near the town of
Saalfeld at the Lehesten firing test base for series-produced A-4 engines.
In order for the reader to better understand the problems that engine specialists
faced at that time, I will return to the events of May 1945 in Berlin.
On 25 May 1945, an American B-25 bomber landed at the airfield that serviced
our “residence” in Adlershof. An assault landing force of “trade union” officers,
headed by “Lieutenant Colonel” Aleksey Mikhaylovich Isayev, disembarked
from the airplane.The commander of the B-25 was not an American but our test
pilot Boris Kudrin. In 1942 and in 1944, he had tested the now legendary BI-1
rocket airplane in glider mode. With the end of the war, the Armed Forces
command transferred several combat airplanes received through the Lend-Lease
Program to our institute for our transport needs.
Aleksey Isayev’s team consisted of liquid-propellant rocket engine specialists. It
also included one of the first testers of liquid-propellant rocket engines, Arvid
Pallo, whose face still showed traces of severe burns from the nitric acid that had
splashed on him when an engine exploded during firing rig tests in the winter of
1942 in Bilimbay.The rest of the team had become involved in liquid-propellant
rocket engine technology during the development of the BI airplane, and they had
already mastered the engine terminology that Isayev had very successfully introduced.
This group was the nucleus that would later diversify into specialized
engine OKBs in the postwar era.
During the first years of work on missile technology in the Soviet Union, and
during the same period in Germany, the creators of liquid-propellant rocket
engines did not have any theoretical works at their disposal that were suitable for
practical application to enable them to design a liquid-propellant rocket engine on
a reasonably scientific basis.
A rocket designer used the sciences developed for the needs of artillery and
aviation, such as ballistics, the flight theory of a variable mass body, aerodynamics,
the theory of elasticity, and the resistance of materials—all of which
depended on the classic works of famous scientists. The developers of missile
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