A Day in October

Today, Sunday the 4th of October 2020, marks the 63rd anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1. According to the son of then Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev, the leadership at the time had no idea of the magnitude of what had just been done. To them, it was just another test of what they hoped would be their game-changing weapon system, the R-7 rocket. 

Well, the rocket went up, Earth's first artificial satellite was confirmed orbiting it and after that? All the assembled dignitaries, generals, party officials and the like assembled before the screens and gauges at Baikonur Cosmodrome went to lunch. And in their ponderous wakes, they left behind a world as transformed by their creation as it was by its intended cargo, the Soviet thermonuclear bomb.

Since then, man's cosmic feats have far outweighed any other consequence of the Cold War. A good thing, for otherwise the amazing technological feat of the R-7 and its successors would have long ago been shelved away as has too much of mankind's engineering past. In its case, the seed that would have opened vast treasures of knowledge and achievement to mankind, if not his future as a species, would have been lost maybe forever.

Certainly this little 'test' was not ignored here. A friend of mine attending jr. high in Norcal at the time remembered being told just days before by his science teachers that man would never go into outer space. After Sputnik, he and his friends were berated for being so lazy as to let the godless Commies slip ahead of us!

Afterwards, he and others of his school founded or joined various rocket clubs springing up around the area. They didn't get as far with their space jaunts as did the celebrated Rocket Boys of October Sky, but still it sounds fun to so go against what had heretofore been a paradigm.

A couple of other notes about the R-7, from my own experience.

Most significantly, an Australian satellite engineer I once knew had actually been invited to the old Bailonur facility where the R-7 at the time (late 1990's to early 2000's) was still being made. Boy I would have liked to have been on that trip! As astonishing a feat of modern engineering as it was, the R-7 still conformed to the autocratic model of the old Soviet Union.

This is to say, that one of the ways people survived was to become indispensable. Therefore, everything was done by specialists, which in the old Union meant people who learnt how to perform particular tasks and crafts in a certain subjective way that only they knew. No, these people didn't train apprentices or anything like that, in fact anyone who did things their way or better were actively considered enemies, people as likely to send them to the Gulag as the friendly local commissar.

The whole thing sounded not unlike old guilds and associations from past times. Indeed, ever wonder why no one can duplicate medieval archways or Chinese Celadon pottery anymore? In the case of the R-7, even in those days, one guy and one guy only did the welding for the framework that held a particular section that I believe was essential to hold the boosters and the core rocket assembly together.

'And what happens if he retires?' I asked my source. He shrugged and said simply, "No more R-7 rockets." And that my friends, is how legends in real life die, with but a change in status.

My own observation was that of the R-7's numerical designation. Now all Soviet rockets were direct descendants of the infamous V-2, in fact the V-2 is the R-1 in Soviet lexicon. After that, you had the R-2 which was an incremental improvement, the R-3 and G-4 which were design studies and apparently never made it to a workshop, the R-5 which was a forerunner to the storied SCUD, and then the R-7.

So what happened to the R-6? There have been some fine attempts to hypothesize an intermediate between the R-5 and the R-7; in truth, one would think such a grandiose leap would demand one. The truth is though, Russian engineering for some reason seems averse to the number 6.

I can think of another example. The BT tank series started with the American Christie tank which was designated the BT-1. Afterwards, once again there was the BT-2 to the BT-5, which became the BT-7, from which came that legendary war winner, the T-34. So what happened to the BT-6?

Apparently, what could have been the BT-6 was simply considered an improved BT-5. And that was that, the nomenclature was crushed under the tank treads of standard Soviet bureaucratic progress. If there are other examples of Soviet/Russian Hexaphobia, I'll list them here and I'd love to hear of them. 

Maybe it's like the odd Japanese phobia about the number four. 'Shi' or four can also be translated as 'Death.' That is why you will rarely find things numbered in four in Japan. I'd be interested in knowing if this is a similar case with six in Russia.