How the Soviet Union built the road to the stars - The R7 Rocket

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The R-7 family of rockets is probably the most famous and the most important series of rockets in the Soviet and even human history.

Engineering behind this rocket brought the first satellite and human into space and led to the development of Soyuz rocket which has been the workhorse of Soviet, Russian and even international space community for many decades.

Today we’ll talk about the space pioneers, engineers, cosmonauts, politics and betrayal. How many lives were lost throughout the years and how the Soyuz almost never came to be.

Strap in for a wild ride through history and see how the humans found the way to the stars.

The main advantage the US had over USSR in the 50s is the means to deliver the nuclear payload. Moscow wasn’t as far away from US air bases as the DC, or pretty much any other US city was, from the Soviet ones.

So, the Soviets started developing new ballistic missiles with their experiences from the captured German V-1 and V-2 rockets and documents.

When Nikita Khrushchev came to power, he made it a number 1 priority to develop new ballistic missiles capable of delivering the end of the world.

R-1 was a direct copy of V-2, and R-2 was a larger R-1 with bigger range, but in early 50s, Sergey Karalyov, the father of Soviet space program, was put in charge of developing the new rocket which could put the scales in balance.

And so, started the development of Semyorka R-7.

Requirements set for this project were range of 8000km and a payload capacity of 3t. Soviet nuclear warheads at the time were very bulky and heavy and this is a very important fact that we’ll get to in a minute.

The rocket itself was unique in design.
A 2-stage beast powered by a total of 5 engines.

The core engine was RD-108 supported by 4 vernier thrusters with further 4 boosters mounted around the first stage carrying RD-107 engines and 2 vernier thrusters each powering this massive rocket.

All engines would be started upon launch and after around a minute and a half, boosters would detach from the rocket and form the legendary Karalyov’s cross.

Four boosters were positioned at an angle and fixed on 2 points to the main body. When the fuel was spent and they were ready to detach, first the bottom anchor point would release, pushing the boosters upwards, and only then the upper anchor would release and push the boosters away from the rocket.

And then… the space ballet occurs.

An amazing visual effect could be spotted even from the ground, where the boosters would continue to fall and move away from the rocket, symmetrically.

Back to the rocket, or more precisely to the thing under the hood – the engine.

The engines powering the thing were a true masterpiece of the era. They were powered by a mix of liquid oxygen and kerosene, and the innovation here was the fuel mixture control, allowing the engines to spend oxygen and kerosene in the same proportions between boosters and therefore maximizing the power and the utility of each booster before separation, along with making the flight path corrections much easier due to symmetrical weight distribution.

Man behind these legendary engines was Valentin Glushko, and he would go on to lead the Soviet space program in the future, but more on that later.

With the design sound and all the eyes facing towards the stars, it was the time for the first flight.