Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience, but at last the long wait is over. I present to you Part-IV of...
Part IV Post#1: Teaser IV
Bright sunshine filled the Central Lenin Stadium as Dimitri Kramarov, Chairman of the Glavkosmos space agency, took his seat in the VIP enclosure of the Grand Arena. The air was a pleasantly cool 17 degrees Celsius on this July afternoon as the athletes, performers and dignitaries participating in the opening ceremony waited with varying degrees of patience for the clock to reach 4pm. There was excitement audible within the murmur of the crowd, and Kramarov detected a clear undercurrent of civic pride in the air as Moscow prepared to take its place at the centre of world attention.
Kramarov’s own attention was pulled away from the arena as Dr. Roy Judge, his guest from America’s National Environmental and Space Science Agency, sat down in the next seat and made himself comfortable.
“You’re just in time, Roy Petrovich,” Kramarov said in his careful English. “See, they are almost ready to begin.”
“Sorry, Dimitri,” Judge apologised. “One of the State Department guys wanted to let me know Washington has cleared the Academy of Sciences to get a copy of our Saturn data direct from Houston. Assuming we can sort out the logistics of copying and shipping, you should be getting print-outs of the full data set in the next couple of months.”
“This is good news!” Kramarov enthused. “Our scientists have been very impressed when they saw the first pictures from your Mayflower. They will be most happy to see the raw data.”
“It’s our pleasure, Dimitri! Of course the results would all have been published eventually in any case, but now we can save you the wait.”
“This agreement, it is good for the November encounter also?” Kramarov pressed.
“Absolutely,” Judge confirmed. “We should be able to have some of your people join us in Houston for that one, too, once your Foreign Ministry gives approval, so you’ll be able to see the data as it comes in. Aside from anything else, it’ll be good practice for ‘86 and-”
A sudden fanfare cut Judge off mid-sentence, as the clock struck four and the ceremony officially began. For the next few minutes conversation was impossible as the amplified playing of the orchestra competed with the roar of the crowd. As the opening music came to a climax, the crowd’s cheering for the orchestra tailed off into a polite (though perhaps not altogether
enthusiastic) rumble of applause as Andrei Kirilenko, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and First Secretary of the Communist Party, stepped up to his podium and gave a dignified wave to the cameras. Kramarov peered closely at his country’s leader as he stood for the playing of the State Anthem, but he was unable to make out any signs of the ill health that the Party grape-vine alleged to be plaguing the First Secretary. Perhaps the rumours were wrong after all, as they so often were. After all, no-one had suspected that Shelepin had been unwell until he actually dropped dead, so the gossip mills were certainly fallible. Come to that, the American President’s recent heart attack had been a surprise to most people - although it had become progressively less surprising as the story emerged about the young woman who’d been with him at the time…
As the 1977-vintage Anthem with its revised, de-Stalinised lyrics came to a close and Kramarov and Judge returned to their seats, the American took the opportunity to return to their earlier topic.
“So Dimitri, where do we stand on providing a payload for your next Mars shot?”
Kramarov shrugged non-committedly. “This I must confirm with my colleagues at OKB-1, but in principle we do not have a problem with this. As long as you are able to meet our mass, power and volume limits, of course.”
“Chelomei is causing you problems?” Judge asked directly, homing in on the key issue as he had an unerring (and slightly irritating) habit of doing.
“We are all comrades, we all work for the same goals,” Kramarov replied. Judge gave him a skeptical look. For two decades the West had assumed that the Soviet space effort was a centrally-directed, monolithic enterprise. Improved relations in the past few years, and the closer working relationships that led to, had gradually disabused them of that notion, although they thankfully remained unaware of the full extent of the in-fighting between the Design Bureaux. “Vladimir Nikolayevich will come around. A Russian probe, built by Chelomei and carrying an instrument from some poor American scientists who need our help?” Another shrug. “It will look splendid on the front page of
Pravda.”
Judge chuckled. “Well, just remind him that we’re planning our own Mars landing for mid-decade. Getting an early ride with his probe is a great opportunity for us, but it’s not the only game in town.”
Kramarov nodded in agreement, as on the arena floor the various national teams, led by Greece and then proceeding alphabetically, began marching out into the stadium to cheers from the crowds. The Afghan team, Kramarov noted, was smaller than most, but given the civil war raging in the country he was amazed they’d been able to assemble an official team at all. From the way the Army had been pestering him and the other Chief Designers for better reconnaissance imagery and satellite communications coverage along - and indeed across - the USSR’s southern border, Kramarov knew better than most that the Kremlin was nowhere near as neutral in the conflict as it publicly claimed. With an American army camped next door in an attempt to hold down Iran, the US could hardly be surprised at such Soviet interest, but the White House hadn’t called them out on it so far. It looked to Kramarov like a tacit
quid-pro-quo had formed:
You don’t bother us in Iran, we won’t bother you in Afghanistan. Still, it wasn’t a topic the Chief Designer intended to raise with his guest.
The celebrations continued for the next hour in a monotonous display of extravagance. After the athletes’ parade came the speech of the IOC president, then Kirilenko’s official announcement of the start of the XXII Olympiad. The exchange of flags was made, followed by the Olympic anthem and the lighting of the torch. And so on and so forth… Kramarov and Judge used the time to go over a few more of the topics they planned to discuss in the formal meeting the next day, like an extension of the Space-Based Disaster Beacon network (to which the Soviets would agree) and a proposed sharing of near real time meteorological data (which would emphatically
not be agreed - the Red Army considered weather satellite data as a critical strategic asset that was not to be shared with an adversary, even when such sharing would serve to improve their own forecasts). Kramarov was about to broach the subject of coordinating observations from their respective Halley probes when the loudspeakers made an announcement in Russian, French and English. “Now we go to a live broadcast from the Chasovoy-3 space station!”
On the giant video screen at the end of the stadium (“A triumph of Soviet electronical engineering!”) a grainy, monochrome image of cosmonauts Yuri Malinov and Timur Barinov appeared, as the speakers relayed a crackling radio link. Kramarov mentally crossed his fingers as the connection was made. His people had been working 24/7 for the past three weeks to make this broadcast possible, checking and re-checking the connections linking the Central Lenin Stadium to the Podlipki ground station on the outskirts of Moscow. They’d even had the station make a dedicated manoeuvre the previous week to ensure it would be over the horizon for the longest possible time during the broadcast. What worried Kramarov most though was that something might go wrong on the station’s side. Chasovoy-3 had been launched just three years ago, but heavy usage meant that it was aging quickly. Last month they had suffered a partial loss of telemetry due to a faulty transmitter on the station, and the month before that the metallurgical furnace had to be shut down when a seal had failed and fumes entered the workspace. If something were to go wrong now, during a live broadcast that would be seen around the world..!
“Greetings from the crew of Chasovoy-3!” came Malinov’s crackling, but clearly distinguishable voice. “On behalf of the people of the Soviet Union, we wish all athletes competing in the Moscow Olympics a happy start and good fortune!”
Kramarov’s tension eased as the broadcast continued without any hiccups. He turned to Judge, intending to make a small joke of his relief that all had gone to plan, but stopped short. The American was watching the screen with an unreadable expression on his face. As Barinov added his own greetings over the radio, Kramarov thought he saw a twitch in Judge’s features, and understood. Immersed as he was in the day-to-day problems of running the Soviet space programme, with its schedule delays, equipment faults, and endless bureaucracy, it was sometimes easy for Kramarov to lose sight of just how incredible an undertaking they were involved in. To many people - most, perhaps - space flight was something in the background of their lives. Something they might briefly follow, like a new TV drama, before switching it off and carrying on with their daily routine. Even within the space industry, there were plenty for whom it was just a place of work like any other. But not for Kramarov, and, it seemed not, for Judge either. Space flight, especially manned space flight, was something amazing and rare and special.
Karmarov, Judge and their respective superiors had proved that they could set aside old rivalries to work together in the unmanned exploration of space. Could the Olympian ideal of friendship and cooperation be extended to manned spaceflight as well?