Scientist Boris Evseevich Chertok postage stamp. Boris Evseevich Chertok
On December 14, 2011, the legendary designer of space technology, associate and deputy of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Academician Boris Evseevich CHERTOK, passed away. He passed away just two and a half months before his centenary. Novaya Gazeta has repeatedly published conversations with him and essays about him. It so happened that a month before his death, Boris Evseevich gave a long interview to our observer, Russian pilot-cosmonaut Yuri Baturin. We were preparing its publication for the centenary of the scientist. Did not happen. In all likelihood, this was the last interview of the oldest veteran national cosmonautics. We offer the reader a fragment of the conversation.
We drink tea with Boris Evseevich Chertok in the memorial house-museum of S.P. Korolev, branch of the Museum of Cosmonautics. It is a stone's throw from Academician Korolev Street. Boris Evseevich is sitting on a small sofa. In fact, the sofa is the most valuable exhibit, and no one is allowed to sit on it. Except Chertok.
- Boris Evseevich, when they were preparing the First Sputnik, they created a ship for the flight of Yu.A. Gagarin, and the Chief Designer, and you and your colleagues were secret people. How do you compare your position then with today's full openness?
- We are now in a holy place for astronautics. From this house S.P. Korolev went to work, returned here. And nobody knew. I've been here too. We considered it normal that we were classified. After all, we worked on two fronts: on the one hand, we were engaged in astronautics, on the other, we were forging a nuclear missile shield. In this our activity differed from the work of partners, as we say now, and then - opponents in the cold war.
They have a military (Pentagon) and a civilian department (NASA) each doing its own thing. And they were able to solve the problem of landing a man on the moon and took a leading position. And we were very worried about this. I felt shame that we, having become the first in space, ceded the Moon to the Americans.
- The moon was already difficult for the Soviet Union then?
- Once I was summoned to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Military-Industrial Commission. I had to report on the reasons for the failures. Why is there still no soft landing on the moon? Why have we still not received a panorama of the lunar surface, although we have spent so many launches?
Then they tried to carry out such an explanation. The Americans landed safely, because we showed them that there is not deep dust, but hard ground - sit down, they say, calmly. It turns out that we, Soviet specialists, somehow helped them. Even so.
I sat at the table next to S.P. Korolyov. They give me a word. And suddenly the heavy hand of Sergei Pavlovich pushes me back into the Kremlin chair.
- I will answer.
“We have your deputy Chertok reporting on the agenda, who is directly responsible for our failures ...” says the host.
— I am the Chief Designer. Can I answer for my deputy?
Ministers sit at the table. Next to Keldysh. It must be said that the ministers of that time were not as dumb as those who are shown to us today on TV. The word of each minister was very weighty. In the depths, not at the table, D.F. Ustinov, who was in charge of defense problems:
- Of course, give the floor to Sergei Pavlovich.
And Korolev very calmly said:
- Of course, Chertok will be able to report now. Look how many posters he has hanging. He will explain to you for each launch, when and what happened and who is to blame. But there is a process of cognition, and in it such failures have occurred throughout human history. And they are happening today. And you shouldn't be surprised.
Ustinov supported him:
- I think everything is clear. It's time to end the discussion.
- I want to promise you that in the next launch we will get a panorama of the moon.
Indeed, the next launch took place about a month after Korolev's death. The panorama of the lunar surface is now hanging in my office at RSC Energia in the most honorable place. But Korolev did not see her. And it still hurts me terribly, if you like. ( long pause.) But what to do?!
— Boris Evseevich, in September at the 24th World Congress of Cosmonauts in Moscow* you said that the Moon should be made a new "continent" of the Earth. Is this your deliberate position?
— Yes, in the coming years (not decades!) lunar bases should become as common as bases in Antarctica. This is the task of the new generation working in space technology. I'm sure. And therefore, where I can, I speak out and shout out the slogan: the Moon should become in the near future part of the earth's civilization. The population there, of course, will be small. But there will be reliable bases for solving scientific problems.
— What do you think about the development of Chinese astronautics?
- Do you want a joke? Somewhere in a distant universe, brothers in mind have discovered us, built a ship and are flying towards the Earth. Approached, and on our planet a huge inscription: "Made in China."
The anecdote, of course, is evil, but it is "far thinking", I would call it that. China has achieved outstanding results. And quite naturally. Today, Chinese cosmonautics still lags behind both Russian and American ones, but in ten years they will lose our nose. Sooner or later they will fly to the moon. And if the inscription “Made in China” appears there, there is no need to be surprised.
“Maybe we should take a break, Boris Evseevich?” More tea?
I don't mind tea. Tea, it seems, is also a Chinese invention.
- If we return to Korolev's thought, there have always been failures both in knowledge and in astronautics. So they are still valid today?
- Today's failures? I am not looking for specific reasons, but am satisfied with the memories of dozens of emergency commissions, where I was chairman or at least a member. We have always tried to understand the root cause.
And, as a rule, the root cause turned out to be in the human factor: someone committed negligence or sloppiness. If they found someone to blame, they did not so much deal with punishment as they taught everyone else by this example.
Space technology requires exceptionally detailed ground training. And you have to work on a spacecraft on Earth much more than when it has already entered orbit. All large space systems require a good thinking ground crew. When we look at the hall of the Mission Control Center, in addition to computers, it is densely populated with literate people who, each in his own part, understand and, if necessary, can interfere with the work of the spacecraft. But what happened to "Phobos"! ..
When a spacecraft goes into space, any malfunctions can be found on it, any emergency situations may arise. But he must vote. It has a telemetry system on it, which should scream and explain what happened on board: “Yes, I have an emergency situation. Yes, I can't do the main task. That's where I am…” And “Phobos” is silent, like a meteorite. This is beyond what today's space technology allows. And that's why it surprises me.
- And yet why is Russia starting to lag behind?
- It is unfortunate that huge funds that could be spent on space exploration to solve very important national economic and defense tasks go the other way, for example, on expensive yachts, the cost of each of which is dozens of good spacecraft, for example, to solve problems of remote sensing of the Earth.
We have a sharply conspicuous gap between a class or group of very rich people and the servants and people of the very poor around them. The gap is larger than in the "classical" capitalist countries. It's very annoying! These are problems social system that has been established in the country. How the leadership of the state will be and whether it will be able (and whether it wants) to correct the system, I do not undertake to predict. Thank God, I'm about to turn a hundred years old. And my biggest concern is if I make it to that date. And if I make it, then in which company and how to mark it.
Chertok Boris Evseevich
Book 1. Rockets and people
annotation
The author of this book, Boris Evseevich Chertok, is a legendary man. He is from that glorious generation of the first rocket scientists to which S.P. Korolev, V.P. Glushko, N.A. Pilyugin, A.M. Isaev, V.I. Kuznetsov, V.P. Barmin, M.S. Ryazansky, M.K. Yangel.
Back in the 1930s, he was one of the creators of equipment for the latest aircraft at that time, then for 20 years he worked directly with S.P. Korolev, for many years he was his deputy.
Corresponding member Russian Academy sciences, full member International Academy astronautics, B.E. Chertok is still an active scientist today: he is the chief scientific consultant of NPO Energia, the chairman of the section of the scientific council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on traffic control and navigation.
For outstanding services in the field of development of automatic control systems and space exploration B.E. Chertok was repeatedly marked by high awards of the Motherland. Most recently, in 1992, the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded B.E. Chertoka gold medal named after academician B.N. Petrov.
Despite the heavy workload of scientific and design work, Boris Evseevich considers it his duty to pass on the accumulated experience to the young. Many students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Moscow State technical university named after N.E. Bauman are introduced to rocket technology at the lectures of Professor Chertok.
Boris Evseevich is a fascinating storyteller, his memory keeps many of the most interesting episodes that formed the history of the conquest of space. These episodes and reflections on the path traveled formed the basis of the book that you are holding in your hands.
B.E. Chertok is a generalist in the field of aviation and space electrical engineering, control problems of large systems, motion control and navigation. Naturally, he gives some preference to these directions in his memoirs. He constantly communicated with the largest scientists, organizers of science and industry, the most prominent engineers who paved the way for humanity into space. They left us their practical achievements in technology, scientific works valuable for specialists, but almost none of them shed light on the environment in which they worked, and did not publish memoirs in which the personal is intertwined with the public. The more valuable is B.E. Chertok, whose life has been inextricably linked with rocket science and astronautics for more than half a century. The author's description of events and people, like that of any memoirist, is colored by his personal perception, but we must pay tribute to his desire for maximum objectivity. The memoirs that make up this book end in 1956. I hope that a book about the subsequent events in astronautics will be published, almost completed by Boris Evseevich.
Academician A.Yu. ISHLINSKY
Chapter 1. From aviation to rocketry
About time and contemporaries
I was eighty years old when I imagined that I had that share of literary abilities, which is sufficient to tell "about the time and about myself." I began to work in this field in the hope that the favor of fate would make it possible to carry out the planned work.
Of the sixty-five years of my career, the first fifteen I worked in the aviation industry. Here I went up the stairs from a worker to the head of an experimental design team. In subsequent years, my life was connected with rocket and space technology. Therefore, the main content of the book is memories of the formation and development of rocket and space technology and the people who created it.
I must warn you that the book offered to the reader is not a historical study. In any memoir, narrative and reflection are inevitably subjective. When describing events and people who have become widely known, there is a danger of exaggerating the involvement and role of the author's personality. My memories seem to be no exception. But this is inevitable simply because, first of all, you remember what is connected with you.
I checked the main facts against my notebooks, archival documents, earlier published publications and the stories of my comrades, to whom I am inexpressibly grateful for the useful clarifications.
Despite the totalitarian regime, the peoples of the former Soviet Union enriched the world civilization with scientific and technological achievements, which took their rightful place among the main victories of science and technology of the 20th century. In the process of working on my memoirs, I realized with regret how many blank spots there are in the history of the giant man-made systems created by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. If earlier the absence of such works was justified by the regime of secrecy, now an objective presentation of the history of the achievements of domestic science and technology is threatened by ideological devastation. The oblivion of the history of one's own science and technology is motivated by the fact that its origins date back to the Stalinist era or the period of the so-called "Brezhnev stagnation".
The most striking achievements in atomic, rocket, space and radar technology were the result of the purposeful and organized actions of Soviet scientists and engineers. The colossal creative work of the organizers of industry and the scientific and technical intelligentsia of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and, to one degree or another, all the republics of the former Soviet Union has been invested in the creation of these systems. The rejection of the people from the history of their own science and technology cannot be justified by any ideological considerations.
I consider myself a member of a generation that has suffered irreparable losses and experienced the most difficult trials in the 20th century. A sense of duty was instilled in this generation from childhood. Duty to the people, the Motherland, parents, to future generations and even to all of humanity. From myself and my contemporaries, I was convinced that this sense of duty is very persistent. It was one of the strongest stimuli for the creation of these memoirs. The people I remember acted largely under the influence of a sense of duty. I have lived through many and will be indebted to them if I do not write about the civic and scientific feats they accomplished.
Rocket and space technology was not created on an even and empty place. It is worth remembering that during the Second World War Soviet Union produced more aircraft and artillery systems than the one that opposed us Nazi Germany. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had a huge scientific and technical potential and production capacity of the defense industry. After the victory over Germany, her developments in the field of rocket technology were studied by engineers and scientists from the USA and the USSR. Each of these countries used captured materials in their own way, and this played a certain role in the post-war stage of the development of rocket technology. However, all subsequent achievements of our cosmonautics are the result of the activities of domestic scientists, engineers and workers.
The author of this book, Boris Evseevich Chertok, is a legendary man. He is from that glorious generation of the first rocket scientists to which S.P. Korolev, V.P. Glushko, N.A. Pilyugin, A.M. Isaev, V.I. Kuznetsov, V.P. Barmin, M.S. Ryazansky, M.K. Yangel.
Back in the 1930s, he was one of the creators of equipment for the latest aircraft at that time, then for 20 years he worked directly with S.P. Korolev, for many years he was his deputy.
Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, full member of the International Academy of Astronautics, B.E. Chertok is still an active scientist today: he is the chief scientific consultant of NPO Energia, the chairman of the section of the scientific council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on traffic control and navigation.
For outstanding services in the field of development of automatic control systems and space exploration B.E. Chertok was repeatedly marked by high awards of the Motherland. Most recently, in 1992, the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded B.E. Chertok gold medal named after Academician B.N. Petrov.
Despite the heavy workload of scientific and design work, Boris Evseevich considers it his duty to pass on the accumulated experience to the young. Many students of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Moscow State Technical University named after N.E. Bauman are introduced to rocket technology at the lectures of Professor Chertok.
Boris Evseevich is a fascinating storyteller, his memory keeps many interesting episodes that formed the history of the conquest of space. These episodes and reflections on the path traveled formed the basis of the book that you are holding in your hands.
B.E. Chertok is a generalist in the field of aviation and space electrical engineering, control problems of large systems, motion control and navigation. Naturally, he gives some preference to these directions in his memoirs. He constantly communicated with the largest scientists, organizers of science and industry, the most prominent engineers who paved the way for humanity into space. They left us their practical achievements in technology, scientific works valuable for specialists, but almost none of them shed light on the environment in which they worked, and did not publish memoirs in which the personal is intertwined with the public. The more valuable is B.E. Chertok, whose life has been inextricably linked with rocket science and astronautics for more than half a century. The author's description of events and people, like that of any memoirist, is colored by his personal perception, but we must pay tribute to his desire for maximum objectivity. The memoirs that make up this book end in 1956. I hope that a book about the subsequent events in astronautics will be published, almost completed by Boris Evseevich.
Academician A.Yu. ISHLINSKY
From aviation to rocket technology
About time and contemporaries
I was eighty years old when I imagined that I had that share of literary abilities, which is sufficient to tell "about the time and about myself." I began to work in this field in the hope that the favor of fate would make it possible to carry out the planned work.
Of the sixty-five years of my career, the first fifteen I worked in the aviation industry. Here I went up the stairs from a worker to the head of an experimental design team. In subsequent years, my life was connected with rocket and space technology. Therefore, the main content of the book is memories of the formation and development of rocket and space technology and the people who created it.
I must warn you that the book offered to the reader is not a historical study. In any memoir, narrative and reflection are inevitably subjective. When describing events and people who have become widely known, there is a danger of exaggerating the involvement and role of the author's personality. My memories seem to be no exception. But this is inevitable simply because, first of all, you remember what is connected with you.
I checked the main facts against my notebooks, archival documents, earlier published publications and the stories of my comrades, to whom I am inexpressibly grateful for the useful clarifications.
Despite the totalitarian regime, the peoples of the former Soviet Union enriched the world civilization with scientific and technological achievements, which took their rightful place among the main victories of science and technology of the 20th century. In the process of working on my memoirs, I realized with regret how many blank spots there are in the history of the giant man-made systems created by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. If earlier the absence of such works was justified by the regime of secrecy, now an objective presentation of the history of the achievements of domestic science and technology is threatened by ideological devastation. The oblivion of the history of one's own science and technology is motivated by the fact that its origins date back to the Stalinist era or the period of the so-called "Brezhnev stagnation".
The most striking achievements in atomic, rocket, space and radar technology were the result of the purposeful and organized actions of Soviet scientists and engineers. The colossal creative work of the organizers of industry and the scientific and technical intelligentsia of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and, to one degree or another, all the republics of the former Soviet Union has been invested in the creation of these systems. The rejection of the people from the history of their own science and technology cannot be justified by any ideological considerations.
I consider myself a member of a generation that has suffered irreparable losses and experienced the most difficult trials in the 20th century. A sense of duty was instilled in this generation from childhood. Duty to the people, the Motherland, parents, to future generations and even to all of humanity. From myself and my contemporaries, I was convinced that this sense of duty is very persistent. It was one of the strongest stimuli for the creation of these memoirs. The people I remember acted largely under the influence of a sense of duty. I have lived through many and will be indebted to them if I do not write about the civic and scientific feats they accomplished.
Rocket and space technology was not created on an even and empty place. It is worth recalling that during the Second World War, the Soviet Union produced more aircraft and artillery systems than Nazi Germany, which opposed us. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had a huge scientific and technical potential and production capacity of the defense industry. After the victory over Germany, her developments in the field of rocket technology were studied by engineers and scientists from the USA and the USSR. Each of these countries used captured materials in their own way, and this played a certain role in the post-war stage of the development of rocket technology. However, all subsequent achievements of our cosmonautics are the result of the activities of domestic scientists, engineers and workers.
I am trying to briefly talk about the foundation on which astronautics began to be built, and about the role of individuals in the history of this area of science and technology. In the history of our rocket and space technology, the decisive role belongs to Academician S.P. Korolev and the Council of Chief Designers created under his leadership, which had no precedent in the history of world science.
I.E. Chertok reports at one of the first meetings of the Council of Chiefs. Left to right: B.E. Chertok, V.P. Barmin, M.S. Ryazansky, S.P. Korolev, V.I. Kuznetsov, V.P. Glushko, Ya.A. Pilyugin
The original members of the Council were:
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev - Chief Designer of the missile system as a whole;
Valentin Petrovich Glushko - chief designer of liquid rocket engines;
- Genre:
- The second book of memoirs (1st edition, 1996) of a prominent scientist and designer of rocket and space technology B.E. Chertok (the first published by the Mashinostroenie publishing house in 1994, republished in 1999) thematically continues the story of the creation of the most complex technology, everyday life and holidays of many of its creators. In the center of a fascinating story - S.P. Korolev and his inner circle in the period from 1956 to 1961 was a busy time of launching into space the first artificial satellite of the Earth, the first interplanetary vehicles, the first spacecraft with a man on board. The author also talks about the years of his youth, when he worked in the aviation industry. The book is addressed to a wide range of readers.
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- Genre:
- The third book (1st edition 1997) of the memoirs of a prominent scientist and designer B.E. Chertok (the first book was published by the Mashinostroenie publishing house in 1994, the second - in 1996, the third - in 1997, republished in 1999) will continue the fascinating story about the creation of strategic missiles, about that shaky line between the world and the war on which mankind turned out during the Caribbean crisis, about manned flights from G.S. Titov to V.M. Komarov, on the most complex collisions of space exploration by automatic vehicles. The struggle of various technical ideas, a description of the tragic death of S.P. Queen, the death of V.M. Komarov and Yu.A. Gagarin, the expressive needs of the life and work of the creators of the most powerful rocket and space technology - all this makes the book interesting for a wide range of readers.
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- Genre:
- The fourth book of memoirs of a prominent scientist and designer B.E. Chertok (the first book was published by the Mashinostroenie publishing house in 1994, the second - in 1996, the third - in 1997, republished in 1999) is devoted to the intense period of work on the manned lunar program. The detailed story is accompanied by reflections on why the "moon race" was won by the Americans. The book contains a description of events related to other rocket and space projects of the 1960s - 1970s. The book is addressed to a wide range of readers.
At the end of 1930, Boris Chertok moved to Plant No. 22 (later the Gorbunov Plant), which at that time was the largest aviation enterprise in the country. Here he worked as an electrician for industrial equipment, in 1930-1933 - as an electric radio fitter for aircraft equipment, in 1933-1935 - as a radio engineer for aircraft radio equipment, in 1935-1937 - head of the Design Bureau Design Bureau, in 1937-1938 - head of the design team for aircraft equipment and weapons.
During these years, Boris Chertok developed an automatic electronic bomb release, which was tested. In 1936-1937, without having completed higher education, Chertok was appointed lead aircraft electrical engineer polar expeditions. He participated in the preparation of the aircraft of the Vodop'yanov group's expedition to the North Pole and the Levanevsky aircraft for the transpolar flight Moscow-USA.
In 1934-1940, Boris Chertok studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. The topic of his graduation project was the development of an electrical system for a heavy aircraft at high frequency alternating current. This work was the first serious attempt to introduce new system alternating current to aviation, but with the outbreak of war it was suspended.
From 1940 to 1945, Boris Chertok worked at Viktor Bolkhovitinov's design bureau at plant No. 84, then at plant No. 293 and at NII-1 NKAP (Scientific Research Institute People's Commissariat aviation industry), where he was later appointed head of the department of electrical and special equipment, automation and control.
During the Great Patriotic War Boris Chertok developed automatic weapons control for aircraft and ignition of liquid-propellant rocket engines. He also created a control system and electric ignition of liquid rocket engines, which was used in the first flight of the BI-1 rocket aircraft, carried out in 1942.
In 1945-1947, Boris Chertok was sent to Germany, where he led the work of a group of Soviet specialists in the study of rocket technology. Together with Alexei Isaev, he organized in the Soviet occupation zone (in Thuringia) a joint Soviet-German missile institute "Rabe", which was engaged in the study and development of long-range ballistic missile control technology. On the basis of the institute in 1946 a new institute was created - "Nordhausen", the chief engineer of which was Sergei Korolev.
In August 1946, Boris Chertok was transferred to the position of deputy chief engineer and head of the control systems department of NII-88.
He took part in the study, assembly and first launches of captured V-2 missiles, then in the development, production and testing of their Soviet counterpart R-1, and after that, all subsequent Soviet combat missiles. In 1950, Chertok went to work at OKB-1 (Design Bureau of Sergey Korolev, since 1994 - Rocket and Space Corporation (RKK) Energia named after S.P. Korolev) as deputy head of department No. 5 (department of control systems), head which at that time was Mikhail Yangel.
In 1974, Boris Chertok became deputy general designer on control systems. He worked in this position until 1992; Queen.
Boris Chertok participated in the development and commissioning of the first domestic long-range ballistic missiles, the creation and launch of high-altitude geophysical rockets, space launch vehicles, the first artificial satellites Earth, scientific satellites "Electron", automatic interplanetary stations for flights to the Moon, Mars, Venus, communication satellites "Molniya-1", photographic observation "Zenit", design and creation of the first spaceships, on one of which the first cosmonaut of the planet Yuri Gagarin flew.
Boris Chertok was a designer in the field of development and creation of on-board control systems and electrical systems for rocket and space technology products. He created a scientific school in the field of design, manufacture, testing and application of on-board control systems and electrical systems for missile systems, rocket and space complexes and systems.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
