Soviet Space Deceptions - not so many after
all!
Sven Grahn, Sollentuna,
Sweden

When the space age started in
1957 the thirst for information about space ventures was unquenchable, both from
the public and from the media. A situation quickly emerged where the U.S. space
efforts were well publicized with plenty of technical and human-interest details
but unsuccessful, and the Soviet space launches were conducted in secrecy and
therefore failures were never revealed. The technical details about Soviet space
ventures were meagre. Sometimes they were not correct, outright fabrications,
like the well known disinformation about the location of the launch site for
Yuri Gagarin - thoroughly explored by Jim Oberg. Interestingly, up until
Gagarin's flight, Soviet public statements about their space launches were, as
far as I can ascertain, truthful, but meagre in technical details. Yuri
Gagarin's and Gherman Titov's flights generated the first cases of deliberate
disinformation about Soviet space launches. The half-truths about the mode of
landing of Gagarin and Titov are other cases that have been explored by Jim
Oberg, who has also extensively covered the retouching of photos to remove
cosmonauts that had left the program for various reasons.

The "Great Vostok Configuration
Myth"
Some
technical information released by the Soviet authorities at the time were very
accurate. For example, on 7 August 1961, TASS issued a communiqué about the
continued flight of Vostok-2 and repeated the radio frequencies used by the
cosmonaut (20.006 MHz, 143.625 MHz), but added that the reports from the
cosmonaut on 143.625 MHz werefrequency modulated
with a deviation of ± 30 kHz! Why would
such technical detail be released? Well, the flight would last quite a long
time, and many people around the world would have the chance to listen in. To
create maximum excitement and "propaganda effect" it was essential that
listeners around the world would be able to tune in, but it was also important
that people did so, in order to avoid any claim from the West that the whole
flight was a fake!

But, the Vostok flights
generated some grand pieces of disinformation. It started with the launch
picture! For some reasons those who directed the media coverage around the
Gagarin flight felt compelled to publish some kind of picture of the launch -
and the result was the one shown on the left, released in Moscow on April 14,
1961, alleged to show the nose of the Vostok launcher rising through cloud! Why
publish such a completely retouched photo after all? Maybe to tell everyone that
the launch vehicle was secret and that revealing it would give the West
dangerous information? Showing such a retouched picture is a sort of
bragging!

Naturally the interest in the
Gagarin flight was so high that some kind of public display of the very heavy
spaceship was necessary, but without revealing some essential details about the
spacecraft. One should remember, that at this time, the sister ship of Vostok,
the Zenit-2 spy satellite had not flown yet, and revealing the configuration of
Vostok would reveal the configuration of Zenit, from which Western intelligence
could glean details about its performance as a spy satellite. Also, the very
simple shape of the re-entry vehicle may have been regarded as a bit of
embarrassing to show to experts in the West, while NASA was designing Mercury,
Gemini and Apollo, the two latter with re-entry vehicles that could manoeuvre
because of their shape. So, there were plenty of reasons to keep the actual
configuration of Vostok secret for some time.

The next
step in the Vostok publicity campaign was therefore quite brilliant. A mock-up
of the last stage of the carrier rocket and the shroud covering the Vostok was
shown at the Tushino air display in July, 1961. The shroud even included the
opening for the the catapult. But - the mock-up had a confusing addition. It had
an annular aerodynamic fin arrangement at the back. Whether this was added as a
device to keep the nose of the mock-up pointing in the direction of flight or
intended as disinformation is hard to know. Perhaps someone in Russia can shed
light on this? However, this annular fin now became a solid part of the "Vostok
configuration myth" as we shall see. It is a bit strange that nobody in the West
was able to interpret the shroud opening for the catapult as evidence for a
spherical capsule. The strange thing about the Tushino mock-up is that it
actually carried real telemetry antennas on the last stage of the carrier
rocket.

At about
the same time, i.e. in July 1961, the Soviet Union released a movie called "With
Gagarin to the Stars". In this movie there was a still picture showing the
mating of the shroud to the Vostok mounted on the last stage of the carrier
rocket. It is strange that this picture is absolutely free from fakes, and does
not show the annular ring, but still was seen as confirming the Tushino display!
The keen observer noticed the similarity between the last stage and that of Luna
1! Pictures of the catapulted container for the dogs carried on Sputnik 5-10 had
been released and their configuration obviously added to the confusion as we can
see from the picture below. It is a Vostok configuration sketch the seems to
have been generated by engineers at the Bendix Corporation and published in
German magazine "Raketentechnik und Raumfahrtforschung" (No. 1, 1962). It is
easy to sneer at sketches like these in this day and age, but remember what the
situation was like 36 years ago. The person who drew this sketch must be
forgiven for forgetting the heat shield and other essential parts of a manned
spaceship. He even got position of the cosmonaut wrong - on his
belly!

The "Vostok configuration myth" got
another injection of half-truths and disinformation with the release of the film
about Gherman Titov's flight "To the Stars Again" in October 1961. In several
scenes the orbital motion of Vostok 2 was illustrated using a model of Vostok
that retained the annular fin or "stabilizing ring" at the base, added
absolutely correct details about radio antennas and thermal shutters at the base
of the craft. But - it added another fantastic piece of disinformation: two
little wings on each side of the body (or "canard control surfaces" as Missiles
& Rockets called them). Also a green band around the waist for thermal
control was also added, and mentioned in technical descriptions of the craft -
this is obviously a non-existent part, isn't it?

It is strange that the little
cylinders with pointed noses that were seen on the stabilizing ring of the
Tushino mock-up had been modified and lacked the little nose-caps. Why change a
little detail like this? Artistic license or a desire to make the craft look
more real and less like a sci-fi creation? But, half the truth of configuration
of Vostok was now out in the open. The top of the re-entry vehicle is obviously
a sphere and the size of camera that can be put on board Vostok for
reconnaissance purposes is now quite obvious. The canards certainly do a good
job at hiding the true shape of the re-entry vehicle. It is hard to imagine
there is a sphere behind the canards!

Well, let us now examine how
this movie model was interpreted by the media. The sketches below come from the
now defunct magazine Missiles & Rockets. I must say I accepted these
configuration sketches as the undiluted truth when I first saw them in the
magazine shelves of the American Library (run by the U.S. Information Service)
on the top floor of "Hotel Stockholm" at the Norrmalmstorg Square in downtown
Stockholm, a place that I could reach during the lunch break at my high school.
I went there about twice a week to read Missiles & Rockets, Aviation Week
and to pick up the mimeographed news releases about U.S. space exploits that
were available at the Library. I have kept old, brown photo-copies (Yes, real
photo-copies, no Xeroxes around in those days) of these configuration sketches.
Instead of letting them fade away in my files I have put them on
here.

In the
December 18, 1961 issue of Missiles and Rockets the model of Vostok 2 shown in
the film about Titov's spaceflight had prompted this interpretation of the
launch configuration of Vostok. The canards are longer than in the movie and the
stabilizing ring lacks the little cylinders. The thermal shutters are included,
but shown somewhat stylized. In the accompanying text, the magazine says that
"Soviet officials said Vostok II was different from Vostok I and the wings
were new. They connected them with maneuvers Maj. Gherman Titov reportedly
carried out during the last orbits of his 17½-orbit Aug. 6 flight, when he was
in the denser regions of the atmosphere". Yet another piece of
disinformation! Who concocted this whole story.....?

The magazine continued:
"There has been continued speculation in the west that Vostok's were winged
and that they were being designed as a military spacecraft. the model, however,
is the most concrete evidence to date that this is the case.....There are
reports that Russia is working on orbital rendezvous. the various control
surfaces of Vostok may be designed for the necessary maneuverability in space."
Well, they got one thing right - Vostok was being developed as a military
spacecraft.

The crowning achievement of this
disinformation campaign can be seen in the diagram of the Vostoks that Missiles
& Rockets published in its issue of July 9, 1962 (p.9). This sketch contains
almost everything from the Tushino air display and the Vostok 2 film. The artist
has added a Mercury-style heat shield and retro rocket. The window is placed
very far from the pilot and the parachute of the re-entry vehicle is placed at
the apex of the spherical front of the craft. This sketch has very little in
common with the real Vostok - which of course was the purpose of the
disinformation campaign!

The Vostok deception ends -
suddenly!
In my files
there is a clipping from a Swedish newspaper (Stockholms-Tidningen) dated April
30, 1965 showing a picture of Vostok taken at the Exhibition of Economic
Achievements in Moscow where Vostok had been put on display. I have another
newspaper article dated May 3, 1965 where the Novosti description of Vostok is
recounted with the comment that the spherical capsule was the great surprise:
"Gagarin travelled like Baron Münchhausen- on a cannon ball" was the
paper's comment. Aviation Week published pictures from the exhibition in its May
10, 1965 issue.

The actual release of the truth
about Vostok occurred on April 29, 1965. It is interesting that just five weeks
earlier Leonov's flight in Voskhod 2 had taken place and the lid of secrecy
about Vostok was still tightly in place. Of course, everyone thought Voskhod was
a great technological leap over and beyond Vostok, so perhaps that is why Vostok
could now be revealed. Or, the fact that the Soyuz craft was getting nearer to
flight status made Vostok obsolete and therefore possible to put on
display.

In the Soviet documentary film
"Man Steps Into Space" about Leonov's spacewalk, the first glimpses of the
R-7-based launch vehicle for Vostok and Voskhod were shown. This film reached
the West in September 1965. But, it took until the Paris Air Show in June 1967
for the Vostok booster to be shown in full detail! The full-scale replica of the
rocket carried a mock-up of the Vostok spacecraft. Finally, we knew what
Gagarin's chariot looked like. Why was the R-7 revealed at that particular
juncture? Well, perhaps it was no longer the most powerful rocket that the
Soviet Union had at its disposal. The UR-500, Proton, rocket was now being used
more and more and the less powerful rocket could therefore be shown without
revealing the true extent of Soviet capability. In fact, we had to wait another
18 years before the Proton was being shown in public on the occasion of the Vega
launch! By that time, the Energiya rocket was in the final stages of
development, the Proton could be shown without revealing the true extent of
Soviet launch vehicle capability. The logic seems to be same, doesn't it? Anyone
who has knowledge about Soviet censorship policy is invited to comment on this
and the whole article of course!

The last elaborate fake - the configuration of
Soyuz hidden for 18 months
When
Soyuz was launched in April 1967, everyone realized it was a new ship and that
the design must differ from that of Vostok. The disaster that followed shook
everyone and the Soviet Union's space prowess did not seem so overwhelming.
However, the primary objective of the Soyuz 1/2 flight - rendezvous and docking
was brilliantly carried out with two unmanned craft in October 1967, a mere 6
months after the death of Vladimir Komarov in Soyuz 1. Cosmos 186 and 188 were
of course nothing but two Soyuz vehicles. The feat of docking them automatically
was not small and the Soviet publicity machine naturally wanted to take
advantage of this triumph. For some reason, perhaps the continuing investigation
into the death of Komarov, it was deemed necessary to keep the real
configuration of Soyuz secret. Again, it was the shape of the re-entry vehicle
that needed to be hidden. Why?? The picture below was released by Soviet
authorities in early November 1967. The area between the orbital module and
descent vehicle has been heavily retouched to hide the shape of the descent
vehicle. Of course, just a year later the true shape of Soyuz was revealed in
connection with the flight of Georgi Beregovoy in Soyuz 3.

The interesting thing about the
picture below is the fact that all antennas are correctly shown. I used this
picture to determine that the U-shaped antennas at the solar panel tips were
designed for 165-185 MHz. As it turned out this was more accurate than I could
imagine. That is precisely the band in which several telemetry frequencies were
located on early Soyuz craft. In general, I have never been able to detect that
antennas on Soviet spacecraft models or sketches were distorted in any way.
Somewhat surprising, but true - it seems.

The Soviet censors did
perpetrate some lies and fakes, but no so many - actually. Usually, I must
conclude, the information released by Soviet authorities was meagre, but
truthful.

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