By the day of astronautics. Continuation of the history of the Soviet Ballistic Center

"Earth is listening." Nesterov.VD 1965

My last article with perhaps a pretentious title caused a lively discussion. To give answers to some of the questions, I decided to post the whole letter of Platonov, without any editing. Especially since it is of historical interest. Of course, this letter was the answer to mine. But all the questions that I asked are well read from the answers.


- Thank you very much, Pavel Sergeevich for the letter and the sent photos!
I answer in stack mode:

1. I will certainly read with pleasure what you have written (although, I confess, I live in continuous time trouble: “Cases are divided into important and urgent, and they are made - necessary!”)
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There are two reasons why I am pleased with our communication:
- I respectfully see in you a person who is interested in the truth of the past, not only by its events, but also by its content, methods, circumstances, mistakes, and +++.
I see my own soul in it. The fact is (I will allow myself these little personal memories) that my parents, in their early youth, met specifically at the museum work at the Kharkov Institute of IRE, the Institute for the Distribution of Natural Science. This is a very interesting, instructive and little-known story of those years. Imagine, the 20s, Kharkov, then white, then red, then the NEP, and from somewhere came a lot of goods, crime ...

And a number of older people in the city decided that they needed to do something with the youth, somehow develop it. And with the support of the Soviet government, they organized this institution. It was a room on the second floor of the Kharkov house, given to the IRE for lectures and a museum, and - with the only employee on the salary - a doorman at the entrance, who was also listed as a supply manager.

The IRE lectured on various topics, with posters pasted all over the city. Excursions were organized and a local history museum was built, in which my father was trained to make stuffed animals and birds killed for this museum while hunting near Kharkov by the participants in the museum itself.

Omitting many details, I will only say that both mother and father as a result of the preparations and even their independent lecture presentations perfectly learned a lot from biology, and from the history of philosophy and much more - from conversations with their patrons (one of them was always called name, and with a capital letter: Teacher). From the youth of this IRE came out some very famous people. One of them is the famous Soviet planetary scientist Barbashov.
Here it is important that since childhood my parents tamed me to respect the romance of the history of knowledge and the history of people and to honor the passion of the museum digging activities in the past.
And I like what you do, and, most importantly, how you do it.
Your one opus about the Surveyor is worth a lot!
- And the second reason: I like how you write, and what you write ...
In a word, you will obviously find in me a "gracious reader."

2. Thanks for the Pennant. I will go to the museum, definitely. This is a very expensive gift for me (we in the civilized world cherish the memory of our life in pieces of paper, photographs and souvenir items, and they say that the Indians had stones, wood and scalps for this). Because of their youth, these Vympels made me laugh, to whom we send them there? And now the sign. and the significance of this is absolutely clear, thanks to the one who invented and organized it! It could well be a joint venture, it was an indestructible romantic affairs and events.

Here is an example: 61 years old - they take out a rocket from the MIC to the launch, and Zhora and I quickly go to see how she will go. We were still before the checkpoint but already behind the move (with his inscription “Saktan train!”, Which, according to Boris Skotnikov, became the universal greeting, with the obligatory answer: “Saktan was driven!”) - ahead of the green Victory, which suddenly stops, the front door opens, and someone to my surprise, waving his hand to us - go here! It turns out the joint venture! He noticed Zhora! And then there was such a romantic thing - I was delighted! We drove up from the inside of the 1st platform barbed fence, right to the moment when the 7-ki engines with their red plugs began to appear from the huge MIKA gate that was already open, with a large number of people around them. We left after the joint venture and silently stood next to it, until the entire rocket with its then 3 steps and the locomotive pushing it slowly (almost solemnly) drove past us. But that was only the beginning!

We sat back to Victory and right across the field overtook a hundred meters on the rocket, stopped, got out and stood again, seeing the rocket into its short distance here, and for the joint venture (and for me) it was a very long way. And so it was at least 4 times! And the three of us were alone in this field! All others looked at the export and went on business. And the joint venture saw off the rocket before the launch from the heart!
He was indestructible young in soul and romance of his affairs, his soul, in spite of all his enormous life experience, did not grow old until his most tragic death. And I have often felt it at different points of presence at something or even successful moments of communication with him.

In a word, to send the Pennant to the Moon or even far away could well have thought up a joint venture. The authorities were very sober people, and if they came up with it, then for very different reasons ... And it is very interesting to find out how it came about, and who came to mind?

3. Regarding the MCC hall.
Here you touch me for a live string. I will answer with pleasure.

The history of the Hall of Management (as it was called at first), and then the MCC is rather long, curious, partly dramatic, partly - comical (this is in my feeling, although, of course, the people who organized it did what they could and could).

The first control room, which I saw, was and was so called just a big room in the future TsNIIMASH in Podlichki (first there was NII-88 with a German shishak over the gate on the Yaroslavl Highway - we went there, and then this area appeared in Podlipki with our trips already there.).

I was there, it seems only once, and there was no control there, but the name was. Most likely, this hall was also used for receiving business travelers. Then this was our work on the Lavochnitskaya winged Storm, and Dima Hermann Tolstousov and I discussed problems with the head of these works, the senior Kheyfetz (this was an elderly and very competent person who was in the “Hall of Management” (- “Where to go?” - “Go to the Hall of Management" on the 4th (?) Floor) Dima and I set the task of calculating the first BESM trajectory for launching the Storm to the march mode with all the details of trajectory restrictions. Unfortunately, he soon died, as I was told thrombus - in this very hall, when it reached To open the window on the window. But I remembered it very much, I liked his business pressure and understanding of the importance of the details. And he is “senior” because then in Khimki already during the flights to Mars and Venus we worked very fruitfully for many years with an extraordinary person - Volodey Kheifetz - ballistics from the Design Bureau named after Lavochkin, and then - an employee of the IKI, who unexpectedly turned out to be the son of that memorable “older” Heifetz for me).

At that time, and later - when flying to the Moon, the Hall of Control was called a large room with only tables and nothing more. Only tables and a large number of telephones were associated with management procedures.

After the launch of the first satellites, the control processes were transferred to NII-4 in Bolshevo (they, headed by PE Elyasberg, were responsible for issuing “target indications” to all observation points). And at the very first of the unsuccessful flights to Mars, I (answering from our BC for the questions of correction and other control operations on the trajectory) turned out to be in the first Real Management Hall in my life! He made a big impression on me - first and foremost.
First impression: a large hall with one or two desks with telephones at the entrance (GS Narimanov, head of the space affairs NII-4, one of many very cultured military people I met in my life) and KD were sitting behind them. Bushuev - Deputy. The queen is immaculately calm and business-like, looks strictly, but speaks without pressure and on business), and then behind them there is a translucent wall long in the ceiling of this hall with a world map on her and with soldiers translucent behind her. map signs points and trajectories.

And in front of the wall and to the windows of the opposite side of the hall there are two or three rows of identical oak-plywood operator consoles with a semicircular table notch, telephones and a high table stand with a clock and two rows of some switch instruments.
The first impression was respectful - I realized that this was given to us by the flight control room of completely different products.

We, the ballistics, were given a place at the rear and farthest diagonally from the entrance by the console. And here we were sitting together three - with Leonid Shevchenko - ballistics from NII-4 (later when he flew to Venus of a leaky object of WW2 it was he who saw the unnoticed opportunity and somehow thoughtfully in our ballistic team offered immediately understood and hotly picked up, and later and the realized idea of ​​a more reliable solar correction) and - with Alexander Dashkov - ballistics from Korolev (the joint venture at meetings jokedly called him "Graf Dashkov." Sasha Dashkov, a graduate of the Moscow State University, was an enthusiastic celestial mechanics interplanetary flight engineer the person who, together with his subordinate Slava Ivashkin, found a surprisingly beautiful random (not connected with celestial mechanics, but simply a gift of a ballistic case) the property of the lunar vertical nullifying the possible terrible 20 m / s lateral speed with a vertical “soft” landing on the moon which actually saved the project E-6 from closing). And so we sat down, and here I, with tremendous surprise and disappointment, found that there was a clock on the remote, and the rest of the instruments with arrows were painted! I went to look at the other consoles, - there - everything is real!

In a word, on this most distant and possibly unnecessary console, made according to the laws of symmetry and beauty of the hall, in case of the generals looking from afar, these missing instruments were simply drawn.

So we sat for a number of months at this remote control at SRI-4. And this was the era of Monday on Saturday of the Strugatsky brothers with their scientific research institutes FAQ and scientific research institute KOVO. I did not despise NII-4 for this, but I also saw the truth of his life.

At that time, the very beginning of the flight, the role of these control rooms was only in the implementation of the necessary special communication with the test site and with observation points.
With each subsequent flight to Venus, Mars or the Moon at the time of the “head” of NII-4, we found ourselves in various places - where at that moment such special communication was free.

Once it was on Gogol Boulevard, once somewhere in Khamovniki (a soldier showed us a large gate in the courtyard and said that the favorite horse of SM Budyonny stood behind them all the years, and SM often came to see with him).

As a rule, these were premises with tables, and a table with a large number of telephones and their operators. The big bosses, as a rule, were either absent altogether (when there were already ordinary events of the next orbit correction) or were somewhere in the next room, from which someone would sometimes come up with a question about current knowledge of flight parameters.
The most vivid impression on me was left by one of these cases, when we all ended up for the same reason for the need for a special connection - not somewhere, but in the office of Marshal Vasilevsky in the old building of the General Staff on Frunze Street!

Omitting the details of the internal routine, I will only say that I, with a certain shock and curiosity, suddenly found myself in the room from which many events in our history were managed. The impression was uncommon. A huge room with a huge oak desk, a soft sofa and armchairs and in their surroundings - with no less than fifty telephone devices of various types. I think that it was only a waiting room of the office, because, like the joint venture, MB and others with them, they were in the next room a little smaller outside the door and the situation was similar there — it was visible when someone entered or left.

Later, when Yu.K. Khodarev made the famous Yevpatoria point of distant space communications, the Police appeared to transmit the received radio data. these data and all the telemetry began to come to the TsNIIMASH via channels. Therefore, our gatherings strongly moved there. At first there was still this one, described above by me, with a separate room for the authorities, but later all the ballistics began to sit in their room, and the Office Hall became similar to what you have in your picture. I remember both the big screen and the running clock above them.

We were commanded by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kazansky, who was very significant in the history of Soviet space. His task was to form the order of performing the next ballistic calculations, to compare our results and, most importantly, to provide filtering of messages to the control room in terms of their reliability and timeliness. He was a very seasoned servant to the tsar, and by responsibility he was the father to his ballistic soldiers. Thanks to him, the Ballistic Management Group worked in unison, without a slip, like a clock.

I remembered him here because I was continually persuading him that our work (and it consisted in writing out on-line data of operational calculations, interpreting them and transferring some of them to the control room) - we need to somehow automate !
And one way or another, but further development of control automation led to the fact that several television sets were put in the control room (probably more for solidity, - on their screen there was usually a setup picture that reminded me of painted devices in NII-4), and later we were put in a ballistic room a reading camera, under which we could put handwritten text, which would then be seen in the control room with its televisions and telephones.

Much later, in the Hall of Management, the Ariston screen appeared under a digital clock. It was said that by this Ariston Shvernik's niece had solved the acute problem of showing a TV program on the big screen. This was realized with the help of a mirror in the form of a rotating disk with oil poured on it, the profile of which was changed by the electric field generated by the TV signal. A powerful beam of light illuminated this disk, and the relief of such a liquid mirror formed on the screen a reflection of the desired TV image. All the equipment was behind the screen and the image was shown "to the light".

On the huge screen of Ariston in this room, we watched the intercepted transmission of Apollo 11 with their jumps on the Moon in a narrow circle of guests.

The same Ariston was also installed in the now destroyed building with its Lunokhod controls on the point near Simferopol, where we, with great enthusiasm, sitting on Earth, in real-time low-frame television were driving on the Moon!
In a word, then it was a big significant step forward.

Then the situation has changed a lot. Our IPM engineers are under the direction of A.N. Miamlin made an ILU - Information Logic Device - for the implementation of "teletype communication over a telephone channel" of computers in NII-4, in IPM and in TsNIIMASH. The three of us (Kolya Teslenko, Tanya Frolova, and I, as a driver, and their head) quickly wrote the necessary programs (this operation was done by everyone in every way. TC: Slava Nagornykh — the head of the ballistics in Khimki — joked that his specialty is now “Ballistic telegraph operator "We all had to deal with the MTC, the international telegraph code, with its 5-track punched tape, three teletype registers and ++. The computers and the teletype with ILU in this technique exchanged data through the teletype tape.

In a word. we tied the ballistic computer's computers together and rewritten numbers columns by hand, and sitting around the Office Hall was no longer necessary. All the problems of documenting points in time (who — when I got the right answer) and the values ​​obtained disappeared — they now remained in the form of teletype printouts. And this process of communication channels began to develop strongly. We then got Minsk-32 for this channel purpose, linking the BESM-6 into the system already, and later the last domestic AS-6 machine with great channel capabilities was made at the Ministry of Radio and Radio. But this is all from another topic of the sad history of domestic computers ...

In a word, we began to travel less frequently to TsNIIMASH, and were rather used to direct communication between our computers.

But besides the Ballistic Group in the flight control loop, there was also a Management Group, which played a significant role in operational decision-making processes. Naturally the main role in it was played by the creators of the flying object. In the course of time and during the life of the joint venture and after his death, this activity increasingly began to acquire the color of Khimki, and, moreover, it was completely deserved and on business.

And I felt some confusion from our machine room - where is this flight control center now? On lunar flights (when creating the first satellites of the moon) practically control came from Khimki, and there were rumors that they wanted to do the Control Center in their own.

And the flights of L1, by decision from above, were controlled from TsNIIMASH, and there they began to actively improve their TsUP (we gave them all our experience of algorithms and programs and helped, how we could, develop our ballistic center to them, because they were all the same people with whom we worked in the time of Kazan).

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