The R-2: Their Russians were as good as our Germans

The Russian Stuff

A memorable scene in "The Right Stuff" was just after Sputnik were someone asks if "their Germans" were better than "our Germans?" This is rapidly refuted.

The brains behind the Reich's missile program had been Werner Von Braun. Seeing the writing on the wall, he gathered up as much of his staff that was willing and travelled towards the American lines in the hopes of being captured by the "right" side. Herman Gottrup, an electrical engineer on the project decided to stay put. During the occupation, the soviet government offered an "opportunity" to help work on a new East Block missile program. The soviets gathered these engineers under Gottrup to work on assembling some A-4s from what scraps remained in their zones and re-generating plans to manufacture new ones. Eventually, the Germans were collected and sent deep into the Soviet Union (for their health, or lack thereof if they failed to do so).

Even so, the Russians would have had a hard time reconstructing the German missile if they hadn't had capable engineers of their own. While before the war the Russians had supported some of the most successful pioneering work in rocket development under GIRD, these engineers had by and large fallen afoul of people within Stalin's government (most likely Stalin himself) and were largely imprisoned and shot. Sergei Korolev was one of these and nearly died in Stalin's gulags. The need to find out more about the new German weapon saved his and many other engineer's lives.

In the end a handful of German V-2s were assembled. The first real success of this Soviet missile program was to successfully build one from scratch. Korolev and rocket engine specialist V.P. Glushko managed to create a working copy called the R-1 (literally for Rocket 1). The missile itself was not much of a weapon. What was needed was a bigger payload, more accuracy and more range. Gottrup and his fellow engineers had been asked to contribute and they did suggest many of the design improvements that Von Braun himself had considered for the next generation missile during the war. As they continued their work, they considered building a new kind of missile, the G-1. Korolev on the other hand believed that working from the existing R-1 would provide a quicker development cycle and an easier to manufacture design.

The R-2

The design work for the R-2 began soon after the success of the R-1. The Germans pursued their own design, the G-1. It seems that the Russians liked the competition. The Germans themselves had little choice, trapped in a foreign country. By the same token, the Soviet engineers must have themselves been under pressure to succeed with their own design given the amount of resources dedicated to the effort.

In the end, the Russian engineers won, although it is a wonder if it could ever have been different. It seems that the German teams were kept very busy working on designs that were never implemented (G-1, G-2, G-3, G-4, G-5). The arguments for a "Russian" missile over the "German" one may have been successful purely on the basis of technical feasibility, on the other hand the mistrust and bad blood may have run deep. It is a situation perhaps not unique to the Soviets. The Nova documentary ("Sputnik Declassified" see refs) on the space race alludes to a similar situation where our German's effectively cloistered by the US Army worked on projects that did not receive the highest priority compared to non-German projects by the US Navy.

The R-2 (R-2/P-2, NATO:“Sibling”, SS-2, 8Zh38/8Ж38) consisted of several improvements over the R-1. Navigational equipment was relocated to below the main tanks providing easier access (I unfortunately can't find the reference now, but I recall reading that a ground crewman was killed by falling off the service platform of the R-1 while working on the equipment). The warhead could now separate from the main body of the rocket extending its range and accuracy. An integral alcohol fuel tank lowered the missile's total mass. Also, a new more powerful engine designed by V.P. Glushko (the RD-101) was incorporated into the newly designed tail. The end result was a more powerful rocket with twice the range and a third heavier warhead capacity than the R-1. While still not powerful enough to carry a nuclear warhead, it could carry a radiological “dirty bomb” that could disperse radioactive fall out over a wide area.
A few detail differences were that only two of the stabilizer fins had active control surfaces (an R-2 at a Russian military museum clearly shoes them on fins I & III). Curiously many images of the R-2A (see next paragraph) show markings indicating similar surfaces on all fins (meant for intelligence disinformation?). Another detail difference are antennas near the nose cone. The R-2 is cited as using radio guidance to improve accuracy. In photographs of the DF-1 (the Chinese copy) these appear as metal loops, but these loops are not as clear in other photographs, and instead appear more like rods. These rods are perhaps aerodynamic fairings for the loops. At any rate, these antennas do not appear on all images, and probably represent missiles that were actually meant to be guided (operational missiles).

The R-2A - "Геофизическая"

The missile was also developed into a sounding rocket, the R-2A* geophysical rocket. Some initial scientific work had been done with the R-1 by attaching scientific nose packages and ejectable pods on the sides. The increased capabilities of the R-2 provided an opportunity to really sample the interface between atmosphere and space. In service by the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), the R-2A was used for high altitude atmospheric and radiological research. It was also used for live biological experiments. Some of these were definitely directed for manned space programs as they featured actual animal space suits as well as various modes of live recovery. Indeed before Laika, many other Russian dogs had already been to space (if not in orbit), and unlike the various Alberts launched at White Sands, New Mexico, most of them came back (not all mind you). It was even considered as a booster for a manned ballistic space shot (the US followed this plan by preceding their manned orbit with the Mercury-Redstone ballistic launches).

Follow ups

Some links for additional information

• Encyclopedic information on the early Soviet missiles at astronautix.com
• Information about the R-1 and R-2 at russianspaceweb.com
• A hard to find site with information about the early research at the Kapustin Yar launch site
• Information on derivations of Von Braun's V-2
• Great pictures of the Chinese R-2 at Martin Troller's flicker gallery as well as other shots of the R-1 and R-2
• Nova documentary "Sputnik Declassified" (Another video not easily available off the web is the BBC produced docu-drama called "The Space Race")
• Also, thanks to Thorsten Brand on the Space Paper Modelers group at Yahoo! groups for a key diagram for the R-2A I had not seen anywhere else.

*Searching for the R-2 can be difficult on the web. Star Wars references aside, there is the issue of cyrillic which results in the R-2 being actually P-2 for the cyrillic Paketa or "rocket" (which also may encode differently given that "P" and "Р" may not actually be the same). This is further complicated in the case of the R-2A because it can be Р-2A or В-2A which translates as V-2A which again confuses it with the German V-2 (the "В" is for "вертикальный" or "vertical", its main flight path).