Some pages from the book 39 Years at Top Secret Re

               
                by Alla Valko

A couple of years ago I got to talking to a young woman. She was interested in my work, and I mentioned that I used to work at “postal boxes”. I noticed that a puzzled expression crossed her face when she heard those two words. I then had to explain to my acquaintance that this phrase meant a company with a post office box number so-and-so and in Soviet times and up to the early1990s it was a general term for factories, enterprises, and organizations operating in the defense sector.

It struck me that not only my acquaintance, but probably quite a number of other young people do not have the faintest idea of the fact that practically the entire adult population of the former Soviet Union worked for such “postal boxes”, and that such enterprises operated everywhere you went, including major cities and small towns. That is the reason why I decided to write about my experience of working at such closed research institutes, about the team atmosphere and work environment at such top secret facilities, and also about my personal life during those 39 years, starting from my student thesis days to the time I retired.

Due to the nature of my work, I was mostly involved in preparing engineering analyses, and I thought that many readers would be interested to learn what challenges I had to face to meet the assigned objectives. That does not make the technical aspects much easier to understand, but if you are not an expert, you may simply skip the science part of the descriptions.  On the other hand, the book will definitely be of interest to research scientists, engineers, line managers, students majoring in aviation, space science, marine engineering, mine surveying, and research and development in the field of tank production, not to mention pilots, flight navigators, and ship captains.

I remember that at one time sensor pins of floated accelerometers started to break during assembly, and the head of the department instructed me to get to the bottom of the problem. I knew that Anatoly Agapov, division deputy chief designer, ordered his assembly workers to make the sensor pins shorter to somehow cope with the situation. His reasoning was quite clear - the shorter the sensor pins, the lower the value of the bending moment at the point of attachment to the sensor and, hence, the lower the maximum value of normal stress acting on the dangerous cross section of the sensor pins and, consequently, the lower the possibility for the senor pins to break under the same load.

I did not think, however, that his logic went far enough, because in operating mode during takeoff the device was subject to dynamic stresses, including shock and vibration. Agapov’s decision to shorten the sensor pins did not sit well with me, but at first I could not find the right theoretical justification for my discontent.

At the time I used to attend group fitness classes at the Rowing Canal sport complex. We also played volleyball there. I noticed that when I received the ball I bent my knees and positioned my arms in a way to make my body more flexible. That is when I understood that it was necessary to increase flexibility to compensate the shock impact. I realized that it was necessary to comply with two conflicting requirements in selecting the length of the sensor pins. It is indeed necessary to shorten the sensor pins to ensure that they are durable enough to withstand static stress; but they should be made longer to ensure that they are durable enough under dynamic loads, because during a shock load or vibration the sensor pins accept the kinetic energy of the sensing element along their entire length.

Having performed the necessary research, I showed that critical stress during shock or vibration causing irreversible plastic deformations in the pins is directly proportional to the square root of the length of the sensor pin. The sensor pin cannot be longer than a certain value that ensures the pin’s resilience under dynamic compressive loads. I came to the conclusion that we should exercise caution when reducing the length of sensor pins and make calculations to determine the solidity of a shorter sensor pin under dynamic stress.

When my report was submitted to Agapov for signature, he flew into a rage. The next morning when I came to work and sat down at my table trying to refresh my makeup after the morning rush, the head of the department Garankin nervously called me to his table. I grumbled: “I didn’t even have time to brush my hair.” The head of the department in his booming voice came to the point: “Agapov was furious yesterday: “What did that Valko guy write in his report?” That instantly brought memories of an episode from my student days.

There was a military department at the Bauman Technical University where I studied, but girls were not required to attend military science classes. I do not know who made the student list for the military department, but it turned out that my name was on it. During the very first class, the teacher lined up the students, took a look at the list and ordered: “Private Forshteller! One step forward!” Our guys almost died laughing.

I explained to Garankin the idea behind my theoretic research and, I must give him credit, it took him less than two minutes to understand everything. He then changed his voice to normal and went to see Agapov to make a report.

Sometime after the end of the workshop held near Miass, at my request, Sergey together with one of his students used a mainframe computer to solve the equations for gyroscopic motion with nonzero dynamic rotor unbalance for an open-loop feedback circuit with an absolutely hard stop. The resulting periodic solution confirmed my hypothesis. Without my knowing, and without including me as a co-author, Sergey sent his report with the results of this work to a conference held by the Instrumentation Department of the Bauman Technical University.

Having accidentally learned of this, I was thrilled to the core. I immediately took all my reports with a description of the model for conical movement of the gyro sensor around the stop, the gyroscopic motion equations and their solution for one cycle of the gyro sensor’s oscillation in contact and without contact with the stop and rushed to the University to submit my reports to the conference organizing committee. Later Sergey’s report was removed from the conference list. How could such a thing have happened? I was convinced that Sergey was a decent person, but he simply did not understand what was at stake. He did not realize that leading experts of Moscow in the field of gyroscopes tried to find a solution to this problem.  His participation in the project was in all respects a technical job that could have been performed by any competent programmer with knowledge of how to operate a mainframe computer and write the necessary program. Fortunately, Sergey understood my concerns, and since I did not have the slightest doubt that he did not intentionally try to take credit for finding the solution to this problem, we amicably resolved the misunderstanding.

We had no idea of the technological, physical, and psychological challenges the world’s first cosmonaut had to overcome. During the last phase of the launch, the radio guidance system aboard the Vostok booster rocket went out of order. It was supposed to turn off the engines of the third stage booster. At the end of the flight, the brake engine was operating normally but with lower thrust; that is why the control system responded by blocking routine separation of the sections. As a result, before it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft was erratically rotating for ten minutes at a speed on one rotation per second. Once the spacecraft entered into the dense layers of the atmosphere, the connecting cables melted, the stage separation command came through from the temperature sensors, and the descent module finally separated from the instrument and propulsion section.

The descent followed a ballistic trajectory with 8-10g deceleration, but Gagarin had been prepared for such a level of stress. It was much harder to withstand the psychological stress: the temperature outside the spaceship during descent reached 3,000-5,000 degrees Celsius, after the module reentered the atmosphere the spacecraft’s skin started to burn, dribbles of melting metal appeared on the illuminator window, and the descent module itself started to make crackling sounds...

If we had been officially informed at the time of all the circumstances of that flight, I would have had even more respect for the heroism and personal bravery of Yuri Gagarin. Speaking frankly, the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite on October 4, 1957 had a far greater psychological effect on me at the time than man’s first space flight.

From science lessons at school we know that to achieve orbital spaceflight a spacecraft has to reach the first cosmic velocity at which the Earth’s gravitational pull is equal to the centrifugal force created by the spacecraft’s propulsion.  The value of this incredible velocity is 7.9 km/s, and that was totally beyond my comprehension. I used to think that it was unachievable, something that would not happen during my lifetime. But human ingenuity managed to solve the technological problems. It was a qualitative leap in space science and in my personal frame of mind. From my point of view, all subsequent space flights were just an improvement of the quantitative indicators of the weight of spacecraft, the size and complexity of their construction, and the functions they performed. In actual fact, it was much more complicated, and Yuri Gagarin’s space flight proved it.

At the time I did not know that sometime in the future - during the last twelve years of my scientific research career - I would be involved in designing space instruments and would have to overcome many obstacles to carry out the tasks entrusted to me.

The translation is done by Alex Triumfov.