August 21. On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. It lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and came down 6,000 kilometers away on the Kamchatka peninsula. For the first time anyone had proven in practice that a nuclear bomb could fly across a continent.
The numbers I felt as a kid without understanding them. A 34-meter-tall, 280-ton rocket. Its chief designer was Sergei Korolev, head of OKB-1. Four strap-on boosters around a central core stage, with RD-107 and RD-108 engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. The whole machine was that large because Soviet nuclear warheads were heavier than American ones: it had to carry a 5.5-ton thermonuclear payload.
But as a weapon it was almost useless from the start. The liquid oxygen fueling took 20 hours, the rocket had only a 24-hour alert window, and the enormous launch complexes were perfectly photographed by American U-2 spy planes. Western experts later flatly called the program a “blunder.” It flew only 28 times as a missile and was never deployed as a strategic weapon.
