Hypergolic from Sputnik 1 by Nick Jaffe

Listen you stupid bastard
what you propose is poison that will corrode all the lines
a fucking powder keg with people on it
it'll kill us all in record time.
You care too much what certain people think
the very ones who try to do us in
and when you mix among these people
I watch the film of a disaster begin.

Sergey you Mister Clean
you want to fly to the moon on a boiler full of steam.
It's really very pretty the way you see things:
we all move to Mars in a Chief Designer's dream.
But you forget who pays the bills here
you forget what this is really all for:
a life of science is a long way off
This is war baby, this is war.

Listen asshole, war may be your job
but it isn't really mine.
I fought it already two or three times
even as they had me doing hard time.
No, my job is to take us elsewhere
bring us round.
Your rocket has killed our family,
vaporized them surely as The Bomb hit the ground.




One of the defining relationships of Sergey Korolev's life was with his long-time colleague and rival Valentin Glushko.

Korolev and Glushko had been friends and associates all the way back to their days as semi-amateurs in the 30's when they built rockets in the basement of a Moscow apartment complex.

The two men fell out during the purges possibly because Glushko may have "named names" in some way. It was never clear exactly what had happened, and if Glushko had implicated others in the midst of Stalin's terror, it was likely under torture. Whatever the actual case, Korolev felt Glushko hadn't behaved honorably.

Both Korolev and Glushko rose to become to of the leading figures in the Soviet space program after WWII. Their ongoing feud came to focus on a high-stakes technical debate about rocket propellants. Glushkov favored hypergolic (self igniting) storable propellants. These were essential for effective strategic weapons because rockets using them could be launched on short notice and stored ready for launch. But such propellants are extremely dangerous both because of their volatility and their toxicity.

Korolev favored cryogenic propellants (liquid oxygen mixing with kerosene). Such propellants were more efficient (important for the heavy payloads of manned flight, but much less so for weapons), and much safer because they don't ignite spontaneously. But cryogenic propellants require long and unwieldy fueling procedures because the liquid oxygen has to be kept at very low temperatures to keep it from boiling off. After about 12 hours a rocket fueled with LOX has to be de-fueled because as the liquid oxygen warms up it produces very high gas pressures inside fuel tanks.

Glushko and Korolev's rivalry became very bitter as the Soviet Space program moved into the era of manned flight and the rift between these two technical leaders was exploited by upper level party bureaucrats including Nikita Kruschev. Korolev felt that Glushkov was a careerist who promoted hypergolic propellants to suck up to the military, and had insufficient regard for safety. Glushkov painted Korolev as something of a utopian dreamer. He accused him of being technically doctrinaire in his "Mr. Clean" attitude toward the hazards of hypergolic propellants, and implied Korolev lacked sufficient interest in military imperatives.

A compromise on the propellant question ensued through the early program: cryogenic fuels were the standard for the manned program and hypergolic fuels were used for most unmanned/weapons rockets.

In 1960 there was a terrible disaster that killed approximately 200 people, including a huge number of leading engineers and officials when the R16, a new military booster blew up on the pad. A variety of problems contributed to the explosion, including political pressure that rushed the launch preparations (a scenario that also recalls the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster), and other technical issues. Hypergolic propellants played a major role in the disaster.

The monologue at the beginning of this song is fictional, but based on real events. The monologue at the end is based on the text of telegram sent by a secure channel from the launch site to the Kremlin soon after the explosion.

Nick Jaffe is a multi instrumentalist, recordist, teacher and writer. Nick has performed and recorded with a wide variety of projects and artists including Common, Dwele, Estelle, Renee Neufville, Bilal, Rakim, DJ Quik, and Slum Village, and has done music for film and advertising. He believes everyone can and should make music and that hip hop is the physics of music.

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