Getting started in television systems

The regime of strict secrecy that surrounded the space affairs, and in which I had to live most of my life, ultimately, I think, did more harm than good. Remember how the people were shocked by the death of cosmonaut Komarov ... Because it was represented as if all our activities were a chain of continuous victories. But life is life ...





We went out into space first, created something that was never before, and we did not have any directories and intelligence to rely on. There happened on this way joy and triumph, dramas and mistakes, your surprises, absurdities and, if you like, adventures ... Otherwise, it could not be!



I came to the astronautics in a natural way, without expecting it myself. Demobilized after the end of the war, settled in Leningrad and in 1948 began working in the Research Institute of Television. The old inclination to ham radio was not insignificant. I was a senior technician. At the same time I studied in absentia at the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute of Communications.





I was engaged then by the KVN televison sets. The main part of these TV sets ("Kenigson,Varshavsky, Nikolaevsky "), which later became very popular, mass-produced by the Research Institute of Television, the first 20 pieces I in 1949 handed over to the commission in Moscow. The following year I graduated from the institute, became an engineer, and a year later, I got a job that can not be forgotten for life.



The system of air defense of Moscow - S-25 was created. We were required to design and manufacture equipment for the transmission of radar information (see image on the right). And, as is often the case in the design business, the situation arose: This has to be done yesterday. Big verbal battles took place at the level of ministries, technical councils and leadership of institutions. And, whatever one may say, it turned out that with the maximum effort for the implementation of the project would take at least three years. And it was necessary to do everything less than in a year ... In the end, a deputy minister came to our institute and asked us to collect meeting of those doing the actual work ("Without chiefs", at the level of heads of laboratories, not higher). As you can see, this was not quite usual. We gathered. The Deputy Minister honestly explained the situation and asked: "Will you accept this task ...?" We sat, exchanged glances, counted from the end: two months would go to complete the acceptance testing, three - to the equipment test ... How much will remain for each of such stages in the project as design, tuning? It turned out - less than a month. Incredible! But we did it.

How did the developers work then, and in what conditions! The main head of the work on the S-25 was personally Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. And he used to say: "Do we need to arrest this designer and this designer? For the good of the cause, of course." And the faces he named really disappeared from the horizon. Your humble servant "for the good of the cause" also had to be in prison, because he had some kind of carelessness to somehow notice that one of the objects of the S-25 was clearly not in place. Stalin's unexpected death saved me, and everything that followed ...



Problems of financing did not exist. Since everything was paid "according to performance", and under normal engineering salary in 1600 rubles ("old", of course, before Khrushchev's reforms) I received 17 - 20 thousand. In other words, if I wanted to, I could buy myself a new car every month. And yet we worked not for fear and not for money. There are more important things ... I remember how I did not leave the institute for a whole week. And even when I was ill - temperature 39 ... My colleagues photgrapherd me while I slept, resting my head on the oscilloscope. This picture appeared in our wall newspaper. We solved a problem that was considered insoluble. And they decided. In December of the same year, our I-400 complex [see picture below on the right of part of the I-400 from a on-line resource: Official Illustrated Guide to Moscow anri-aircraft defense system, 1955] was already operating at 116 air defense facilities in Moscow.

Sergei Korolev comes for a visit

However, formally this had nothing to do with cosmonautics. Under the leadership of the chief designer Vitaly Illarionovich Sardyko, I was engaged in a large-scale television screen (3 × 4 meters), under the supervision of the chief designer Igor Leonidovich Valik - the aerial reconnaissance system "Plutonium." Actually, we had the 20th department at our institute (it was supervised by the just mentioned Vitaly Illarionovich), which little by little studied the problems of television in space. But neither I nor other young designers had any interest in this, because we believed that something really could be realized here only in the 21st century.

Everything radically changed on October 4, 1957. The first satellite, the launch of which shocked the world, "Beep-Beep", coming from space, received a special, professional resonance in our institute. It became clear that the real development of space television would not be required in the 21st century, but immediately. A committee was formed to consider the affairs of the 20 th Division. I was appointed its chairman. But the elementary knowledge of the problem still did not suffice, and I went to Moscow, to Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh, who was then vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics.

After the launch of the second satellite Sergei Pavlovich Korolev came to us in the scientific research institute of television. By the way, I saw him for the first time, as well as the Lenin Prize medal, which he wore. Sergei Pavlovich looked at the complex that was developed by us for aerial reconnaissance, and then quite specifically formulated two tasks: the first one was to develop equipment capable of photographing the reverse, invisible side of the Moon and transmit the image to Earth, the second - to create a system for transferring from the orbit of the television image first animals (dogs), and then a person.





Let me remind you that the rockets were launched only directly from the Earth, there were no launches involving intermediate, i.e. parking, orbits. The method of flight correction, braking systems, too, did not exist yet. Fifteen minutes of operation of the rocket engines had to accurately bring the station to the Moon region, where, under the influence of the gravitational forces of the eternal satellite of the Earth, it would go to the required orbit, then photograph the invisible side of the Moon and upon returning to Earth would transfer the image to the ground station. Specialists of space ballistics calculated that even with the use of a special "perturbation" trajectory, this operation was possible once a year - in early October. This determined the terms of the work.

Design work starts

Again the "day and night" work began. Enthusiasm was boundless. For four months we developed the equipment "Yenisei-1". The main designer was Igor Leonidovich Valik, I was his deputy, leading engineers were Yuri Pavlovich Lagutin and Viktor Fedorovich Kuverov. In general, the people worked a lot, all did not list their real working hours....

In principle, we, the television crew, were ready by October 1958. But other developers of the most complicated space complex were not ready. Too serious problems faced them. The launch was postponed for a year. We, without wasting time, began to develop more advanced equipment "Yenisei-2".

In parallel, even more promising equipment was the Yenisei-3 based on the use of an electronic tube of the Vidikon type and intermediate magnetic recording. But with it, unfortunately we "did not have time to meet deadline". It later became the prototype for meteorological satellite camera system in the "Meteor" satellites.

Now the compact, elegant onboard photo camera, which we did then, stands among other exhibits in the museum of our institute. And few can imagine what passions seethed in its time around it. Not only designers argued, but also academics. Some said: "It will work!" Others categorically: "It will not work!" Scientific and technical advice was like battles. It came to the point that at meetings at the ministry I was ordered to "keep quiet and not speak." But in the long run, this "will work - will not work" dispute always led to something that worked.





Without getting into technical details (and it is unlikely that they will be understood by anyone other than specialists), I explain that for the cosmos the usual "earthly" modes of transmission turned out to be completely unacceptable. For this, it would be necessary to use gigantic energy sources, which would exceed the weight of the station itself by tens of times. We only had a few kilograms ... The "usual" signal received from such a source would be so insignificant that it would completely disappear in terrestrial and cosmic noises.

The solution was to drastically narrow the transmission bandwidth, with a slowdown, of course, of the transmission of the image. The main ideas in this direction in television as early as 1938 were formulated by Semen I. Kataev, who worked at our institute (then called NII-9), with the transfer of images on a short-wave channel. Of course, it does not make sense for ordinary household systems, but for solving all sorts of special problems of image transmission, "slow-scan" television is simply irreplaceable.

And we applied it. In the I-400 system, about which I spoke, the transmission of one frame was carried out in 10 seconds, and in the aerial reconnaisance system "Plutonium" - in 3 minutes. For the space camera system "Yenisei" two modes were developed - a frame in 10 seconds, and for obtaining a sufficiently high-quality image - for 30 minutes. As you know, it's okay. If humanity for millennia could not look at the reverse side of the moon, then we could wait half an hour.

There was one more major problem ... Photochemical part for us was developed by NIKFI [Cinema and Photo Research Institute, Moscow], and with them we decidedly did not agree. Its employees defended the "two-step" system, we advocated the "one-step system" (created, by the way, by the same NIKFI), in which the development, washing and fixing are simultaneous. Each side had its own arguments, and none was inferior. In the end, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev cut this Gordian knot as follows: "If the TV crew undertakes to make this device - let them do it." NIKFI was indignant and defiantly washed their hands.