Sputnik 22, Mars 1 and Sputnik 24

The 1962 window allowed three shots between 24 October and 4 November, and OKB-1 filled all three. Two flyby craft, 2MV-4 No. 3 and No. 4, and one impact craft carrying a lander, 2MV-3 No. 1, were prepared in parallel in the assembly building on twelve-hour shifts. The 2MV was the second-generation design: a sealed orbital module holding guidance, power, thermal control and radio, and beneath it either a science module for a flyby or a descent capsule for an impact mission. After 1960 Chertok had insisted on a high-rate centimetre-band link working through a parabolic dish, backed by a decimetre link on low-gain antennas and a metre-band emergency link on omnidirectional antennas for use when the spacecraft was not oriented. Reliability work on the chronically unreliable Blok L fourth stage had eaten into the mass budget, which Chertok found painful because it devalued the science the whole flight existed to carry. Nobody on the team knew what was happening in the Caribbean. Chertok flew out from Moscow on 15 October, the day before President Kennedy was shown the U-2 photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and the first Mars rocket was rolled out to Site 1 on the morning of 21 October, the day before Kennedy went on television.

2MV-4 No. 3 left the pad on 24 October at 17:55:04 UTC on vehicle T103-15. The first three stages worked. Then the Blok L escape stage, which had already destroyed the entire 1962 Venus campaign, destroyed this one too: about seventeen seconds into the burn its turbopump exploded, traced afterwards to leaking lubricant, and the spacecraft came apart. Twenty-four objects were eventually catalogued, the spacecraft itself reentering on 29 October and the last of them, the spent Blok L stage, not until late February 1963. Because the launch was never announced, Western catalogues invented a name for the debris: Sputnik 22. This flight is attached to one of the most quoted near-miss stories of the nuclear age, that a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Alaska picked up the breakup and briefly read it as the start of a Soviet attack. NASA's own catalogue repeats it. It deserves care: the 24 October incident is not documented anywhere near as well as the two better-attested false alarms of 28 October 1962, at Moorestown and at Laredo, both of which involved satellites being misread as missiles, and popular lists of nuclear close calls sometimes blur the three together. What is documented from the Soviet side is the mirror image of the same fear. Chertok wrote that they told nobody about the Mars launch, and worried that in that atmosphere American air defences might read it as a combat launch.

Three days later the crisis reached the launch site itself. On the morning of 27 October, Black Saturday, Chertok walked to the assembly building and found submachine gunners climbing to the roof, soldiers in full kit and gas masks fanning out along the perimeter, and the always-shrouded duty combat R-7A uncovered with crews swarming over it, while the Mars rocket that should have flown by 29 October stood abandoned. Colonel Anatoly Kirillov, head of the range's first directorate, had opened the sealed envelope from the special safe during the night. His orders were to mate the missile with the warhead held in a separate store, roll it to Site 1, fuel it, aim it and wait for a launch command. The pad prepared for 2MV-4 No. 4 was the pad the warhead needed. Chertok asked whether the Mars rocket could be left in place a little longer in case the strike was called off; Kirillov, who had commanded an artillery battery in the war, replied that he would face a military tribunal, and that every line to Moscow was closed. Chertok got through anyway, on a half-forgotten back route through switchboards, and reached Korolev, who said only that he knew everything, that nobody should do anything stupid, and rang off. That evening Kirillov's jeep braked hard on the concrete outside and he shouted a single word: stand down.

The reprieve let the second flyby craft fly on 1 November. The day held one more oddity. At 14:15 Moscow time a Soviet high-altitude nuclear test, shot K-5, detonated roughly 60 km up and some 500 km from the range, and every radio band at Baikonur fell silent for over an hour. The ionosphere had recovered by launch at 16:14:16 UTC on vehicle T103-16, the ninth flight of the four-stage 8K78. This time Blok L worked, and an 893.5 kg spacecraft went to Mars. TASS named it Mars 1 the next day. Within days the telemetry showed a nitrogen valve in the attitude control system that had not seated properly, and by 5 November the entire gas supply had escaped through it. Investigators, forensic specialists among them, traced the cause to crumbs of rosin from soldering the valve's electromagnet winding lodging under the seat, and reproduced the fault at the factory. Without three-axis pointing there could be no course correction and no high-gain link, so the craft was spun for solar illumination and worked through its low-gain decimetre antenna. It managed 61 sessions across about 140 days, accepted more than 3,000 commands, and returned data on cosmic ray intensity, magnetic fields, solar wind ions and meteoroid densities out to 1.24 astronomical units. The last session was on 21 March 1963, at 106 million km.

The third craft never got its chance. 2MV-3 No. 1 lifted off on 4 November at 15:35:15 UTC on T103-17, carrying the only Mars lander of the series: a sphere roughly 90 cm across with its centre of gravity offset so it would present its blunt face to the atmosphere, instrumented for temperature, pressure, density, composition and gamma rays, and buoyant in case it came down in water, which was not yet an absurd contingency to plan for. Cavitation in the core stage propellant lines around T+260 seconds shook the vehicle hard. Chertok recorded that a shutdown command reached the Blok L engine 33 seconds into its burn; other reconstructions hold that the vibration jarred loose an igniter or fuse so the stage never fired at all. Either way the spacecraft stayed in Earth orbit. McDowell's catalogue has it reentering the next day, on 5 November, with the settling-motor unit staying up until 19 January 1963; NSSDCA instead gives 19 January 1963 for the spacecraft itself. Which tracked object was which has never been settled. Western catalogues called it Sputnik 24. Mars 1 itself passed Mars on 19 June 1963, silent, at a distance usually given as about 193,000 km, and settled into a solar orbit it occupies still. It remains the only spacecraft of the Soviet 1962 campaign that reached deep space, and the first close-up pictures of Mars would come, two years later, from NASA's Mariner 4.