On August 3, 1957, the Soviet Russian R-7 Semyorka missile, called "Little Seven" by the men who worked around it, flew a simulated nuclear strike trajectory, then became a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching Sputnik. A great international triumph, then, but in missile terms, not necessarily the military advantage that Russia wanted.

The Semyorka used kerosene and LOX. Who in their right mind wants a nuclear missile that takes three or four hours to prime with LOX before you can launch it? Not the Soviet Red Army, for sure. So they commissioned an even more secret missile, the R-16, which, in theory, could be fueled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because its engineers had abandoned super-cold LOX and kerosene in favor of nitric acid and hydrazine: hypergolic fuels... a fuel and oxidizer combination that can be stored indefinitely at normal pressures and temperatures.

Hypergolic chemicals are efficient too. They ignite spontaneously on contact with each other and deliver a pretty good bang for your buck. Of course there's a downside. Hypergolics are among the nastiest and most toxic substances in the rocket business. Did we mention that they can be stored? Well, sort of. They are so corrosive they will play havoc with any part of your rocket (or your people) that they come into contact with that they shouldn't....

In October 1960, the R-16 was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur, Russia's ultrasecret equivalent of Cape Kennedy, based deep in the deserts of Kazakhstan. And so began the single greatest rocket disaster in history.

The R-16's "storable" fuels wouldn't store. They were viciously corrosive and leaky as hell, oozing from dozens of pipe joints and tank seams. On October 23, the surrounding launch gantries were crowded with young technicians trying to fix a dozen different problems. As zero hour approached, the rocket began to drip nitric acid from its base. At this point, launch director Mitrofan Nedelin should have ordered the entire gantry to be evacuated, but he didn't seem to care about the risks. He sent yet more ground staff into the pad area straightaway, to see if they could tighten up some valves and stop the leaks and get the rocket up in the air.

Suddenly, the rocket exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage crashed to the ground, spilling fuel and flame. The new tarmac aprons and roadways around the gantry melted in the heat, then caught fire. Ground staff fleeing for their lives were trapped in the viscous tar as it burned all around them. The conflagration spread for thousands of yards, a wave of fire engulfing everything and everyone in its path. More than 190 people were killed, including Nedelin, perched on his chair near the gantry as a surge of blazing chemicals swept toward him.

From Piers Bizony's How To Build Your Own Spaceship, due out this August for $15. Excerpted with permission of Plume, an imprint of the Penguin Group.

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Video of the disaster:

Haunting details and quotes from the event, curated by Jacqueline Sly in a space history project

According to a mailing list from the Netherlands, Atompunk is devoted to the cultural period (mostly of the United States) of between 1945 to 1965. While the moniker hasn't become a part of our country's vernacular yet (though I'm sure some of you already started using it ages ago), it sounds just annoyingly catchy enough to warrant a New York Times trend piece in about eight years. And the Dutch aren't helping, devoting a festival to it in Amsterdam for September 2009.

First I had to shake off being labeled steampunk because of my love for Jules Verne novels and Victorian-era science... NOW I have to go around convincing people I'm not another type of punk just because I'd totally live in Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion home? Great, Dutch people. Thanks a lot. [Boing boing]

Laika's statue resides outside the Moscow military research facility where her flight team prepared the original space mission in 1957. Reuters reports the monument features the hot dog standing atop a rocket.

Like all dogs used in the Soviet space program Laika was a stray. Strays were selected because Soviet doctors apparently believed the mean streets of Moscow were similar to conditions experienced in space. Small dogs were selected due to the size constraints of the Sputnik 2 capsule, but at least Laika got to travel in style with this custom space suit-complete with euthanasia needle and feeding trough!

"Laika was quiet and charming," Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book about Soviet space medicine. He even took the dog home to play with his children. "I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live," he said. After fetch with the kids, Yazdovsky launched Laika into space, attached to a fuel-filled tin can with no parachute, and into history. We should all be so lucky. [Images: Telstar Logistics and Reuters]

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