April 6 marked the 105th anniversary of the birth of Anatoly Savin, a scientist and designer who participated in the creation of advanced smart weapons, fighter satellites and space reconnaissance systems. TASS recalls the life and work of the academician
The future outstanding designer was born in 1920 in the family of Ivan Nikolaevich and Maria Grigorievna Savin, who then lived in Ostashkov, Tver province, on the shores of Lake Seliger. The revolution and the Civil War are behind us, the years of the New Economic Policy have passed, and industrialization has begun. "This period was terribly difficult — there were no clothes, no shoes, nothing,— Savin recalled. — The lake was saved, especially in summer: fishing, berries, mushrooms. And it was extremely difficult in winter." Schoolwork was encouraging.
Anatoly Savin
In 1935, the Savin family of seven (Anatoly had three brothers and a sister) moved to Smolensk, where they occupied a 12-meter room. A short, thin ninth-grader, Savin did not look like his 15 years: his hungry childhood had an effect. After graduating from school with honors, Anatoly, according to the rules that existed at that time, could enter any educational institution without exams. Savin chose the Moscow Higher Technical School (MVTU), the famous Baumanka, the forge of advanced engineering personnel. "When I first arrived in Moscow, I had no money, no relatives, nothing, and no one to whom I could turn for support. Of course, it was one of the incentives to achieve something in life," Anatoly Ivanovich later shared his memories.
Young designer
Savin graduated from the first year with A's. In the spring of 1938, by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, several new defense faculties were established at the Moscow State Technical University: artillery, anti-tank, ammunition faculty, and others. The first graduation of military engineers was scheduled for the fall of 1941. "It was the eve of the war, the inevitable approach of which was felt literally everywhere. This is probably why the interest of young people in defense specialties was so great that the number of applications submitted to new faculties was almost three times higher than the number of places that were designated by the plan," Savin wrote.
In the spring of 1941, after completing his fourth year, Anatoly and his fellow students went on an industrial internship at the Stalingrad Artillery Factory. There they met the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. After returning to Moscow, the student volunteered for the People's Militia division, but he and other students were recalled from the military: talented young people were needed to create new weapons systems. Savin was sent to work at the Gorky plant named after Stalin (plant No. 92, now the Nizhny Novgorod Plant of the 70th Anniversary of Victory as part of the Almaz-Antey Aerospace Defense Concern). The first work of the young designer was the improved recoil device of the F-34 cannon of the legendary "Victory Tank" T-34. Savin then led the development of tank and anti-tank guns. In February 1944, Anatoly Savin was appointed deputy head of the plant's design department, and in 1946 he became the company's chief designer. He managed to graduate from the university only in the same year.
From guns to atomic weapons
After the end of the Great Patriotic War, Plant No. 92 began to produce equipment for the oil industry. However, talented engineers found more important work: since 1945, the plant's design bureau has been involved in working on the Soviet atomic project. In the special design bureau at the enterprise, created in 1947, Savin led the development of isotope enrichment plants (due to secrecy in the documentation, they were called turbochargers), mechanisms for the first industrial nuclear reactor that produced weapons-grade plutonium.
Anatoly Savin
The result of the work, including Gorky residents, was the test of the first domestic atomic bomb on August 29, 1949.
Rockets for every taste
In the post-war years, defense innovations gained momentum: jet aircraft, rocket technology, and "smart" weapons appeared. Anatoly Savin was assigned to work on one of these areas — air—to—sea, air—to-ground, and air-to-air guided missiles. In 1951— he was transferred to Moscow to the Design Bureau No. 1 (now the Almaz Scientific and Production Association named after Academician AA. Raspletina as part of the Almaz-Antey East Kazakhstan Region concern). Here, at SKB-41, as part of KB-1, he took part in work on the first domestic system with the Komet cruise missile, other subsonic and then supersonic missiles capable of hitting sea, land and air targets.
"Smart" missile against American aircraft carriers
Cruise missiles are an area in which Russian gunsmiths traditionally occupy leading positions. In the USSR, such missiles appeared as a response to the deployment by the United States, a recent ally in the anti-Hitler coalition, of aircraft carrier formations with aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons. One cruise missile launched from a carrier aircraft was capable of sinking even a large enemy ship, remaining a difficult target for anti-aircraft guns. For example, the Komet anti-ship missile system, similar to a miniature jet aircraft, was launched from a Tu-4 bomber at a distance of 60 km from the target and raced towards it at a speed of almost 1,000 km/h. The missile was aimed at a radio signal reflected from the affected ship, emitted by the carrier's onboard radar. Subsequently, such domestic missiles "got smarter" (up to the elements of artificial intelligence), became able to find and identify targets independently based on the radar "patterns" embedded in them, flew towards them at a speed several times higher than sound, several meters above the surface of the water. The pinnacle of the evolution of Russian anti-ship missiles is the hypersonic Zircon: the speed of the latest munition is ten times the speed of sound, and the range is 1,500 km.
Another danger that threatened the Soviet Union in the late 1940s was American strategic bombers with atomic munitions on board. The enemy's priority target would be Moscow, where the country's military and political leadership is located. To counter the threat, in 1950, the development of a stationary air defense system of the capital, the S-25 Berkut, began, consisting of small and large ring defense lines (24 and 32 anti-aircraft missile systems, respectively). Alexander Raspletin became the chief designer of the system. Savin became his deputy, at the same time entering graduate school — it was necessary to retrain, master radio electronics. Anatoly Ivanovich, by that time the winner of three Stalin prizes, the owner of two orders and government awards, passed the exams on a general basis. In April 1953, the S-25 successfully intercepted a target aircraft (a Tu-4 bomber) at an altitude of 7 km for the first time, and in 1955 it was put into service.
The space "fighter"
Meanwhile, military technology was developing rapidly. With the launch of the first artificial satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, the planet entered the space age. The advantages of reconnaissance satellites, which allowed unhindered photographing of military installations, were obvious. Weapons capable of dealing with orbital spies were needed.
Anatoly Savin
In the spring of 1960, Anatoly Savin's SKB-41, in cooperation with Vladimir Chelomey's Reutov OKB-52, began work on the creation of anti-satellite weapons. The designers faced a fantastically difficult task: it was necessary to create a space control center, ground structures, a satellite with homing equipment that would destroy enemy spacecraft, and a launch vehicle for it... The designers of OKB-41 (formerly SKB-41) even considered installing weapons on board the space "fighter" — a combat laser or an installation that releases a beam of accelerated particles. In January 1961, even before the flight of the first cosmonaut, a technical specification was formed for the design of a "fighter" satellite equipped with a radar homing head and a fragmentation warhead.
The degree of novelty of all the solutions was off the scale: for example, liquid rocket engines of various thrust (from 1 to 400 kg) were developed for the interceptor satellite, capable of repeatedly turning on and producing the necessary impulses so that the device could maneuver longitudinally and transversely. In November 1963, the R-7A launch vehicle launched into orbit a prototype of the world's first combat artificial satellite, the Polet-1 maneuvering spacecraft, and in April 1964, the second such vehicle.
In the following decade, full-scale tests of the space interception system took place, followed by its modernization. The world's first interception of a spacecraft in orbit took place on November 1, 1968: the Kosmos-252 fighter hit the previously launched Kosmos-248 target vehicle with fragments of a directional warhead. The development of the interceptor was of great importance for the future of space exploration, paving the way for the creation of spacecraft docking systems in orbit, large long-term orbital stations with crew replacement and supply of cargo ships.
You can see everything from above
The Soviet Union was a leader in the development of anti-ship cruise missiles as an asymmetric response to aircraft carrier strike groups of the American fleets, however, long-range missiles fired from Soviet submarines required target designation, over-the-horizon detection system, and target selection. On March 16, 1961, the Soviet government issued a decree on the development of the Legend marine space reconnaissance and targeting system. The electronics and stabilization systems of the Legend satellites were commissioned to create OKB-41 under the leadership of Anatoly Savin.
Anatoly Savin
An on-board nuclear power plant with an electric capacity of 3 kW was developed to power space radars. The first prototype of a satellite with a chemical power source was launched in 1965, in 1970 the first Soviet satellite with a nuclear power plant entered orbit, the prototype of the US-A radar reconnaissance spacecraft (Kosmos—367), and in 1975 the system with radar satellites was put into service. Later, it was joined by electronic intelligence satellites. Now the seven-ton Granit anti-ship cruise missiles, which were equipped with Soviet nuclear-powered submarines and surface-to-surface missile carriers, could receive information about naval targets and hit them hundreds of kilometers from the launch site.
The American heat footprint
The next stage in the development of Russian space exploration was the creation of the US-K early warning system for the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by the main geopolitical opponent of the USSR, the United States. The detection of missiles by the radiation of rocket engine flares immediately after their launch on another continent increased the notification time about the attack, which gave time for the evacuation of citizens and the adoption of retaliatory measures. The preliminary project involved the creation of a group of 20-28 satellites that continuously monitored the territory of the United States from an altitude of 3,600 km. Anatoly Savin was appointed Chief designer of the US-K control system.
How did the Third World War not begin
On the night of September 25-26, 1983, one of the US-K satellites "reported" a massive launch of ballistic missiles from the territory of the United States. The missile attack warning system confirmed the high reliability of the launch. At that moment, the decision to confirm the strike against the USSR rested on the shoulders of the duty officer of the Serpukhov-15 command post, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. The rocketman was careful and decided to wait for confirmation or denial of the launch by his colleagues monitoring radar readings. There was no confirmation. Subsequently, it turned out that the system mistook the glare of the setting sun in numerous glass structures in the United States for a rocket launch. The recognition algorithms have been improved, and the system has not generated any more false alarms.
The following year, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov retired, and this story became known only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Skeptics doubted that it was even possible to create a system that could detect the heat trace of a rocket and separate it from interference. The attitude towards the project changed after the developers of the system tried to detect the launch of a ballistic missile using a television installation located on a spacecraft, a project of the Television Research Institute. We agreed on the moment of the rocket launch from the Kapustin Yar test site at the moment when the satellite was flying over it. At the last moment, the launch of the ballistic missile was canceled, but the chief designer of the Television Research Institute, Peter Bratslavets, confidently reported the detection of the rocket launch. The check showed that the space thermal direction finder detected a Tu-16 bomber flying over the test site with a much smaller thermal footprint. The project was changed: now it provided for a smaller number of satellites, but in orbits they rose to 40 thousand km. Doubts were dispelled when on December 24, 1974, the onboard satellite detection equipment first saw the launch of the American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile and accompanied it, determining the flight path. And all this at a distance of 45 thousand. km! In December 1982, the space-based ICBM launch early detection system began combat duty.
"Comet", "Almaz", "Almaz-Antey"
In 1973, on the basis of OKB-41, the Central Scientific Research Institute (now the Special Purpose Space Systems Corporation as part of the Almaz-Antey concern) Komet was established as part of the Almaz Central Design Bureau. Anatoly Savin became its director and general designer. In 2004-2007, Savin was the general designer of the Almaz-Antey East Kazakhstan Region concern, established in 2002, and until 2016, he was the scientific director of the concern. The scientist and designer died on March 27, 2016 at the age of 96.
Anatoly Ivanovich's contribution to the country's defense capability cannot be overestimated. With his participation and under his leadership, advanced weapons and space intelligence systems were created. Academician Savin is the author and co-author of over 500 inventions and scientific papers, has trained 48 doctors and 126 candidates of sciences. In 2017, a monument to the outstanding designer was unveiled on the territory of the Almaz-Antey East Kazakhstan Region concern.
Victor Bodrov
The materials of the book "Academician A.I. Savin" by S.M. Semenov, V.N. Korovin were used.
