Starman

by Jamie Doran

  Meanwhile, at an Army barracks on the outskirts of Saratov, General Andrei Stuchenko was awoken in the pre-dawn darkness by a telephone call from someone very senior and very frightening at the Kremlin. ‘A man is shortly to fly into space. The cosmonaut will land in your district. You are to organize his safe recovery and reception. You answer for this with your head.’6 Stuchenko promised he would comply. He grabbed a map of his region, divided it into grids and spent the day deploying his troops as fast as he could, to watch for something amazing – a boy falling out of the sky.

  The evening before the flight, Titov and Gagarin settled down in a cottage a few kilometres from the pad. Nikolai Kamanin visited them briefly, and (as his diary records) Gagarin took him aside for a few moments, whispering tensely, ‘You know, I’m probably not quite right in the head.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The flight’s tomorrow morning, and I’m not the slightest bit worried. Not the tiniest bit, d’you see? Is that normal?’

  ‘It’s excellent, Yura. I’m very glad for you. Good night!’

  Of course Korolev came along for a few minutes to settle his cosmonauts for the night. ‘I don’t know what all this fuss is about,’ he teased. ‘Five years from now, the unions’ll be subsidizing holidays in space.’ Everybody laughed. Korolev calmly looked at his watch and said good night. This was the signal for the cosmonauts to bed down.

  Vladimir Yazdovsky, the senior Director of Medical Preparations, had spent the day in their bunk room, organizing a little treat for the doctors. He had inserted strain gauges into the mattresses to register whether the cosmonauts tossed and turned in their sleep. Wires trailed from the bunks and through a suspiciously fresh hole in the wall to a clutch of batteries outside the cottage. A data cable ran off for a few hundred metres to another building, where the doctors had set up their knobs and dials. Of course this experiment was supposed to be a secret, but as Yuri and Gherman understood from bitter experience, the doctors were sure to demand entertainment of some kind, whatever the time of day. (‘There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’) History records that both men slept perfectly well. Common sense tells us otherwise. Gagarin eventually admitted to Korolev that he did not sleep a wink. It was not just the impending flight preying on his mind. He wanted to concentrate on lying still, so that the doctors would declare him well-rested and fit for duty in the morning. No doubt his highly disciplined understudy Titov employed a similar trick, with the result that both men were less refreshed next morning than they would have been if the doctors had left them alone. Before going to bed Gagarin confided to Kamanin that he had always considered Titov’s chances to be exactly the same as his own. He knew that the merest hint of upset in their last night’s ‘sleep’ could still make a difference. Months later, he joked to Korolev that the only reason he had gone into space on the morning of April 12 was because Titov turned over in his cot the night before.7

  American Intelligence experts knew perfectly well that preparations for Vostok’s launch were under way. Washington time was eight hours behind Baikonur’s. While the cosmonauts were resting on their wired-up mattresses, President Kennedy appeared on an NBC early-evening television programme sponsored by Crest toothpaste. He and his wife Jacqueline talked with reporters Sander Vanocur and Ray Scherer about the difficulties of raising their small children, and about the president’s ‘hands-on’ management style. Kennedy mentioned that political events often appeared more subtle and complex from inside the Oval Office than they did to the outside world. Even as he smiled and joked for the television cameras, he knew that a significant defeat awaited him in just a few hours’ time.8

  At 5.30 a.m. on April 12, Korolev and Yazdovsky breezed into the cosmonauts’ darkened room, all hale and hearty, and turned on the lights. ‘What’s this, my dears? A lie-in?’ Gagarin and Titov went through the motions of awakening from a deep and untroubled slumber.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ the doctors asked.

  ‘As you taught us,’ Gagarin answered warily.

  Korolev went off to check his rocket, but after Gagarin and Titov had washed and shaved, he rejoined them in the day-room for a simple breakfast of concentrated calories and vitamins in the appetizing form of a dark brown paste. Even in Gagarin’s heavily censored published account of that day, The Road to the Stars, Korolev’s exhaustion is evident:

  The Chief Designer came in, and it was the first time I’d ever seen him looking careworn and tired. Clearly he’d had a sleepless night. I wanted to give him a hug, just as if he were my father. He gave us some useful advice about the coming flight, and it seemed to me that talking to us cosmonauts cheered him up a bit.9

  The doctors arrived from another building across the road to give the cosmonauts a final check-up, bringing with them more of their favourite things: a clutch of sticky, round sensor pads. Titov and Gagarin stood there patiently, half-naked, while the pads were glued into place on their torsos. Star City’s director Yevgeny Karpov gave them each a bouquet of flowers to cheer them up. Actually he was passing them on from the old woman, Klavdiya Akimovna, who usually lived in the cottage. He could not let her in just now, which was probably just as well, for she had a touching story about her son, who was a pilot just like Yuri, but who had been killed in the war. No need to mention that, she said. Karpov ushered her away with a few kind words and took the flowers into the cosmonauts’ room. He wanted to say something important, something meaningful on this great occasion, but could not think of anything sensible. ‘Instead of advice and farewells, all I could do was joke and tell funny stories and other pieces of nonsense, just like everyone else. At the breakfast table we squeezed space-food out of tubes and pretended we thought it was amazingly delicious.’10

  After breakfast, when the doctors had finished with their pads and glue, the cosmonauts were driven across to the main spacecraft assembly building. The huge construction floor for the Vostok was empty. The rocket and capsule were already out at the pad, but in a closed-off side facility there remained some small but essential items of equipment still to prepare – the spacesuits.

  So far, Titov and Gagarin had been treated exactly alike. Now, in the clean white glare of the suiting-up room, a subtle shift of emphasis came into play. Titov was the first to receive his padded undergarment; the first to climb into his pressure-suit; the first into the bright orange outer layer. By the time he was fully dressed in his suit, Gagarin was barely ready. Titov knew not to become excited about this. The technicians had dressed him first, and Yuri second, so that the First Cosmonaut would spend less time between here and the launch pad overheating in his suit. During the drive to the gantry both their suits were ventilated, rather ineffectively, by plug-in fan boxes inside the crew bus. Just in case something happened, Titov had to be ready. A little warmer in his suit than Yuri perhaps, but ready just the same. For now, he knew that getting dressed first meant that he would almost certainly stay second.

  Gagarin had his own shock of realization to deal with. In his official account of the flight, The Road to the Stars, he wrote, ‘The people helping me into my spacesuit held out pieces of paper. One even held out his workpass, asking for an autograph. I couldn’t refuse, and signed several times.’ Yevgeny Karpov watched Gagarin right up to the last moment. He noticed the First Cosmonaut’s anxiety about all these autographs. ‘For the first time since his arrival at Baikonur he was at a loss, unable to give his usual instant replies to people. He asked, “Is this really necessary?” I said, “You’d better get used to it, Yura. After your flight you’ll be signing a million of these things.”’ With many months of technical and physical training behind him, Gagarin had not had much time to consider what might happen when he came back to earth after today’s mission. Now, almost too late, he caught a glimpse of the enormous social burden that would be placed on his shoulders.

  Dressed in the twentieth century’s most distinctive suits of armour, Gagarin and Titov took their seats in the bus:
a matching pair of cosmonauts, the same sort of age, at the same peak of physical fitness, with the same hard slog of medical endurance and procedural training behind them. Their spacesuits and helmets were identical. It could be either one of them going up today, but by some ridiculous anomaly of fate it was going to be Gagarin. When the bus drew up alongside the base of the launch gantry, Titov wished him good luck, and meant it. Cameraman Vladimir Suvorov recalled the scene in his diary:

  According to our old Russian tradition, on these occasions one should kiss the person going away three times on alternate cheeks. It is completely impossible to do this while wearing bulky space suits with helmets attached, so they simply clanged against each other with their helmets, and it looked very funny . . . Then Gagarin got off the bus and paced awkwardly towards the Chief Designer. Obviously it wasn’t easy for him to walk in his clumsy suit.11

  Titov remained in his seat in the bus, staring listlessly through the windows at the reinforced concrete control bunker – at the ‘hedgehogs’. That’s what everybody called them: the array of jagged spars sticking out of the roof at crazy angles. The theory was that if a misfiring rocket fell on top of the bunker and exploded, the hedgehogs would break it up before it could actually smash into the roof. The worst of the blast would be deflected, and the people in the bunker might live to launch another day. At least the hedgehogs made more sense than this business of sitting in the bus as Gagarin’s back-up. Titov recalls his thoughts that day with painful clarity. ‘We’d trained together a long time. We were both fighter pilots, so we understood each other. He was commanding the flight, and I was his back-up, just in case. But we both knew “just in case” wasn’t going to happen. What could happen at this late stage? Was he going to catch flu between the bus and the launch gantry? Break his leg? It was all nonsense. We shouldn’t have gone out to the launch pad together. Only one of us should have gone.’

  Even so, Titov admits that one simple, tantalizing thought went round and round in his head. ‘Probably nothing will happen, but what if? No, nothing can happen now, but what if . . .?’

  Director of Medical Preparations Vladimir Yazdovsky remembers Titov’s palpable tension in the bus. ‘Of course he was hoping that when Gagarin went up to the capsule, a small tear would appear in his spacesuit or something, and immediately the Number Two would be in command of the flight, but Gagarin went into the launch-tower lift-cage very carefully, ascended to the capsule and sat down in the cabin, and when he reported to me that he was safely strapped into place, I gave the order to Titov to remove his spacesuit. He answered abruptly, in a disturbed way, but after that he quietened down. He showed no further emotions.’

  Korolev, Academician Keldysh and several other dignitaries were at the gantry’s base to greet Gagarin and wish him a good flight. ‘Well, it’s time to go. I’ve already been inside the ball, to see how it feels,’ said Korolev. He took from his pocket a tiny hexagon of metal, a duplicate of a commemorative plaque sent to the moon on a simple automated ‘Lunik’ probe in 1959. Its deliberate crash-landing had scattered a dozen of the little plaques in all directions. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll be able to pick up an original, Yuri Alexeyevich.’12

  In his diary Nikolai Kamanin observed drily:

  When Gagarin left the bus, everybody let themselves release their emotions and started to hug and kiss one another. Instead of wishing him a nice journey, some of them were shedding tears and saying goodbye as if for ever. We had to apply force to pull the cosmonaut out of their embraces.

  Then Korolev strode towards the bunker and disappeared under the hedgehogs. Gagarin went on up and Titov stayed down.

  After he had ascended to the top of the pad in the lift, the technicians supported Gagarin’s shoulders as he raised his legs over the rim of Vostok’s hatch and wriggled himself into the ejection seat. Once he had settled, Oleg Ivanovsky and Chief Test Pilot Mark Gallai leaned into the cabin as far as they could and hauled at the loose ends of his straps to tighten him against the seat. Then they plugged his suit hoses into Vostok’s life-support system. Gagarin was now an integral component of his ship – or, rather, an integral part of his ejection system. The couch’s cylindrical lower section incorporated a pair of solid-charge rocket nozzles, but it also contained a small separate oxygen supply in case the ball sprang a leak in orbit, or Gagarin had to bale out somewhere between the earth and true space, maybe at ten or fifteen kilometres’ altitude, where the air is still present but much too cold and thin to breathe.

  Down in the blockhouse, Korolev and his technicians saw the life-support monitors flashing their positive signals as the hoses locked into place. Gagarin’s air supply was working and his suit showed no signs of leakage. At the foot of the launch gantry, fretting in the bus, Titov received his last orders for the day, standing him down from the mission once and for all.

  Fifty metres above the bus and its disappointed cargo, Ivanovsky rapped on Gagarin’s helmet with his fist for a final goodbye, but one last detail still troubled him: the keypad codes. ‘It didn’t feel right to send Yura into space without any real control over his own craft,’ he recalls. ‘No matter what the psychologists said, he was still a properly trained military pilot.’ Surely the whole point of all Gagarin’s training was to get him out of lethal emergencies in dangerous craft travelling at colossal speeds? Ivanovsky remembers feeling resentful on Gagarin’s behalf. ‘The doctors could not judge if his sanity might crack under pressure, because they were not familiar with any kind of flying.’ If something went wrong with Vostok’s automatic-guidance systems, then surely Gagarin was entitled to flick his own switches and solve the problem his own way, just as he would be expected to pull a spiralling MiG out of trouble without asking permission from a committee of doctors? Vostok was a strange apparatus, but still a flying machine for all that. Just like a plane, it might blow up on take-off, in flight or on landing – Ivanovsky uses the word ‘unpleasantness’ to cover all these hazards. ‘There was always the possibility of unpleasantness to do with flying machines of all kinds,’ he says. The only new twist was that Vostok might do none of these things and just quietly carry on in orbit, with the retro-rockets refusing to fire and Gagarin slowly suffocating, with no hope of rescue, no possibility of getting out of the cabin and parachuting gently to earth, his Vostok an eternal tomb . . . Ivanovsky sums up the fundamental risk of a cosmonaut’s life: ‘His work, his special expertise, may require his death.’

  Ivanovsky worried about all these possibilities, although he acknowledges that nobody in the space community ever spoke openly about such things, least of all the cosmonauts themselves. Of his decision on the launch gantry that day, his small rebellion of conscience, he says, ‘How should I know why I did it? I must have been undisciplined for a moment.’ He leaned through the hatch one last time, signalling for Gagarin to open his faceplate, so that they could talk without using the radio link. Conversations on the wire were not private, and this one certainly had to be. Ivanovsky was about to reveal the Big Secret – the three numbers from the six-digit keypad that Gagarin needed to punch in before he could unlock the spacecraft’s manual controls.

  ‘I said, “Yura, the numbers are three, two, five.” and he smiled. “Kamanin’s already told me.” he said.’

  Even the hard-hearted Stalinist had been overcome with a dose of humanity at the last moment. As it turned out, so had Gallai and Korolev, although their contempt for the keypad was never in much doubt. Anyway, no more Big Secret. It must have been comforting to know that three other people, including the Chief Designer himself, had broken the rules. In theory Ivanovsky was betraying an official State secret and could have been sent to a prison camp for his crime.

  Ivanovsky felt a little happier as he squeezed Gagarin’s gloved hand one last time. He and Gallai prepared to seal the capsule, assisted by military Chief of Rocket Troops Vladimir Shapovalov and two junior pad-staffers. First they checked the electrical contacts on the hatchway’s rim to make sure that they registered a clear
and unambiguous signal. Once the hatch itself was locked down, the contacts would confirm that everything was airtight. They would also prime a series of miniature explosive charges set into the attachment ring, which could blow the hatch at a millisecond’s notice, just in case Gagarin needed to eject during a launch failure. The contacts seemed to deliver the right signal, so they manhandled the hatch into position and began to secure the first of thirty screw-down bolts along its circumference. They tightened the bolts in opposing pairs in order to mate the seals evenly.

  The instant they had secured the final bolt, the gantry telephone rang. ‘We thought this would be Korolev from the blockhouse, ordering us to climb down from the launch platform,’ Ivanovsky remembers.

  Not quite. It was Korolev, but he sounded far from happy. ‘Why aren’t you reporting what’s going on up there?’ he demanded. ‘Have you sealed the hatch properly?’

  Ivanovsky assured him that they had, just seconds ago.

  ‘We don’t have KP-3,’ Korolev barked. (KP-3 was the required electrical signal from the contacts on the attachment ring.) ‘Can you remove and reseal the hatch?’

  Ivanovsky warned Korolev that re-securing the hatch could delay subsequent launch preparations by at least thirty minutes. ‘There is no KP-3,’ Korolev insisted with his habitual logic. So the hatch had to come off. Ivanovsky thought for a terrible moment how Gagarin might feel when he saw the dawn’s early light invading his cabin from a suddenly wide circular hole above his head. ‘I said to Korolev, “Can I just tell Yuri? He’ll be distressed, and he’ll think the hatch is coming off because the flight is cancelled, and we’re going to pull him out of the capsule.” Korolev said, “Don’t worry. Get on with your work in peace. We’ll tell Yura.”’ But Ivanovsky remained agitated. ‘In peace? In peace! You can imagine the state we were in. We dedicated our six hands, three pairs, to these thirty little screws, and we had to undo them all with a special key. The hatch panel weighed about a hundred kilos, and it was a metre wide, a massive piece. It wasn’t a shameful incident at all, but it was certainly embarrassing.’