It was an odd press conference, the reporters probing the character of the pilots. But the reporters’ motivation was not to dig up dirt on their subjects, as has long been a media preoccupation, and might easily have been a focus with these men; instead it was just the opposite. The reporters wanted confirmation that these seven men embodied the deepest virtues of the United States. They wanted to demonstrate to their readers that the Mercury Seven strode the Earth as latter-day saviors whose purity and noble deeds would purge this land of the evils of communism by besting the Soviet Union on the world stage. The astronauts did not disappoint.
John Glenn, perhaps intuitively or perhaps through sheer zest and innocence, picked up on the mood of the audience and delivered a ringing sermon on God, country, and family that sent the reporters rushing to their phones for rewrite. He described Wilbur and Orville Wright flipping a coin at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to see who would fly the first airplane and observed how far we had come in only a little more than fifty years. “I think we would be most remiss in our duty,” he said, “if we didn’t make the fullest use of our talents in volunteering for something that is as important as this is to our country and to the world in general right now. This can mean an awful lot to this country, of course.” The other astronauts fell in behind Glenn and eloquently spoke of their sense of duty and destiny as the first Americans to fly in space. Near the end of the meeting, a reporter asked whether they believed they would come back safely from space, and all answered by raising their hands. Glenn raised both of his.
The astronauts emerged as noble champions who would carry the nation’s manifest destiny beyond its shores and into space. James Reston of the New York Times exulted the astronaut team. He said he felt profoundly moved by the press conference, and that even reading the transcript of it made one’s heart beat a little faster and step a little livelier. “What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions. . . . They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers. . . . This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism.”
These statements of values seem to have been totally in character for what was a remarkably homogeneous group. They all embraced a traditional lifestyle that reflected the highest ideals of American culture. The astronauts also expressed similar feelings about the role of family members in their lives and the effect of the astronaut career on their spouses and children. Many commentators have remarked on the intertwining of the family and work lives of the astronauts, something also seen in military members and their families as well as among others engaged in professions where lives are placed on the line. Those professions often exacted a toll on all involved in the relationship. In every instance the wives of the astronauts, as well as their children and extended family, experienced the stress of carrying the burden of the nation into space. Many wives commented on how it was not “his” career any longer, but “our” career.
For many Americans the public personas of the wives of the astronauts were just as significant as their famous husbands. As a group these women were always “proud,” “thrilled,” and “happy”—their watchwords. Their private well-being, however, was often something less. They spent their time in the public eye caring for their families and for one another, while supporting the efforts of NASA in reaching for the Moon. Essentially, the space program called for the wives of astronauts to set the standard for the moral and social well-being of the space agency, to serve as a support for group members in both good and difficult times, and to enforce the principles of the organization. That is exactly what the astronauts’ wives did.
The media, reflecting the desires of the American public, scrutinized the astronauts and their families at every opportunity. The insatiable nature of this desire for intimate details prompted NASA to construct boundaries that both protected the astronauts and reinforced the image of the astronauts and their families as models of American society. NASA, for obvious reasons, wanted to portray an image of happily married astronauts, with no hint of extramarital scandal or divorce. Gordon Cooper, one of the Mercury Seven, recalled that public image was important to some inside NASA because “marital unhappiness could lead to a pilot making a wrong decision that might cost lives—his own and others’.” That might have been part of it, but the agency’s leadership certainly wanted to preserve the image of the astronaut as clean-cut, all-American boy.
The astronauts humanized this endeavor and created the myth of the virtuous, no-nonsense, able professional. In some respects it was a natural occurrence. The Mercury Seven were, in essence, each of us. None was either aristocratic in bearing or elitist in sentiment. They came from everywhere in the nation, excelled in the public schools, trained at their local state universities, served their country in war and peace, married and tried to make lives for themselves and their families, and ultimately rose to their places on the basis of merit. They represented the best we had to offer, and most important they expressed at every opportunity the virtues ensconced in the democratic principles of the republic.
The Cosmonaut as Mirror Image
On the Soviet side the cosmonauts were less public, at least until they made their flights, but equally attractive. In September 1959, chief designer Sergei Korolev established a cosmonaut selection commission under the Scientific Research Institute of the Soviet Air Force. Since American astronauts had just begun their training in the full glare of the world’s media, the Soviets, who lacked a focused central organizing body like NASA, were nevertheless able to borrow and adapt much of what they saw of NASA’s selection and training methods for their own program. Their training emphasized physical fitness, with all of the first selectees in their late twenties; each of them was a fighter pilot, but not necessarily a test pilot. Korolev developed close relations with his first cosmonauts.
Korolev drew from an initial pool of about three thousand military pilots who had experience flying high-performance aircraft. This group then underwent reviews of their medical and other records, a battery of medical tests, and a range of physical and psychological stress testing. This whittled the group down to fifteen pilots, collectively referred to as Air Force Group One. The group then reported for assignment in March 1960 to a newly formed Tsentr Podgotovka Kosmonavti (TsPK)—the Cosmonaut Training Center—located just outside of Moscow. TsPK later evolved into the Star City facility that is still used for Russia’s cosmonaut training today. Of the fifteen who were trained, eleven eventually made at least one spaceflight.
Among the eleven were some of the most famous of all the cosmonauts: Yuri Gagarin, Andrian Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, Gherman Titov. These, along with Anatoli Kartashov, who did not fly, and Grigori Grigoryevich Nelyubov, who was dismissed as a cosmonaut in 1963 for disorderly conduct while drunk, were known as the Sochi Six for the location where a famous picture of them was taken. After his dismissal, Nelyubov was airbrushed out of the picture, something not admitted for years by the USSR. Regardless, this group emerged as the elite of the cosmonaut trainees and soon took on greater responsibilities than the rest of the candidates. All the cosmonaut selectees were aware that they were competing for the honor of being the first to fly in space, and by early 1961 Gagarin was effectively viewed as the front-runner, both by Korolev and by the other cosmonauts. Korolev, however, kept his first choice secret so that everyone else would keep working hard. Korolev refused to announce, even internally, who would take on the responsibility of becoming the first cosmonaut to fly aboard the Soviet spacecraft Vostok 1—a small vehicle just 7½ feet in diameter, weighing less than three tons, with a ballistic reentry acceleration of eight times the force of Earth’s gravity, about 256 feet per second squared—almost until the point of its first launch. Despite his training, Titov reported experiencing disorientation, extreme fatigue, dizziness, and nausea. Titov even found it difficult to differentiate between the Ear
th and space. This forced a reconsideration of cosmonaut selection and training processes.
Figure 8. Most of the original 1960 group of cosmonauts is shown in a photo from May 1961 at the seaside port of Sochi. Sitting in front from left to right: Pavel Popovich, Viktor Gorbatko, Yevgeny Khrunov, Yuri Gagarin, chief designer Sergei Korolev, his wife Nina Koroleva with Popovich’s daughter Natasha, Cosmonaut Training Center director Yevgeny Karpov, parachute trainer Nikolay Nikitin, and physician Yevgeny Fedorov. Standing in the second row: Aleksei Leonov, Andrian Nikolayev, Mars Rafikov, Dmitri Zaykin, Boris Volynov, Gherman Titov, Grigori Nelyubov, Valery Bykovsky, and Georgy Shonin. In back: Valentin Filatyev, Ivan Anikeyev, and Pavel Belyayev.
In 1962, Korolev selected another group of cosmonaut candidates, their physical capabilities more rigorously assessed. This group also included the first women cosmonauts, and the next year the first scientist-cosmonauts were added to the team. Further additions came in 1964, 1965, and 1966.
As TsPK, outside of Moscow, evolved into Star City, Korolev ensconced the cosmonauts and much of the planning apparatus for human spaceflight there. Highly secretive, Star City did not even appear on maps. It has been the heart of the Russian human space program from its creation until the present. The central goal of the cosmonauts at Star City in the 1960s says much about the priorities of the space race. According to Georgy Grechko, one of the early cosmonauts who trained with Yuri Gagarin: “We thought of nothing else but doing everything before the Americans; it was part of being a good communist.”
Like their American counterparts, the cosmonauts were public relations symbols, both within and beyond the Soviet Union. On April 14, 1961, two days after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, the Soviet Union held a gigantic ceremony in Red Square in Moscow to honor its first cosmonaut. Gagarin had been chosen for cosmonaut training in 1959 and had undergone a series of increasingly rigorous physical and mental exercises to prepare for his flight. Selected from among several other contenders for the first spaceflight, Gagarin represented the Soviet ideal of the worker who rose through the ranks solely on the basis of merit. His handsome appearance, thoughtful intellectuality, and boyish charm made him an attractive figure on the world stage. The importance of these attributes was not lost on Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other senior Soviet leaders. The success of the Vostok 1 flight made the gregarious Gagarin a global hero, and he was an effective spokesman for the Soviet Union on the world stage.
Khrushchev recognized Gagarin’s winning personality and sent him on a goodwill tour. Gagarin’s spaceflight energized the Soviet leadership to invest more money in space exploration during the years that followed, in part because of the international prestige that the nation gained for its spectacular missions. Subsequently the Soviets were the first to launch a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into orbit; the first to launch two- and three-person crews; and the first to execute an extravehicular activity, or spacewalk. It was a major loss to the Soviet program when Gagarin died in a plane crash while on a training mission for the Soviet air force on March 27, 1968.
Training the First Space Explorers
Both the Soviet cosmonauts and the American astronauts undertook intense training to prepare for their space-exploration missions, with many exotic devices, complex procedures, and physical endurance tests. Throughout their respective programs, astronauts and cosmonauts underwent medical tests before, during, and after their flights, physical training, procedure training, pilot familiarization training, and plenty of experiment practice. They would simulate all phases of their missions to assure mission planners that they could accomplish their tasks without error, almost by rote.
Those early space explorers were keenly aware that their simple spacecraft allowed for humans to venture into space only for short periods of time. They also knew they had to quickly learn how best to cope with and overcome any technological hurdles they might encounter. Life scientists worked closely with their respective groups of pilots to ensure both survival and success in the mission, and engineers worked to help the space travelers to master their spacecraft’s controls and systems. They even had to undertake earthly survival training in case they landed in a remote location and needed to sustain themselves while awaiting rescue.
First and foremost, astronauts and cosmonauts had basic human physiological needs that had to be satisfied in orbit. Scientists, flight surgeons, life scientists, and the fliers themselves worked together to ensure the survival of the human body in the extreme environment of space. They strove to encapsulate the body in protective garments, pressure suits, and space suits of various types, and to attend to the needs of those venturing into space to ensure their survival. Mostly they have been successful, but there have been some notable losses of life.
Many pursued knowledge that would help the body survive. For example, in New Mexico, John Paul Stapp and others tested the limits of the human body in surviving the forces of acceleration by riding a rocket sled simulating what the astronaut would experience in flight. Cosmonauts and astronauts tested their capabilities by riding centrifuges to more than ten gs—ten times the force of gravity. Balance and stability were approximated through full-motion simulation, and constant training made actions necessary to survival in space second nature.
Typically, astronaut and cosmonaut training could be split into three stages: individual general training, group training, and specific training for missions. The space explorers learned both technical and management skills focused on understanding, operating, and, if necessary, repairing their respective spacecrafts. Prospective cosmonauts and astronauts developed their own specializations and served as liaisons to the technical teams working on building the space vehicles. For example, John Glenn had responsibility for representing the astronauts in human factors, the manner in which astronauts related to the vehicles they flew. Finally, as a flight neared its launch date, its crew would rehearse and rehearse the details of the mission, often in a full-size mockup of the spacecraft. Usually crew members would become so proficient that they could perform every task automatically without much conscious thinking about it.
The success of such training was obvious throughout the early human space missions. Astronauts and cosmonauts regularly faced glitches and equipment failures, but in each case they were successful in overcoming them.
The First Humans into Space
It came as a shock to the system for many in the United States when Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, on April 12, 1961. The flight of Vostok 1, engineered by Sergei Korolev, represented one of the great success stories of the first few years of the space age. The launch of this first Soviet human orbital mission proved enormously important both for Gagarin and for the Soviet Union. Vostok 1 was a three-ton ball-shaped capsule, with an attached two-ton equipment module containing (among other things) retrorockets. The two parts to the Vostok spacecraft included a sphere in which the pilot sat and a cone-shaped service module that separated as the capsule entered Earth’s atmosphere.
It was lofted into orbit atop a modified R-7 ICBM rocket. Gagarin’s 108-minute flight had been the direct result of Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to be the first to send a human into space, as a demonstration of technological superiority before the world. With Gagarin’s success, the United States lost that challenge and the Soviet Union was recognized worldwide as a technological and scientific superpower.
It was not a given that Gagarin would be the first to fly, or that he would be successful. There had been many earlier failures, and during the Cold War the Soviet Union hid its space accidents. For example, Soviet officials denied an explosion during launch of a Soviet R-16 ballistic missile at Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 24, 1960, in which Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin and as many as 125 other people died. Not until the collapse of the Soviet Union did the Russians confirm this accident, though accounts of it had circulated among Soviet watchers for decades. The chief
designer of the R-16 that exploded, Mikhail Yangel, survived, having stepped away from the test to smoke a cigarette behind a bunker. In the USSR’s hyperaggressive military environment, Yangel had intended to challenge Korolev’s control of the human spaceflight program, but after this accident his stock fell sharply in the Kremlin. Rumors of additional failures in early attempts to launch a cosmonaut into space abounded during the Cold War, with speculation that as many as two cosmonaut deaths had taken place before Yuri Gagarin’s successful flight. There is no evidence to support that theory, even though many historians combed Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers after the end of the Cold War to learn the truth.
Following Nedelin’s failed R-16 launch attempt, Korolev remained in firm control, and proceeded with the Vostok program, which employed a surplus ballistic missile to lift a capsule to orbit, where it could sustain a human occupant for a day or more. Moreover, a rudimentary solid-fuel rocket engine propelled the spacecraft out of orbit at the end of the flight, an ablative heat shield dissipated the heat produced as the capsule returned through Earth’s atmosphere, and a parachute system broke its descent as it landed on the Russian Steppes. On the morning of Yuri Gagarin’s flight, from a remote and secluded area known as Tyuratam, both he and his backup, Titov, suited up. Korolev was also present as chief engineer. The tension of those working the mission proved excruciating, according to engineers who recollected it many years later. Gagarin was surprisingly calm and confident. He relieved himself on the side of the carrier before entering the capsule at the top of the rocket; that became a ritual engaged in by all cosmonauts ever after.
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