Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (50th Anniversary Edition)

⁴ PREPARATION

When Korolev and his colleagues brought home captured German V-2s and began to fire them, they built a small testing station 180 kilometres east of Volgograd (then called Stalingrad) near a small town called Kapustin Yar. In January 1957 work began on a much larger and more permanent base at Plesetsk, on the Arctic Circle, because trans-polar trajectories offered the shortest ballistic routes into the North American continent. Plesetsk became the principal base for Soviet intercontinental nuclear missiles – though the ‘missile gap’ which John F. Kennedy spoke of so effectively in his 1960 election campaign was largely a myth. Kennedy presented a frightening vision of vast numbers of Soviet missiles aimed at the US, and urged the building of an adequate counterstrike force to reduce the supposed ‘gap’ between Russian and US capability. In fact, at that time Plesetsk could handle no more than four of Korolev’s R-7 rockets at a time, and it is unlikely that they could have been launched all at once. The missile gap was, if anything, greatly in America’s favour.

The Soviets’ most famous launch station was built as close to the Equator as they could manage, so that the west–east rotation of the earth would impart extra energy to departing heavy rockets. On May 31, 1955, supervising engineer Vladimir Barmin and his men turned over the first clump of soil in one of the loneliest places on earth: a vast, utterly flat, barren steppe in the middle of the southern republic of Kazakhstan. The new complex was built around an old settlement called Tyura’tam, named by the nomad Kazakhs for the burial site of Genghis Khan’s beloved son Tyura, although another translation was ‘Arrow Burial Place’, which was not considered appropriate for a rocket-launching station. The Soviets swept aside the old name and called the place ‘Baikonur’, which was actually a small town 370 kilometres to the north-east. This was a bid to confuse the Western Intelligence agencies about the base’s location, although they discovered the truth as soon as the first R-7 ICBM prototype was successfully launched from Baikonur (after two failures) on August 3, 1957 and was monitored by radar stations in Turkey. Near the rocket base the Soviets founded a new city called Leninsk to house 100,000 Russian technicians, along with 30,000 soldiers to guard them.

Several metres of snow cover the steppe from October through to March, and blizzards are frequent. Only in April does the place become bearable, when the snow melts and the steppe comes into bloom for two or three weeks. As the flowers fade and the last of the meltwaters evaporate to leave shallow pools, the mosquitoes breed. Then, in the long summer, the earth hardens like brick, the heat is remorseless and sandstorms are a constant hazard for people and machines alike.

At first glance the engineers working on the Baikonur complex in 1955 could have been mistaken for political prisoners. They lived in tents, by turns freezing and sweltering, and their equipment was so inadequate that they had to start their work using just shovels and spades. Their first task was to run a triangular spur from the Moscow–Tashkent railway (which itself followed an ancient nomadic caravan route). While NASA supplied its launch centre in Florida with an endless succession of cargo planes, barges, helicopters and 16-wheel trucks cruising along smooth highways, the Soviets went into space by train. Only when the rail spur deep into the steppe was completed could proper construction machinery arrive at Baikonur.[1]

Within two years the construction workers completed an airport, a huge hangar bay where rockets could be assembled and checked under shelter, control blockhouses, and a support platform and flame trench for the base of the first launch tower. The 250-metre-long platform, supported on solid concrete pillars the height and size of apartment buildings, jutted out over the reinforced slope of an old mine working, like a giant balcony over a hillside. Rockets would be suspended by clamps with their engines pointing down through a large square hole in the platform, so that in the first moments of ignition the engines’ blazing exhaust products would shoot through the hole and down onto the slope, to be deflected harmlessly away from the pad.

Other launch pads soon followed, and over the next decade Baikonur’s various facilities sprawled across hundreds of square kilometres of the steppe. Until 1973 no American had ever seen this place, except as a vague pattern of rectangles, lines and shadows in high-altitude reconnaissance photos, taken at great risk by spy planes flying out of Turkey. In fact one of the worst embarrassments in the history of US reconnaissance occurred on May 1, 1960, when a U-2 aircraft was shot down over the Ural mountains. Its mission was to overfly Baikonur and photograph the launch pads. The pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and put on trial in Moscow, much to Khrushchev’s glee. The US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his last months of office, made empty protests about an unprovoked attack on ‘an American weather research aircraft flying from a base in Turkey’, which had ‘inadvertently strayed off-course’.[2] Immediately Eisenhower banned any further U-2 overflights of Soviet territory.

In the wake of this humiliation, one of the most costly, secret and technologically sophisticated space efforts was born: the US spy-satellite programme, run largely by the CIA and the Department of Defense. Their projects came to be known as ‘black’, because nobody ever knew very much about them, despite budgets that matched, or even exceeded, the funds allocated to NASA’s more visible space exploration projects.[3]

No longer a secret, the first R-7 launch pads at Baikonur are still in operation today. Stars painted onto the metal gantries denote the number of launches – one star for every fifty launches. One gantry is decorated with six stars… This is the facility from which the world’s first manned space mission was launched. Today it despatches Soyuz crew-ferries to the orbiting Russian space station Mir.

Baikonur’s modern launch record is good, but the early years of the complex were dogged by failure. In particular, the six months prior to Vostok’s first manned launch were extremely discouraging. On October 10, 1960, Korolev’s robot probe Mars I reached a paltry 120 kilometres into the sky before falling back to earth like a damp squib. The base blocks of the R-7 booster fired according to plan, but the uppermost interplanetary stage, designed too hurriedly, failed to push the probe clear of the earth’s gravity. Four days later, a second probe fell back in the same way. At the time Nikita Khrushchev was attending a United Nations conference in New York. He had looked forward to boasting about the Mars project, but an urgent coded telegram from Moscow changed his mind. He was most upset.

In mid-October a new prototype rocket, the R-16, was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur. This was one of Mikhail Yangel’s military machines, designed as a replacement for Korolev’s R-7, which was proving somewhat frisky for space exploration and even worse as a strategic missile. If the Soviets were ever to deploy a truly credible force of ICBMs, they had to find a rocket capable of firing at much shorter notice. The R-7 was fine as it went, but it took at least five hours to fuel and prepare. The problem was its use of liquid oxygen, which was a highly efficient chemical when it was actually burning inside an engine, but would not keep for very long prior to launch. Inevitably, after a few hours it warmed up and turned from liquid to gas. The pressure in the tanks climbed towards bursting point and the accumulating gas had to be vented, then replaced with fresh supercold liquid. The longer an R-7 stood on the pad, the more the greedy creature needed replenishment.

The R-16 was designed to need far less preparation before launch, in keeping with the military’s need for a fast-response missile. It could be fuelled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because Yangel had disowned supercold liquid oxygen and kerosene in favour of nitric acid and hydrazine. These chemicals could be stored for long periods inside the rocket at normal pressures and temperatures, without venting or leakage. The R-16 could be kept on permanent standby in a secret silo, ready to strike the Americans at a moment’s notice. The only trouble was that its ‘storable’ fuels would not store. They were viciously corrosive and did just what they were not supposed to do – they leaked.

Thwarted by the Mars probe failures in October, Nikita Khrushchev remained quite determined to come up with a bold gesture for the United Nations conference, so he focused on Soviet military superiority. ‘We’re turning out missiles like sausages from a machine!’ he crowed. On his return to Moscow he pressured his Chief of Missile Deployment, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, to come up with a tangible demonstration of strength. Khrushchev wanted no damp squibs this time. Nedelin flew to Baikonur straight away to supervise the début launch of Yangel’s R-16 on October 23.

As zero-hour approached, the missile began to drip nitric acid from its base. What does a cosmodrome commander do when a fully fuelled rocket springs a leak? He drains its fuel away carefully and then pumps non-flammable nitrogen through the tanks to get rid of any lingering vapours. Next day he might send in a couple of brave technicians in heavy fire-suits to ‘safe’ the rocket, so that it can be taken down and checked. Instead, Nedelin sent dozens of ground staff to the pad straight away, to see if they could tighten up some valves, stop the leaks, and get the R-16 up in the air. His instructions seemed so insane that the crews were at a loss how to proceed. In the firing blockhouse, the proper thing to do was to reset all the electronic sequencers and disarm them, before they could send any further ignition signals to the rocket. Nedelin ordered the firing sequences to be revised and delayed, but not cancelled. Somehow, a wrong command was transmitted to the R-16’s upper stage. Its engine fired, straight away burning a hole in the top of the stage beneath it. This lower stage exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage then 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 metres, 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 wall of blazing chemicals swept towards him.[4]

For thirty years the West knew little of this, although it was apparent from various Intelligence reports that something had gone awry. In particular, an American Discoverer spy satellite photographed Baikonur the day before and the CIA noted with interest the stacking of a new missile. On October 24, the Discoverer in its predetermined orbit overflew the site once again and recorded no gantry and no rocket, just a very large dark smudge despoiling the landscape. The rocket had exploded, but so what? American rockets also blew up from time to time. One had to expect the occasional bad day. The scale of the disaster was not immediately apparent because all news of it was suppressed. All of Soviet Russia was saddened to hear (eventually) that Marshal Nedelin and several other senior missile officers had been killed in an ‘aircraft accident’. Of course the absence of many familiar faces became obvious to thousands of space workers beyond Baikonur, but such unpleasant and difficult matters could be discussed only in private. The sudden disappearance of dozens of young military technicians from Yangel’s squad – most of them just nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old – was not so immediately apparent, except to their mothers.

Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts were told that a prototype missile – not one of Sergei Pavlovich’s ‘Little Sevens’ – had blown up and several technicians had been injured. No doubt they knew better, but for the time being they remained closeted from the worst of the horror in their training compound at Star City. In fact the explosion did not greatly delay preparations for Vostok. Surviving ground crews at Baikonur were able to continue their work. The pads, fuelling pipes and blockhouses assigned to the manned mission were not damaged, and few of Korolev’s most important technicians had been actively involved with the R-16.

Then, less than three weeks before the first manned flight, one of the cosmonauts was killed. Valentin Bondarenko was the baby of the group, a fresh-faced lad of twenty-four years. When his turn came to go into the isolation chamber, he handled his assignment very well. His was a fairly long session (fifteen days), to see how he made out. On March 23 he prepared to exit the chamber. They were running a ‘high-altitude’ regime, and the chamber had to be brought up to normal pressure very slowly, or Bondarenko would suffer from the ‘bends’. There was another half-hour to go before the supervising technicians could equalize the pressures and open the hatch. Bondarenko stretched, climbed out of his itchy woollen outer garment and peeled the medical sensor pads from his torso and upper arms with evident relief. He cleaned his irritated skin with pads of cotton daubed in alcohol. Perhaps he tossed the pads aside a little carelessly. One of them landed on the hotplate of the little cooking stove and caught alight. In the confined, oxygen-rich environment of the chamber, the fire spread with terrifying rapidity.

They pulled him out, covered in burns and in great pain. ‘It’s my fault! I’m so sorry!’ he cried. The doctors struggled for eight hours to save him, but his injuries were too extreme. The circumstances of his death were not made public until 1986.[5]

There was one aspect of space flight for which the cosmonauts at Star City had no practical means of preparing themselves in advance: weightlessness. Korolev and his advisors were not keen to allow their first manned spacecraft to drift in space for longer than a single orbit, because no one was sure that its passenger could survive an entire day without the normal sensation of gravity.

Weightlessness presented a tremendous psychological barrier for the early Soviet space programme. The only earth-bound opportunity to taste the sensation was in the 28-storey lift shaft at Moscow State University, one of the city’s tallest buildings. There was a special cage that fell freely down the shaft and slammed into compressed-air buffers at the bottom of its drop. The cosmonauts might float freely of the cage’s floor for two or three seconds at best. Korolev’s guidance specialist Yuri Mazzhorin explains, ‘It was our first dive into an ocean of uncertainty. We were afraid of everything. That’s why Sergei Pavlovich was in favour of a gradual approach. For the first human space mission, one circle. The next flight, twenty-four hours. The next, three days, to see how a person would survive.’

American astronauts at NASA flew long parabolic arcs aboard Boeing 707 jet planes. These craft were essentially cargo-carrying airliners, but with all the seats and storage crates stripped out, so that the interior cabin was a capacious free space. The astronauts could float free of the walls for perhaps two minutes at a time – more than enough to eliminate the sinister mystique of weightlessness. The Russians never thought to use their cargo planes in this way, at least not in the early 1960s. Trainee cosmonauts experienced thirty seconds or so of near-weightlessness while jerking about in the back seat of a MiG-15 fighter aircraft flying a similar parabolic arc, but it was barely more useful than plunging down the lift shaft at Moscow State University. Titov recalls the MiG experience being uncomfortable and unsatisfactory, and so short that it was not much more than he was used to on ordinary combat training missions. ‘When you’re performing an advanced manoeuvre and not doing it well, you might get something similar, and all the dirt and dust on the cockpit’s floor flies into your face. These short bursts aren’t weightlessness as such. It’s very different [in space] when you have to live in a weightless environment for long periods.’ What’s more, the MiG cockpits were so cramped that there was little chance to float about in any meaningful way.

The Soviets’ dread of weightlessness remained unconquered, at least for now. Calculations were made to fire Vostok’s braking rockets well within its first orbit, which would keep the period of weightlessness to a minimum. However, there was the remote possibility that the craft might be stuck in orbit for several more circuits, because of a failure in the retro-rockets. Andy Aldrin neatly sums up the risk faced by the world’s first space traveller: ‘In an orbital trajectory what happens is you go up and around the earth, and then the rocket that got you up there has to work again to slow you down and bring you back in. If that doesn’t work, you end up with a man orbiting the earth for ever and essentially dying… Korolev’s designers suggested a safer sub-orbital trajectory for the first manned attempt, but he made it clear he didn’t want to beat the Americans by such a little margin. He wanted to beat them by a lot.’

Vostok’s air supply (sixteen spherical gas tanks, alternating nitrogen and oxygen reservoirs wrapped in a ‘necklace’ around the join between the ball and the equipment module) would last for a maximum of ten days. The ship’s orbit was deliberately designed to skim the outermost layers of the earth’s atmosphere so that, in the event of a serious problem, natural atmospheric friction would slow the craft down within a few days. It was a gamble whether or not this would happen before the cosmonaut ran out of air, water and food.

With help from Academician Keldysh and his computers in Moscow, Mazzhorin calculated that Vostok’s re-entry ball could be recovered safely at the end of its first orbit, so long as the braking rockets in the rear equipment module functioned without incident. But even if these rockets were in good shape, there was a chance that the braking manoeuvre might have to be delayed while Vostok’s orientation was fine-tuned. In theory the retro-systems could be fired at any time, but there was no guarantee that they would bring the capsule down anywhere within Soviet-held territory.

Vostok’s orbit was inclined to the Equator by sixty-five degrees. Each orbit, west to east, took ninety minutes. Meanwhile the earth rotated at its own steady pace beneath the ship, once every twenty-four hours. As a consequence the craft did not fly the same path over the ground each time. The mathematics of the situation were clear. The best opportunities for a good homecoming occurred one hour into the first orbit, or else a whole day later, halfway through orbit seventeen. Firing the retro-rockets during any other orbit would risk bringing the craft down into the sea, or on foreigners’ land; in which case, the embarrassment could be severe. Secrets of technology might be revealed; corrupt capitalists might claim the glory for ‘rescuing’ a cosmonaut within their own borders.

Eventually the solutions to these potential propaganda problems were sealed within three envelopes, addressed to the official news agency TASS in Moscow. The various enclosed documents were prepared by Mazzhorin, doubling not just as a guidance mapper but also as a propaganda officer. He had such a detailed understanding of how and where the ball might come down, at the end of its flight, that it seemed appropriate for him to work out what measures should be taken if it actually did descend onto foreign soil. If this calamity occurred, then TASS would be instructed to tear open the appropriate envelope and broadcast its contents. Mazzhorin was also instructed to prepare for the very worst-case scenarios. If the capsule blew up in space, or the ball sprang a leak, then the press statements would have to be tailored accordingly to make the best of the situation. It seemed wise to consider all possibilities and prepare the various announcements in advance. ‘We prepared three envelopes for TASS, with different announcements,’ says Mazzhorin. ‘Envelope number one in case of a full success. Number two for a forced landing over foreign territory. Number three for a catastrophe. People in the television and radio stations were waiting. When we saw the cosmonaut had made it into orbit, and we had data, altitude, inclination and orbital period, the Kremlin could order TASS to open envelope number one.’

But even this ‘success’ envelope was not easy to compile. ‘When the capsule, suspended on parachutes, reached seven thousand metres, the cosmonaut was supposed to eject and come down under his own parachute. We weren’t sure whether to include this part.’

The problem was simple. In the event of a good flight, the Soviets intended to claim the World Aviation Altitude Record, according to rules established by international agreement. Korolev read these rules with care, and noticed to his alarm that any pilot claiming such a record had to remain inside his vehicle all the way to touchdown. If a pilot bailed out before landing, the rules assumed that something must have gone wrong with the flight. In which case, no record. The alternative was not to eject Vostok’s crewman, but Korolev was not sure that anyone could survive the re-entry ball’s abrupt landing without injury. Gai Severin, the foremost Soviet designer of fighter-pilot equipment, had already designed an emergency ejection seat for the cabin, just in case the R-7 launched badly and the cosmonaut had to get clear of some terrible explosion. If the same system was used to remove him at the end of his flight, there would be no need to worry if the ball came down rather too hard on the ground. Future re-entry modules would incorporate larger parachutes and a cluster of rockets in the base to soften the final impact. In later years, more powerful upper stages for the R-7 would allow larger and better-equipped ships to be hauled aloft. For now, the power-to-mass calculations for the system allowed Vostok no margin for luxuries. Soft-landing rockets for the ball were not an option, and its crewman had no choice but to eject.

Nikolai Kamanin instructed a sports official, Ivan Borisenko, to research the altitude-record regulations more deeply. By February 1961 the problem still had not been resolved. At this point, very late in the day, a strategic untruth seemed much more appealing than a major re-design of Vostok. Mazzhorin’s first envelope for TASS, containing the ‘successful’ announcement, falsely implied that the cosmonaut landed in his ship. ‘For a long time this legend was supported in all the official documents,’ says Mazzhorin. ‘Only in the glasnost era was the truth revealed to our people, and to the world.’ The other envelopes must have told a different story. For instance, if Vostok had landed over non-Soviet territory, the use of an ejection seat would have been blatantly obvious to foreigners. Mazzhorin cannot remember the precise wording he used, and he regrets the subsequent loss of his envelopes. ‘It’s a pity we destroyed them. They’d have a historic value today.’

Even the simplest details in the documents for TASS presented a challenge. In the lead-up to the first manned flight it seemed natural to call the capsule ‘Vostok-1’, in the expectation that others would follow in its wake; but the capsule’s principal designer, Oleg Ivanovsky, recalls, ‘If we’d given it a number, then it would have suggested that a series was beginning. We didn’t want anyone to know we were preparing other flights, so Vostok wasn’t given a number.’

A fourth and very different kind of document was prepared for stowage in the Vostok capsule itself. The cosmonauts were not to know it, but even in the last few weeks before the first manned flight, arguments were raging about the extent of command and control that a space pilot should be allowed during his mission. Everything centred around the mysterious six-digit keypad on Vostok’s left-side control panel.

So far, all space vehicles had been operated by on-board electronic systems linked by radio to control stations on the ground, which represented a difficult challenge in itself. What new problems might arise when a human pilot was included in the ship? The doctors worried that a solo cosmonaut might go mad up there, overcome by the spiritual and psychological separation from his companions on earth, while the security services worried that he might defect to the West, deliberately re-entering his craft over foreign territory at the end of his flight. By the autumn of 1960 the discussions about control underwent a bizarre shift of emphasis. The aim was no longer to give the pilot some dignified authority over his own vehicle, but to take it all away from him. Guidance of Vostok would be purely automatic, just as with all the unmanned ships. In an emergency, the crewman might be allowed to operate the controls for a while, but only if he could prove his sanity beforehand.

The engineers devised a six-digit keypad that would unlock the navigation systems from the computers and let the pilot steer his own ship, if manual control became necessary. He would be told the keypad combination only if the mission directors on the ground decided he was mentally fit for the job. With his accustomed logic, Sergei Korolev broke this plan down into its component parts and questioned the basic assumptions. Why would a pilot be given control of the ship? Presumably because the automatic systems had failed and he needed to take over. But if the ship started to tumble out of control, the radio link with earth might be interrupted just at the point when the pilot really needed to hear the secret code that would release his manual controls. The keypad idea seemed more dangerous than just leaving things be.

The doctors came up with a face-saving solution whereby the pilot could find out the code even if his radio went dead, as Vostok’s co-designer Oleg Ivanovsky explains: ‘They decided that if he reached for an envelope placed inside the cabin, ripped it open, took out the paper and read the number printed on it, then pressed the keypad, this careful sequence of actions would prove he hadn’t lost his mind and was still answerable for his actions. It was a dangerous comedy, part of the silly secrecy we had in those days.’ The whole procedure was self-defeating. Obviously the envelope had to be placed somewhere within reach in the cabin, and could not be hidden anywhere too hard to find, just in case the need for it was genuine and urgent. An unstable cosmonaut could have opened it at any time without permission and taken control of his ship. Mark Gallai, the Soviet Union’s Chief Test Pilot, was recruited into the space programme to help train the Vostok cosmonauts. In a recent interview with historian James Harford, he said:

Curiously enough, the American space pilots fought this battle in precise mirror-image. NASA’s cautious rocket engineers wanted fully automatic systems at first, but the astronauts insisted on a wide-ranging freedom of control. They took advantage of their high-profile appearances in Life magazine and on television to lobby for command over their own flights, or at least to obtain an equal partnership with their mission managers on the ground. Strong-willed, individualistic astronauts spent long hours throwing their weight around at the various aerospace factories, essentially designing many aspects of the emerging spacecraft to their own convenience.

There was no requirement to prepare any keypad codes or TASS envelopes for unmanned test flights of Vostok, nor to worry about rescue arrangements. If they descended over a foreign country, they could be destroyed by remote control with a 10-kilo explosive charge. If the ‘destruct’ radio command failed, an on-board timer would blow them up anyway, sixty-four hours after landing. This would discourage American rocket experts from looking into matters that did not concern them.

In fact, the early Vostok capsules needed little help destroying themselves. The first prototype, launched on May 15, 1960, spiralled out of control in space and was lost. Two dogs, Chaika and Lisichka, were put aboard another Vostok on July 28, after the capsule had been modified in the hope of improving it. Now came the R-7’s chance to disappoint its makers. Shortly after launch the rocket blew itself to pieces, dogs and all. The Vostok cosmonauts were at Baikonur that day on their first familiarization visit, and they witnessed the launch of the vehicle which, supposedly, was designed to carry them safely into space. Gherman Titov wryly recalls, ‘We saw how the rocket could fly. More important, we saw how it blows up.’

On August 19 two more dogs, Strelka and Belka, were sent into space. This time, much to Korolev’s relief, the R-7 settled into its climb and the mission proceeded smoothly. Both dogs made it safely back to the ground after seventeen orbits. There was much appreciation in the world’s press. Nikita Khrushchev was delighted. Privately, Korolev and the space doctors were disturbed by a small incident during the flight. Belka became dizzy with the weightlessness and vomited into the cabin. Did this mean that humans would also become ill up there? Cameras in the ship recorded the dogs’ demeanour throughout. Obviously the journey had not entertained them, but they seemed fine once they were back on the ground.

On September 19, 1960, Korolev formally submitted his proposal for a human flight, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party approved his request. Ten senior figures signed the documents: Korolev; his old ally, the mathematics and computer expert Mtislav Keldysh; the doomed, glory-seeking Chief of Missile Deployment, Marshal Nedelin; the Chief of Defence Marshal Ustinov; a watchful Valentin Glushko… If the new adventure was successful, that would mean glory all round. If there was any ‘unpleasantness’, then ten people could pass the buck.[7]

Korolev planned to launch a cosmonaut by the end of 1960, but Vostok still refused to cooperate. On December 1 another hapless pair of dogs was burned to a crisp when their re-entry ball came down at too steep an angle. On December 22 (the rate of launches was frenetic) a fresh duo of dogs survived an emergency ejection in their special pod, when the R-7 booster ran out of thrust halfway up its climb into orbit. The upper stage’s engine did not catch alight and Vostok fell back to earth.

The medical experts exposed many dogs to unpleasant laboratory experiments with barely a second’s thought, but the rocket engineers had more feeling for their canine cosmonauts. Yuri Mazzhorin remembers a dramatic race-against-the-clock rescue, in which the space community’s concern for one of their animals overcame their fear of the 10-kilo explosive devices in the prototype capsules. ‘In 1960, approximately in March, we launched a one-hour flight with a dog. All of a sudden we were advised that the flight was aborted and we weren’t getting any more data. Straight away we calculated where the capsule would fall. It was approximately in the area of Tunguska, Siberia region, coincidentally near where a big meteorite fell in 1908. Everyone was upset and said it was a pity the dog would be blown up. Suddenly a signal came through from radio aerials attached to the parachute lines. It meant the ship had survived.’

This was good news, except for a couple of minor details. When they realized the orbit was failing, the controllers had sent up a ‘destruct’ command. Nothing happened. Obviously the ship was still in one piece when it began its uncontrolled re-entry, but there was no signal to confirm that the dog had escaped in its ejection pod. Perhaps it was still trapped in the re-entry ball? And was the explosive back-up timer activated? If so, the dog would land with a terrible bump, only to be blown up after sixty-four hours!

‘Ten people immediately boarded an Ilyushin-14 at Baikonur. There was a bad fog, but they took off anyway.’ Cooperative KGB officers were despatched to the more colourful establishments of Samara (then Kuibishev) on the Volga, hunting for a couple of off-duty time-bomb experts with a shared love of drink and girls. ‘They were taken from a party, in quite a state, and they were given a plane to Siberia, and we were counting the time left. Perhaps the charge would go off before sixty-four hours? Who knows what the timer was doing? It was a big risk.’

The capsule had come down close to the Arctic Circle. This being March, the daylight in that part of the world lasted no more than a few hours. Fortunately the parachute was spotted from the air just before darkness fell. The bomb was defused and the dog was saved.

In part, this drama was created by the difficulty of maintaining proper radio contact with a spacecraft. The Americans at NASA had the advantage of a worldwide network of listening posts to keep in contact with their Mercury space capsules. They made diplomatic arrangements with Australia, Nigeria, India, the Canary Islands and Mexico to site large and powerful radio dishes on their territory. Communications engineers then laid down an extensive grid of relay towers and undersea cables to connect these stations with the flight managers at Cape Canaveral. (The well-known mission control centre in Houston had not yet been constructed.) In all, the ‘Mercury Tracking Network’ was a diplomatic and technical achievement just as impressive as the spacecraft itself.[8] It formed the basis of an international system that functions to this day. NASA’s spacecraft are never out of communication, unless they disappear for a while behind the moon, or another planet.

Soviet Russia was unable to make such tidy arrangements, because their foreign allies did not live in the right places. Once a spacecraft had disappeared over the farthest horizon of home territory, it was out of communication. The solution was to equip a fleet of four 12,000-tonne cargo ships with special radio masts and send them out into the world’s oceans. They transmitted spacecraft data back to Russia, where the signals were in turn relayed to Baikonur for Korolev’s inspection. Because the cargo ships’ radio pulses were so easy for Westerners to intercept, all the telemetry had to be coded for security. Mazzhorin says, ‘Our vessels were observed from the air. The planes came very close, and took many pictures. The [foreign observers] never boarded us, though they probably guessed the ships’ purpose from their locations and sailing times. If they did board, the crew were instructed to burn all their code books immediately in a special stove. As soon as each space mission was over, the vessels would carry on and deliver their cargoes – grain, palmira seeds or whatever – to earn money.’

On March 25, 1961, one month ahead of Yuri Gagarin, Ivan Ivanovich flew for the first time, dressed in the same type of spacesuit and equipped with the same model of ejection seat and parachute harness. He flew his Vostok well, and took time to send some radio messages back home, although his observations about space were somewhat strange. In fact, he relayed instructions for making soup: schi (cabbage soup) and borscht with beetroot and sour cream. The exact details of the recipe are now lost, but it seems to have been a deliberate attempt to confuse any Western listening posts monitoring the flight.

Ivan’s descent and landing caused great anxiety for witnesses on the ground. Local villagers saw him come down under his own parachute, and they decided that something did not look quite right. The instant Ivan’s feet touched the ground he fell over, apparently unconscious. Naturally the villagers ran over to help, but a cordon of troops quickly surrounded the cosmonaut’s prostrate body. The soldiers made no effort to help, but simply stood around him as if to let him die. The villagers were appalled.[9]

In recent times, a sort of Russian ‘Roswell’ legend has attached itself to this incident. An unacknowledged cosmonaut went up before Yuri Gagarin and was killed during the return phase… History was not best served when a pro-communist British newspaper, the Daily Worker, published a story just two days before Gagarin’s flight, written (or, rather, concocted) by its Moscow correspondent Dennis Ogden. A renowned test pilot had been injured in a car crash, but Ogden decided that the man was a cosmonaut who had come down to earth badly in a spaceship called ‘Rossiya’. As recently as 1979, experts at the British Interplanetary Society took some of these rumours seriously:

Actually Sergei was the famous aircraft designer, and his son’s name was Vladimir; nor does Bobrovsky sound entirely like a citizen of France. It made no difference to all these rumours that Korolev’s launch technicians had daubed maket (meaning ‘dummy’) in thick black paint all over Ivan’s face and across the back of his suit, before strapping him into Vostok’s ball and sending him off; nor that his soup recipes, beamed back from space, were so obviously the product of a tape-recorder, rather than a live human being. Ivan’s choice of subject matter was the cause of heated debate before his flight, as Oleg Ivanovsky recalls. ‘We needed to check the radio’s ability to convey human speech from space, so we decided to put a tape together. Then the security officials said, “No, because if the Western listeners hear a human voice, they’ll think we are secretly flying a real cosmonaut on a spying mission.” Remember, this was only a few months [eleven months] after the Gary Powers business. So we thought we’d record a song instead, but the security people said, “What, have you gone mad? The West will think the cosmonaut has lost his mind, and instead of carrying out his mission he’s singing songs!” Then it was decided to record a choir, because nobody would ever think we’d launched an entire choir into space, and in the end that’s what we did, along with the recipes.’

A less realistic dummy had preceded Ivan on March 9. With these two tests successfully completed, Korolev decided that Vostok was finally ready for a real pilot. He had no choice but to take some risks. NASA’s Mercury programme was about to send an American into space. They, too, were prepared to fly brave military volunteers atop missiles with a less-than-perfect launch history, just so long as they could beat the Soviets.

Incidentally, Mazzhorin and his guidance experts had access to many of the documents openly published by NASA, but they also received secret Intelligence reports about forthcoming launch preparations at Cape Canaveral, including the engineering delays and unmanned test failures that dogged the early phases of the Mercury project. This helps to explain why so many Soviet space successes pipped their US equivalents to the post by just weeks, or even days on some occasions. ‘I remember once I got this three-page document, data about various secret orbits that the American satellites were following, and I said, “What do I need this for? This is just Newton’s Laws of Gravitation.” But I reckon our spies had to get those numbers from somewhere. Of course the Americans knew what we were doing, but they stayed silent because we stayed silent. Each side was pretending not to know the other’s business. It wasn’t a very adult game to play, but it led to great technical progress on both sides and a global space industry with benefits for everybody.’

Quite apart from these complex games of international strategy, the simplest and cheapest security measure that Mazzhorin ever had to organize was for the cosmonauts’ benefit alone. ‘We put a pistol into Vostok’s survival kit, just in case our man landed in the African jungle or some such place, and had to protect himself against wild animals. Not against people, of course. He was supposed to ask any people he came across to help him. He wasn’t supposed to shoot them.’