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

⁵ PRE-FLIGHT

By the end of 1960 six men from the cosmonaut squad of twenty had been selected as potential candidates for the first Vostok flight. The list was based on the cosmonauts’ abilities and their training record over the previous year; however, there was a more arbitrary factor at work – height, or rather, the lack of it. Vostok’s ejector seat could only accommodate a crewman of modest stature. Gagarin’s short frame made him ideal, as did Gherman Titov’s. Alexei Leonov was a highly proficient candidate, but he was too tall for Vostok in its current configuration.

On March 7, 1961 Valentina Gagarina delivered a second child, Galya. Three weeks after this happy event, Gagarin had to leave for Baikonur, where he and Titov were scheduled to rehearse their final pre-flight checks. By now, they were the only serious candidates in the running for the first flight, the list of six having been whittled down yet further. Both men were aware that a final selection for the first flight would not be made until the very eve of launch, scheduled for April 12. Competition was fierce, albeit understated. ‘Of course I wanted to be chosen,’ Titov explains today. ‘I wanted to be the first into space. Why shouldn’t I? Not just for the sake of being first – simply because we were all interested to see what was out there.’

Titov and Gagarin tried to outdo each other in their cooperation towards each other, knowing that a spirit of professionalism and teamwork would mark them out as suitable choices. A third potential candidate, Grigory Grigoryevich Nelyubov, miscalculated badly, deliberately trying to push himself forward as the only suitable man for the historic first flight. By the end of March, he was no longer in the running.

On arriving at Baikonur, the cosmonauts’ first task was to learn how to dress in their spacesuits. The decision to make the suits had only been taken in mid-1960, after a series of difficult discussions. Many designers thought that Vostok’s pressure-shell should be enough to protect its pilot, and Korolev was worried about the extra weight penalty imposed by the suit and its separate life-support system. However, he was swayed by the safety arguments. He turned to Gai Severin, Russia’s most experienced maker of pilot garments and ejection systems, and said bluntly, ‘You can have the weight allocation [in Vostok] but we need the suits in nine months’ time.’[1]

Severin based his suits on the high-pressure aircraft garments he had designed in the wake of the Korean War. The pro-communist pilots in Soviet-built MiGs often lost consciousness if they turned their planes too suddenly during combat, while their American enemies managed to stay awake. Severin realized that a tight pressure-suit could help against the g-forces. After he had dressed the pilots more suitably, the Americans became less keen on chasing MiGs round sharp corners. Using a similar design, his spacesuits would help to brace a cosmonaut against the acceleration of the R-7 rocket. The tight fit, especially round his legs, would prevent blood from pooling in his lower torso and starving the supply to his brain. The strong, airtight layers of the space outfit were made from a tough, blue-tinted rubberized compound, while the outer orange material – familiar to Western observers from publicity photographs – was not particularly important for survival. It was just a coverall to smooth out the various bumps and seals, made from a brightly coloured fabric so that a cosmonaut could easily be located if he came down in a snow-covered region. The Soviet Union in April had many snow-covered regions.

Severin was on hand now to teach the cosmonauts how his spacesuit worked, while the Chief of Cosmonaut Training, Nikolai Kamanin, watched carefully. This lesson was also for the benefit of the attending technicians, who had to be able to handle every component with flawless efficiency, so that nothing would be forgotten on launch day. Two spare outfits were allocated so that the ‘real’ suits would remain unblemished until they were needed. Then, fully suited up, the cosmonauts took turns clambering through the hatchway of a duplicate Vostok ball, while the pad crews practised strapping them down. Kamanin supervised mind-numbingly repetitive run-throughs of the emergency ejection routine: setting all the right control switches in the cabin, ensuring the suit and helmet were sealed, and above all preparing the body, tensing the muscles, for the violent shock to come. In a real emergency Gagarin and Titov would have to be able to do all these things without a moment’s thought.

On April 3 the two rival cosmonauts dressed up in the reserve spacesuits for one last time so that they could be filmed climbing into Vostok. They took it in turns to make a moving farewell speech at the foot of the launch gantry. No clear details of the R-7’s appearance were revealed in these shots, because the rocket was still sitting horizontally in the assembly hangar – and its design details were highly secret. The launch technicians mimed the procedures for sealing the cosmonauts up in the ball, these sequences being staged in another area of the main spacecraft preparation hangar, not at the launch pad itself. In the months to come, several faked scenes would be spliced into brief but genuine shots of the launch preparations, taken under much less favourable conditions by cameraman Vladimir Suvorov. On the big day, gantry staff would not be able to give him such full access as he could fake in the hangar.[2]

On April 7 Titov and Gagarin accompanied Kamanin to the launch pad. They inspected the gantry equipment in detail and rehearsed how to get off the pad if a fire broke out. If a cosmonaut was sealed into the ball and something went wrong before the R-7 rocket had even left the ground, the ejection seat would hurl him away from trouble, but at this low altitude he would never get high enough into the sky to open his parachute to its fullest extent. So the engineers had worked out the ‘catapulting distance’ of the seat and built a huge array of netting on the ground 1,500 metres away from the pad. The cosmonaut would fall into this, just so long as all the calculations were right. A mannequin had made this trip a few times, but now it was for real.

Kamanin reminded the cosmonauts about the manual option. If they were sitting on the pad awaiting lift-off and the blockhouse computers decided that something was wrong with the rocket, then the cosmonaut’s seat would automatically eject. Failing that, Sergei Korolev in the control bunker had a special key to activate the seat by remote control, according to his own judgement. Typically he would not trust himself alone. He ordered that two other level-headed people in the bunker should also be assigned such keys. But what if none of these safety options worked properly in a crisis? Then the cosmonaut would have to fire the seat on his own initiative, just like a pilot consciously deciding to bail out of a stricken MiG.

At this point in the lecture, Titov made a casual but most unfortunate remark, as recounted in Kamanin’s diary for April 7. ‘Worrying about this is probably a waste of time. The automatic ejection system will work without a hitch.’

Kamanin then turned to his other candidate. ‘Yuri, what do you think?’

Gagarin considered carefully before answering. Reading his answer, one can assume that he did not want to embarrass Titov or insult the skills of all those engineers who had built the automatic systems, although Kamanin obviously wanted to hear a different opinion. ‘I agree, the automatic systems won’t let us down,’ Gagarin replied, giving Titov some covering fire and expressing proper confidence in the ship’s design. ‘But if I know that I can eject for myself in case of failure, then that’ll simply increase my overall chances.’ Kamanin made no particular response, but he carefully noted down the entire exchange:

In fact, Kamanin seemed to be having a hard time deciding which man should be the first to fly. Only the day before he had been leaning towards Titov:

Kamanin seemed to accuse each of the two prime cosmonauts of similar failings with regard to the parachute escape training. Ultimately his final recommendation may have been influenced by a factor beyond his control: the political requirement to favour a farmboy over a teacher’s son. However, his diaries suggest a more subtle reason for his ultimate recommendation:

Kamanin obviously believed that Gagarin was capable of flying the single-orbit mission that had now been decided upon for the first manned space flight. He kept Titov in reserve for a more demanding longer flight in the near future. In the circumstances, Titov could not possibly have been expected to see this reasoning as a compliment on his superior discipline.

Some while before he made his fatal mistake with the R-16, Marshal Nedelin constructed a wooden summerhouse at Baikonur as a pleasant change of scene from the usual drab barracks and drearily functional blockhouses. It had an open framework, more like a gazebo than a proper building; a wooden floor; archways, trellises and columns prettily decorated in blue and white. A cool stream trickled nearby. In the cold of winter it was impossible to make sensible use of the building. The airless summer was also impractical, but in April, when the steppe was in blossom for a few weeks and the air was sweet with the scent of wormwood… There were times when the summerhouse was perfect for a party.

Today, white-haired 63-year-old Gherman Titov bemoans the old summerhouse’s sorry state. ‘It’s windy here now. There were some elm trees, but they cut them down. They should have been replaced, but no one cares. New Russians aren’t interested. For them, flying into space is just a business. At least under Nikita Khrushchev cosmonautics was developing. Under the modern Democrats everything just falls down. What’s all this history for? Silly fools, they don’t understand that when they die, memories of them will also be destroyed. There won’t be a single bump left. Not even a grave.’

History is important to Titov, because it was in this summerhouse on April 9, 1961, just three days before the first manned Vostok flight was scheduled, that they celebrated his removal from greatness with vodka, fresh oranges, apples and other splendid foods laid out on a long table. Vladimir Suvorov, the official cameraman, caught the scene on colour film.

The previous day, Suvorov’s camera had recorded a more formal event in another part of Baikonur, a special State Committee headed by Korolev, Keldysh and Kamanin, during which the First Cosmonaut was selected. The six prime candidates were standing before them. At the pivotal moment a proud Yuri Gagarin stepped forward to receive his historic commission. In fact, the whole thing was staged. The Committee had already met the previous day, in secret session, with none of the cosmonauts present. Afterwards Nikolai Kamanin summoned Titov and Gagarin to his office and told them, just like that. Gagarin was to be commander and Titov his back-up, his ‘understudy’. No explanations. Nothing. Just the awful fact of it, and Gagarin suppressing his usual grin and promising to perform his duties well. Titov says, ‘Some people will tell you I gave him a hug. Nonsense! There was none of that. However, the decision had been taken. I understood that.’ Kamanin noted in his diary that ‘Titov’s disappointment was quite obvious.’

Titov mimed his way through the fake State Committee. There was a moment of purest idiocy, a farce within a farce: halfway through Gagarin’s carefully pre-rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ acceptance speech, Suvorov ran out of film. Korolev tapped his glass with a spoon and called the room to silence, as though he had some crucial announcement to make. ‘The cameraman needs to reload, so we’ll pause for a moment.’ Everybody laughed, then sat fidgeting while Suvurov reloaded. Then the First Cosmonaut repeated his earlier performance word-for-word. Meanwhile, Suvorov was struck by Gagarin’s youthfulness. ‘He was a small, sturdy man, but how young he looked! Like a boy, with a fascinating smile and very kind eyes.’[4]

Next morning there was the more relaxed celebration in the summerhouse, where Titov kept his emotions firmly under control. ‘I was upset, of course, but everything went by the script, as they say.’ Now he can only wonder if things might have gone differently that day. For he was absolutely convinced that it was going to be him.

Of course the selection of the First Cosmonaut was helped along at the highest levels. Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev’s trusted advisor and speechwriter, knows exactly why Gagarin was favoured over Titov. ‘Gagarin and Khrushchev were alike in many ways. They had the same kind of Russian character. Titov was more reserved, his smile wasn’t so open, he had less charm. It wasn’t just Khrushchev who chose Gagarin. It was fate.’

Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers’ sons, while Titov was middle-class. If Gagarin could reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev’s rise to power from similarly humble origins was validated. Wasn’t that the truth? The real reason why they chose a simple farmboy against a properly educated and serious man? After a stiff jolt of vodka to ease the memory and blunt the sharpness of his pride, Titov can now admit, ‘I wanted to be the first one. Why not? Many years have passed, and I would like to say they made the right choice. Not because of the government, but because Yura turned out to be the man that everyone loved. Me, they couldn’t love. I’m not lovable. They loved Yura. When I visited his mum and dad in the Smolensk region after he was dead, then I realized it. I’m telling you, they were right to choose Yura.’

Gagarin’s old academic tutor Sergei Belotserkovsky suggests that another cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, came close to being assigned the first flight, ‘but a distant member of his family was subject to official repression at the time’. Belotserkovsky attributes Gagarin’s eventual selection to a lucky error. ‘I was surprised when I found out that Yura’s brother and sister had been captured by the Germans. Normally it’s a black spot in a person’s biography to have lived in occupied territories. Either the vetting authorities missed that, or they didn’t take it into consideration. If you like, it was a mistake, but a very useful one. If we could have made more mistakes like that when selecting people for important positions, our country woudn’t have had so many problems. Leaders with an informal attitude to the rules, like Korolev for instance, usually turn out to have the higher standards of morality.’

At 5.00 in the morning of April 11, the doors of the main assembly shed rolled open and the R-7, with Vostok on its nose, trundled into the pre-dawn chill, supported horizontally on a hydraulic platform mounted on a railcar. Korolev paced along the track just ahead, escorting his rocket-child like an anxious parent. The railcar moved at slower than walking pace, so that the rocket would not suffer any vibration damage. All the way to the launch pad four kilometres distant, Korolev never left its side. As Titov explains, ‘The rocket was the Chief Designer’s baby, if you like. That’s why he walked along with it all the way, like a pedestrian. These transports to the pad are very slow. At a time like that, speed is always associated with problems. Vostok rockets are quite delicate as well as powerful – especially that first one.’

At one o’ clock that afternoon, Korolev escorted Gagarin and Titov to the top of the gantry for a final rehearsal of boarding procedures alongside the now-vertical rocket. All of a sudden Korolev became weak with exhaustion, and had to be helped down from the gantry and back to his cottage on the outskirts of the launch complex to get some rest. In time, Gagarin would discover that the Chief Designer’s stocky, rugged appearance disguised a very fragile man.[5]

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 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:

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:

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.’

Embarrassing and exhausting. Ivanovsky and his colleagues had worked non-stop on Vostok’s pre-launch checks, ever since the rocket had reached the pad on the morning of April 11. They had checked the life-support system, the propulsion systems, the navigation gyros: the awesome combinations of electrical energy and explosive chemicals that could miscombine in some small way at any moment and blow Gagarin into pieces (and possibly topple the rocket on its pad, spilling death and destruction across half of Baikonur). They had checked and re-checked, and now this failure of a couple of simple switches on the hatch threatened to ruin everything in the very last minutes before launch. As they pulled off the hatch, Ivanovsky hardly dared look into the cabin. What might Yuri be thinking? ‘In fact it was impossible to see his face at that moment. You could only see the top of his white space helmet. Sewn into the fabric of the left sleeve of the spacesuit there was a little mirror, which enabled the cosmonaut to look up at the hatch area, or other areas [of the upper cabin] normally blocked from view [by the rim of his bulky helmet]. He tilted his sleeve so that I could catch a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He was smiling and everything was fine.’ Gagarin was whistling quietly to himself as Ivanovsky and his colleagues replaced the hatch.

Those thirty bolts again. Tightening the opposite pairs, and Korolev’s voice on the phone, more forgiving now: ‘KP-3 is in order.’ Ivanovsky does not want to apportion blame, but as far as he can remember, the hatch had looked perfectly good to him right from the start, and he decided that someone in the blockhouse must have made an error reading the data. He would not have minded, except that the KP-3 business gave him a very nasty moment. Now it was the 40-minute mark, and the people in the blockhouse had sent the signal exactly on time to make a partial retraction of the gantries and walkways around the rocket. The platform that Ivanovsky and his four companions were standing on started to move away from Vostok. Any second now it would rotate down to forty-five degrees and they would fall off. There was an awkward moment when they had to use the gantry telephone to request a brief delay in the retraction. They quickly patted Vostok’s ball for luck, then climbed down from the gantry as fast as they could. Their feet were barely on the ground when the hydraulic motors started up again to pull the platforms away.

Ivanovsky headed for the nearest control bunker, while cameraman Vladimir Suvorov opted to stay out in the open, anxious not to miss the most important photographic opportunity of his life. He and his assistants prepared various cameras – manual and automatic – around the pad, only to find themselves being manhandled by soldiers with strict orders to clear the entire area prior to launch. The officer in charge was furious that Suvorov could be so stupid as to stay outside. ‘No film crews are allowed. I’m in charge here, and I’m ordering you into the shelters now!’ The cameraman’s righteous rage turned out to be the stronger. ‘We’re on official assignment! Here, I’ll write you a note,’ he sneered. ‘I am staying outside by my own wishes. In case of my death you are not responsible, all right?’

‘Okay, okay. No hard feelings.’ The guards retreated and Suvorov got his historic shots.[13]

The crew bus pulled back from the pad, and Titov was escorted to an observation bunker so that he could strip off his suit. Gai Severin’s technicians came at him again like predators, stripping off his gloves, his air hoses and restraint harness, taking him to pieces. He was all flapping arms and crumpled legs, a tangle of stiff fabric, with the neckpiece halfway over his head, when the technicians suddenly rushed away towards the bunker’s exit. The launch had started, and they wanted to go outside to see it. ‘They forgot about me,’ Titov recalls mournfully. ‘I was all alone.’ He waddled to the exit behind everybody else, clumped up the stairs and emerged onto the observation platform on the bunker’s roof.

To this day Titov vividly remembers everything he saw and felt in the next few moments. ‘I could hear the high-pitched wine of the fuel pumps pushing fuel into the combustion chambers, like a very loud whistle. When the engines fire up, there’s a whole spectrum of sound frequencies, from high-pitched screams to low rumblings.’ He knew the R-7 was hanging over the gulch of the flame trench, suspended on the gantry’s four slender support arms. The engines were going through their paces for a few seconds, adjusting to their unimaginable stresses in the last moments before the deliberate inferno of main thrust. ‘I saw the base of the rocket belching fire when the engines were igniting, and there were stones and pebbles [from the surrounding scrubland] flying through the air because of the blast.’ He watched the claw-like hold-down clamps around the rocket falling away; heard later, much later, the noise too loud to be heard, as the belated soundwave arrived. ‘It hammers your ribcage, shaking the breath out of you. You can feel the solid concrete bunker shaking with the noise… The light of the rocket’s exhaust is very bright… I saw the rocket rise and sway from side to side slightly, and I knew from this that the secondary steering nozzles were doing their job properly… It’s no good describing a rocket launch. Every one is different, and I’ve seen many. To describe a rocket launch in words is a hopeless task. You have to see it. Every time, it’s as if for the first time.’

Titov watched the brilliant fire climb high and dwindle to a spark, a fading impression on the retina, until all that was left was a pungent smoke trail and a silence suddenly much more deafening than the original blast, and all the other people on the platform with their backs turned against him.

Then, back down in the bunker, Gagarin coming through on the radio link, reporting from space. ‘It was strange to hear Yuri’s voice… We were sitting together here just half an hour ago, and now he was up there somewhere. It was hard to understand. Time somehow lost its dimensions for me. That’s how I felt.’

Titov on the ground, forgotten. Gagarin up there: the first man in space, his name surviving for as long as human memory survives. And Titov a white-haired businessman and Duma politician in Moscow today, turning up sometimes at Baikonur to watch the paintwork crumble on an old summerhouse, where they took his day away from him.

And if any cosmonaut was more disappointed than Titov, it must have been Grigory Nelyubov, who came within a whisker of making the flight himself. Almost exactly the same age as Gagarin, he had flown advanced MiG-19 fighters as a Navy pilot on assignment to the Black Sea Fleet, before joining the cosmonaut squad in the first group of twenty. A brilliant and intelligent man, his principal fault was his need to be the centre of attention at all times. Although heavily favoured in some quarters to make the first flight, Nelyubov’s eventual assignment to third place, behind Titov, came as a great disappointment to him.

Nelyubov’s space career did not last – in fact he never went into orbit. On May 4, 1963, Nikolai Kamanin dismissed him from the cosmonaut squad after his drunken skirmish with a military patrol on a railway platform. The patrol arrested him for disorderly behaviour, and (according to Oleg Ivanovsky) he shouted, ‘You can’t do this. I’m an important cosmonaut!’ The military officers agreed to release Nelyubov if he apologized for his rudeness, but he refused. Two other cosmonauts, Anikeyev and Filateyev, were merely bystanders in this drama, but Kamanin sacked them too.

Nelyubov went back to flying MiGs at a remote air station, where he tried to convince his fellow pilots in the squadron that he had once been a cosmonaut and had even served as back-up to the great Yuri Gagarin himself, but nobody believed him. On February 18, 1966, profoundly depressed, he threw himself under a train.

Nelyubov’s likeness was airbrushed out of most of the photographs of cosmonaut groups associated with the Vostok programme. In 1973 keen-eyed Western historians discovered a snapshot that had escaped the airbrushing. Star City’s political information officers had accidentally released the photo without realizing its significance – and the ungenerous lies that it exposed.[14]