by Amy Cherrix
Tereshkova and four other talented female skydivers were chosen from a list of four hundred women candidates. Skydiving experience was critical. The only way for a cosmonaut to exit a Vostok capsule was to “punch out,” a dangerous maneuver initiated by activating the craft’s ejection seat at an altitude of more than four miles, after it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Once the cosmonaut was clear of the capsule, she opened her parachute.
Tereshkova’s call sign was Chayka—“the seagull.”
Nikolai Kamanin, deputy chief of the air force, supervised the selection and training of cosmonauts, including Tereshkova and the other female candidates. Kamanin expected the women to overcome an obstacle that did not challenge their male colleagues: they had to prove they could do the job in spite of the fact that they were female. Kamanin’s journal highlighted the unfair double standard used to evaluate the trailblazing Russian women who were willing to die to prove that human spaceflight was possible. In one entry, he criticized a candidate who enjoyed “taking walks (although she has a husband and four-year-old son).” He seemed to believe that her enjoyment of this light exercise took away from time she should have spent caring for her family. By contrast, a journal entry about Tereshkova praised her abilities but still managed to be blatantly sexist:
“We must first send Tereshkova into space flight. Tereshkova, she is a Gagarin in a skirt.”
Of course Valentina Tereshkova was not wearing a skirt when she fearlessly blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in June 1963; she was outfitted in the same Soviet space suit that male cosmonauts wore, and for the most part, the launch had gone according to plan. By the end of the first day, however, Tereshkova suffered from motion sickness and vomited. Korolev considered aborting the flight early, but the Seagull reported that she felt better and asked that the flight continue. She reassured ground control that she would fulfill her duties and remember all that she had learned. The Seagull was determined to keep flying.
Valentina Tereshkova’s achievement was bittersweet for the other four female cosmonauts. Tatyana D. Kuznetsova (age twenty), Valentina L. Ponomareva (age twenty-eight), Irina B. Solovyova (age twenty-four), and Zhanna D. Yerkina (age twenty-two) knew there would be only one Vostok mission for a woman. Unlike Tereshkova, none of their names would appear in the press. There would be no interviews, parades, or public celebration. Tereshkova’s flight had been a stunt, not a statement in favor of equality. Nonetheless, Soviet news outlets heralded her achievement as a victory for their country. The first woman in space was a Russian, not an American.
Tereshkova knew that to Khrushchev, her flight was just another spectacular victory in his publicity war against the West. The Soviet space program appeared so advanced even a woman could be sent successfully into orbit. It’s likely that all the women who submitted themselves for consideration as cosmonauts would have cared less about this distinction and more about the prospect of flying into space. They knew that men dominated the times in which they lived and that an opportunity like this came along once in a lifetime. They didn’t argue the politics. It was a chance to serve their country. For Tereshkova, it was also a way to honor her late father, who had died in the fight against Hitler. For the world’s first woman in space, it had been personal.
During her first and only spaceflight, Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth forty-eight times in three days. As she circled the planet over and over, the Seagull broadcast a message of hope and sisterhood. “Women of the world,” she said. “Greetings to you from space. I wish you good luck and success.” To this day, Tereshkova remains the youngest woman ever to have flown in space.
AMERICA’S FIRST WOMAN IN SPACE
It took the US two decades to catch up to the Soviet Union’s launch of a woman into space. On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman aboard the space shuttle Challenger. She was thirty-two years old.
Both Vostok 5 and 6 landed safely on June 19, 1963, three hours apart.10
Chapter 34
“The President Has Been Shot”
On November 22, 1963, American television and radio stations interrupted their regular broadcasts with breaking news: President Kennedy was dead. Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots at forty-six-year-old Kennedy’s open-air convertible as he rode with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was immediately sworn in as president of the United States. America, and the entire world, was in shock.
In the Soviet Union, Korolev was at home when he heard the news. His English-language expert, Vladimir Shevalyov, called him to report that the American president had been assassinated. Korolev lived with the constant suspicion that his phone was tapped by Soviet intelligence services. He knew it was inappropriate and potentially dangerous to speak favorably about the United States. Criticism of the Americans was expected in political circles. It was only in private that one could admire the US and the chief designer felt the loss of President Kennedy as well. Despite the risk, Korolev made no attempt to conceal the sorrow in his voice when he heard the tragic news. Shevalyov later revealed that he had “never heard Korolev criticize America.”
In Huntsville, von Braun was devastated. He had grown fond of President Kennedy and respected his enthusiasm and support for the space program. He had met with the president on November 16, six days before he was assassinated.
November 16, 1963. NASA associate administrator for manned space flight George Mueller discusses the Saturn V with von Braun, President Kennedy, and other officials at Cape Canaveral.
On the day of Kennedy’s funeral, von Braun’s secretary, Bonnie Holmes, recalled him saying, “What a waste. What a tragic loss of a friend and a great leader.” Holmes later said it was the only time she ever saw her boss cry.
Two months after Kennedy’s death, von Braun wrote a letter to his widow, Jacqueline. He offered his condolences and shared some good news of successful launch tests he knew would have pleased her late husband. “Like for so many, the sad news from Dallas was a terrible personal blow to me,” he wrote.
Several days later, he received Mrs. Kennedy’s handwritten response: “What a wonderful world it was for a few years—with men like you to help realize his dreams for this country. . . . It is my only consolation that at least he was given time to do some great work on this earth, which now seems such a miserable place without him.”
Wernher von Braun (middle) and President John F. Kennedy (right) met on November 16, 1963.
In the wake of Kennedy’s death, the moon shot became a memorial to the fallen American president and Cape Canaveral was renamed Cape Kennedy.11
Chapter 35
Stepping-Stones to the Moon
Work on the Apollo mission continued. The successful launches of Shepard, Glenn, Gagarin, Tereshkova, and others on Projects Mercury and Vostok proved it was possible for a human being to orbit the Earth in a single-person capsule. If either country was going to land on the moon, they needed to answer basic questions about prolonged missions lasting days or weeks. What would happen to astronauts who spent extended periods of time in orbit? How could they exit their spacecraft to “walk” in space? What was the best way to connect two separate spacecraft?
Project Gemini
To answer these questions, NASA undertook Project Gemini (Latin for “twins”). The Gemini capsule, based on the Mercury design, was expanded to seat two astronauts. According to NASA, the vehicle would test “long-duration flight, rendezvous and docking, and other techniques needed for journeys to the moon.” The Gemini capsules would be launched with the air force’s Titan II rocket, and the project would be managed by NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. Von Braun’s team wasn’t responsible for building and launching every space capsule and rocket. NASA divided this heavy workload among different and specialized departments that all supported the primary goal of landing on the moon. Von Braun’s focus was overseeing development of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo moon-l
anding missions.
Voskhod Program
In the Soviet Union, Korolev and his team were in the early stages of designing their own two-person space capsule, called Soyuz. Korolev hoped that it could be modified to accommodate multiple cosmonauts for trips to space, and one day, to the moon.
Then, as if on cue, Nikita Khrushchev called in an order for another space spectacular, this time the “launch of three cosmonauts, right away!”
Three cosmonauts? The Americans were still trying to launch two, and Korolev’s two-person Soyuz capsule was still in the design phase. He didn’t have a capsule that was big enough to accommodate three cosmonauts wearing bulky space suits. The only available vehicle was the tiny Vostok capsule, which seated one person. In the past, Korolev had managed to pull rabbits out of hats, like a magician. However, Khrushchev seemed to believe that rabbits lived in hats—that he had only to ask, and Korolev would pull off another engineering miracle. Once more, with a shoestring budget and brazen ingenuity, Korolev and his team set out to accomplish the impossible.
The mission was a risky, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants-and-hope-for-the-best project from day one. They gutted the Vostok capsule to make room for three cosmonauts and renamed it Voskhod. The only way to squeeze two more cosmonauts inside the cramped capsule was by eliminating two safety features: space suits and ejection seats. The space suits provided the cosmonauts’ oxygen. Now the entire capsule would have to be perfectly sealed to preserve the crew’s air supply. Without ejection seats, there was no way to evacuate the Voskhod if something went wrong.
Landing the Voskhod after it reentered Earth’s orbit was equally dangerous. During previous missions, the cosmonauts ejected and parachuted to safety. Now engineers had to figure out how to land the capsule softly with three cosmonauts inside. They settled on a reentry system comprised of retro-rockets and two parachutes working together to slow the capsule’s descent and gently lower it to the ground. They ran the risk of the rockets igniting the parachutes’ fabric during a landing, but Korolev decided the fire risk was minimal and he needed to make this flight happen. The chief designer’s goal remained a rocket to the moon. Without the Soviet leader’s consistent and generous support, he would never get the chance to build it.
The F-1: A “Big Dumb Engine”
While Korolev secretly retooled his single-person Vostok space capsule into a flying sardine can for three cosmonauts, von Braun struggled to perfect the engine design for the future Apollo moon landing.
At the Marshall Space Flight Center, the F-1 was known as the “big dumb engine” because it used two common propellants: kerosene and liquid oxygen. It was an engineering masterpiece. It was also enormous: 18.5 feet tall, a diameter of 12.2 feet, weighing 20,000 pounds. The dome of the bell-shaped engine was covered by a large plate with thousands of tiny holes in its surface. It looked like a supersize showerhead. Fuel sprayed through the holes and into the engine bell at the rate of three tons per second; there it ignited, creating hot gases. As the gases were forced from the engine bell, the rocket rose off the ground.
The trouble was, the big dumb engine had an annoying habit of blowing up. In rocket engine design, it’s called combustion instability. But F-1 engineers were unable to determine the precise cause of the instability. In test after test, the engine incinerated itself. Designers took a radical step by inserting a small bomb inside the F-1, hoping to balance the instability. It worked. Without knowledge of what caused the instability in the first place, however, it was impossible to guarantee the engine would not blow up again.
In the Soviet Union, Korolev’s hastily remodeled three-person Voskhod was ready for its flight, but nonstop work on the project aggravated his ongoing health issues. He had been hospitalized twice, once for ten days with a heart complication, from which he recovered, but he returned to the hospital one week later due to a painful gall-bladder attack.
Shortly thereafter, Korolev learned that the N-1 moon rocket program was out of money, and that there were no plans to commit additional funds. Khrushchev had never fully endorsed a long-term moon-landing project. Most of the defense budget was earmarked for the building of ICBMs and nuclear weapons, not “civilian” space systems. Every facility dedicated to the production of the N-1 closed. Korolev refused to accept that his dream of a moon shot was dead. He fought for the N-1, campaigning for the program by writing letters to anyone who had enough power to reverse the decision and authorize more money. “The scope and progress of the work on ‘big space’ in the USA is a reason for great alarm,” he warned, stressing the incredible power of von Braun’s rocket to lift a heavy payload and orbit the Earth. “In this, the USA has already surpassed the Soviet Union.”
The fight was far from over for Korolev, who was about to astonish the world again. Between fall 1964 and late winter 1965, his Voskhod capsule flights began. What had originally been a single-person vehicle had been modified to fit three cosmonauts . . . barely. Without ejection seats or space suits, cosmonauts Konstantin Feoktistov, Vladimir Komarov, and Boris Yegorov were crammed inside the crowded capsule and launched on October 12, 1964. After one day in orbit, the crew prepared for reentry. It was a dangerous moment for the Voskhod. If the exterior of their spacecraft became severely damaged during their fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere, the cosmonauts had no space suits to protect their bodies from the heat or to provide oxygen. Mercifully, the capsule withstood reentry. Its parachutes deployed and the Voskhod drifted smoothly to the ground. In fact, the landing was so soft only the sound of brush against the capsule signaled to the cosmonauts they had touched down.
Although Korolev had beaten America to another historic first, no one in the US knew the truth. It had not been a step toward a Soviet moon landing, but another of Khruschev’s propaganda stunts intended to undermine American confidence and boost Soviet prestige. It worked like a charm. The Soviets’ policy of absolute secrecy created an information vacuum that people rushed to fill with frightening (and false) possibilities, including one theory that the Voskhod could be as powerful as NASA’s Apollo vehicle. It wasn’t, of course. But just five months later, before the US could catch its breath, or launch a Gemini flight with a two-person crew, Korolev would strike again.
On March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov attempted another risky and ambitious mission: the world’s first-ever space walk. Everything was going according to plan in the history-making flight. While cosmonaut Pavel Belyayev waited inside their Voskhod 2 spacecraft, Leonov put on his space suit and exited through the capsule’s air lock. For twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds, he floated in space from a sixteen-foot cable as their ship whirled around the Earth at seventeen thousand miles per hour.
The trouble began when Leonov attempted to reenter the capsule.
He immediately noticed the pressure inside his space suit had increased so much that he felt like he had shrunk inside it. His hands and feet had pulled away from his gloves and boots. He was unable to control his fingers. Leonov knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to use his hands and feet to pull himself back inside the spacecraft with the pressure building inside his suit. “It was taking far longer than it was supposed to,” Leonov recalled years later, but he knew panic at this stage would be deadly. If he had any hope of fitting through the air lock, he would have to vent some of the pressure from his space suit. It was a dangerous maneuver. Leonov risked running out of air, or triggering decompression sickness—in which air bubbles that form in the bloodstream cause coma or death. He didn’t have a choice. Thousands of miles below, a helpless Korolev waited as Leonov fought for his life. “My temperature was rising dangerously high,” Leonov wrote. The exertion was taking a toll on the cosmonaut.
After twelve minutes, the determined Leonov finally squeezed back inside the air lock. With the emptiness of space now safely on the other side of the hatch, Leonov removed his helmet, “drenched with sweat, my heart racing.”
Alexei Leonov photographed outside his Voskhod 2
spacecraft, performing humankind’s first-ever space walk in 1965.
Once Leonov was safely back inside the capsule with Belyayev, the mission continued. The cosmonauts soon discovered they had another problem. The Voskhod 2’s automatic landing program malfunctioned. They would have to manually land their capsule. Without the program, it was difficult to pinpoint the landing coordinates, but the pair managed to touch down unharmed. The spacecraft, however, had landed in the deep snow of remote Siberia, approximately 1,200 miles from their intended target. Their situation was precarious and deteriorating rapidly. The cosmonauts were vulnerable to predators. “We had only one pistol aboard our spacecraft, but plenty of ammunition,” Leonov recalled. The rugged terrain made an airlift impossible, and a supply helicopter was dispatched to the Voskhod, dropping warm clothes and food to sustain the cosmonauts until a rescue party arrived. “As the sky darkened, the trees started cracking with the drop in temperature . . . and the wind began to howl.” The temperature fell to minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit.
Leonov and Belyayev spent two freezing nights in their spacecraft before being rescued. Like other embarrassing, deadly, or near-fatal mishaps in the Soviet space program, the truth of Voskhod 2—and its death-defying crew—was not released for twenty-five years.
