by Jamie Doran
For the rattled cosmonauts, it was almost a relief to move on to the parachuting exercises, where they could tease the doctors because most of them lacked the courage to follow the pilots out of the aircraft’s doorway. Their instructor was Nikolai Konstantovich, an expert parachutist with a record-breaking freefall jump from a height of fifteen kilometres to his credit. Future space crewmen might have to eject and parachute to earth at similar altitudes, and Konstantovich’s job was to demonstrate all the things that could go wrong up there – and how to get out of them. For example, there was the ‘corkscrew’ problem, when a misfiring ejection seat throws the pilot into a sickening spin, or the seat fires cleanly, but the craft it’s coming out of is tumbling. Either way the pilot cannot pull his parachute safely, because the lines will twist around each other like the strands of a rope, and the silk canopy will not unfurl. The pilot must stabilize his fall and give his ’chute a chance to open normally. Konstantovich taught his pupils deliberately to sabotage their own jumps, then to regain control, preferably some time before they hit the ground. ‘That’s very unpleasant,’ Gagarin recalled. ‘Your body starts spinning at great speed. Your head feels like lead, and there’s a sharp, cutting pain in your eyes. Your body is drained of strength and you lose all sense of direction.’8
At least the parachuting felt more like proper space training. Once Gagarin and his comrades were in a plane and doing something useful, they felt better. More in control. For another group of victims, however, there was no such easy escape from the doctors’ needles, gas tanks and isolation chambers.
Quite apart from the cosmonauts, another group of ‘testers’ was put through a similar series of medical procedures – similar but worse. These young men were selected from a slightly lower rung of the aviation-academic ladder. They were not necessarily fighter pilots or first-rate theoreticians. They were just averagely bright, fit young military men. During recruitment they were never asked outright if they would like to fly in space. They were offered a chance to ‘participate’, which was a subtle but important shift of emphasis.
The testers’ job was to find out just how much a human body could take. Then the cosmonauts, who were somewhat less expendable, could be pushed to those limits but no further. Unlike the cosmonauts, testers were not professionally acknowledged, and were paid only according to their previous military occupations as soldiers, technicians or mechanics. They were seduced with great care by their recruiters into a feeling of privilege and self-worth, but in truth their status was barely better than that of disposable laboratory rats. When they received injuries – and they did receive injuries – there were no special arrangements to compensate them or their families, because the authorities were unwilling to acknowledge any of their work in public. Even today, long after glasnost, the Russian space authorities do not like to discuss the testers’ contributions to the early space effort, nor to the development of high-performance jet fighters, parachutes, ejection systems and flight suits for the Air Force. In all, approximately 1,200 testers were involved in various programmes over three decades.
They were all military volunteers, good soldiers, who did not like to surrender, to fail in front of their comrades. They were ‘free’ to abort any test-run halfway through if the discomfort became too great, but very few wanted to quit. Like the cosmonauts, who all dreamed of getting the first flight into space – of going higher, flying faster – the testers had their own strange pinnacle of glory to climb. Who could take the highest air pressures? The lowest? Who could survive the catapult sled’s most rapid accelerations? The bone-jarring crash-stops? Who spent the longest time aboard the centrifuge, and how many g’s could they take? Who among them was the toughest, the strongest, the bravest?
Sergei Nefyodov, a veteran from those days, recalls with a bitter smile, ‘At first we didn’t know what kind of tests we were in for, but it soon became seriously clear. They said they’d try us out in a “soft” landing experiment. That made us laugh! The tester had to throw himself out of a seat at some height – not great, but high enough. It was the level that might actually occur from a real landing of a spacecraft. There were some traumas as a result. The most serious was when something broke, or the system didn’t work properly. Some lads couldn’t get up again after the test.’
Nefyodov still boasts today that the testers took turns in a centrifuge that would have wiped out the delicate little cosmonauts. ‘I achieved seven minutes at ten g’s. The cosmonauts only had to endure two or three minutes at seven g’s, and twenty seconds at twelve g’s. My colleague Viktor Kostin often took twenty-seven g’s for a very short time, by taking severe shocks in the catapult sled. Those were very brief, measured in microseconds, but once he went up to forty g’s for a fraction of a second. I’d like to make it clear that we weren’t chasing record g’s just for the sake of it. We wanted to see how long a person could endure. Though we didn’t use the word “record”, because we couldn’t claim any sporting achievements.’
This was the great frustration – the testers could not tell anyone how tough they were, because their jobs were extremely secret. They knew perfectly well that they were being given a much harder time than the cosmonauts. Sometimes they would look across at the physicians, with their dials and monitoring equipment, and they could only wonder. Nefyodov says, ‘On the one hand, they [the doctors] were representatives of very humane professions, but on the other hand, the g-forces would climb, and the technicians would ask: should they stop the tests? It seems the subject can’t take any more, he’s going red, his heart is galloping, his sweat is flowing, but the doctors don’t stop the test...
‘It was dangerous for the testers. One of the senior academics for the test programme, Sergei Molydin, he said – and I can quote him – “we experimented on dogs, and fifty per cent of them survived. As you know, a person is stronger than a dog.” Well, that’s a joke! The consequences of our tests couldn’t be predicted. Even if a person survived, he might become an invalid in later life, with damage to the lungs, the heart or other internal organs. Of course we could refuse a test at any time, but the unwritten rule was not to refuse. If you turned down a test, this would only happen once, because after that you weren’t in the team any more.’
Nefyodov says that half of all the testers he worked with in the 1960s have not survived into the 1990s, but he isn’t bitter about his career. Far from it. He takes great pride in his contribution to the space effort. ‘The only tragic side is that our profession never existed. It was a close secret, so we had no social protection from the State, and no one ever investigated the long-term health of the testers. Today our old friends, our colleagues, are beginning to die.’ He remembers a particularly nasty experiment to simulate the failure of a spacecraft’s air-cleansing system. ‘If carbon dioxide builds up in the air to three per cent in a submarine, for instance, that’s enough to declare an emergency condition. With a colleague in a test chamber [at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems] I went over to three and a half, four, five per cent. Honestly, you have nothing to breathe, your face turns an unpleasant colour, the lips turn blue, your brain won’t work, you have a hideous headache and your strength fails. My partner and I had nosebleeds, but we worked for the set time. I always remember saying to him, “Just a half-hour more, and it will pass.” Then half an hour later, “Just one more half-hour.” I had to pep him up in some way.’
Yevgeny Kiryushin vividly remembers the altered state of consciousness he experienced in a centrifuge, with his body pushed beyond any normal definition of stress. ‘Suddenly there was a light, it was very interesting, dark at first, then yellow, lilac, crossing some sort of emptiness, and then you just forget any sensation in yourself. You just have the impression that you’re a brain, a hand, an eye. The oppressive weight is all in the seat, and suddenly, above your body is you. You’re completely weightless, as if having a look at yourself from above. That’s the transforming moment. All of your real achievements happen in those few minutes. Bu
t the experiments are frightening, without exception.’
Nefyodov remembers meeting Yuri Gagarin personally for the first time on January 2, 1968, when the First Cosmonaut came to visit the medical experimental facility and share a New Year’s celebration with the testers. ‘At that time I had just started working on explosive decompression, which interested me greatly. He kept asking me, “What’s it like? Aren’t you frightened? Have you simulated an atmospheric drop to fifty kilometres’ pressure?” It was great to talk to him about all this. But suddenly he asked me why I was looking so sad. I felt calm, but to him it appeared as if I was sad. He gave me a warm hug and said to me, “Sergei, everything is in your hands. You must have an unsurpassable desire.”’
An unsurpassable desire. The cosmonauts had it, and the world sang their praises. The testers had it, but they could not speak of it – except to Gagarin, who took the time to understand when a young lad volunteering for an insanely dangerous run of explosive decompressions tried, for a few moments, inarticulately, to share the reasons why he was doing it.
In fact, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to volunteer for the most dangerous kind of work. Vladimir Yazdovsky, a senior manager closely involved with all aspects of the early Soviet space effort, recalls, ‘After the dog Laika’s flight in the second Sputnik, there were nearly 3,500 applications to the Academy of Sciences from people in prison, from abroad and from many organizations, saying, “You don’t have to save me, just send me into space.” Of course we couldn’t reply to everyone, and as long as we didn’t know how to bring someone back at the end of a flight, we weren’t going to send anyone up.’
3
THE CHIEF DESIGNER
There was one man who, more than any other, dominated Gagarin’s life from now on, at first behind the scenes, and later as a friend and powerful protector. This man was not a cosmonaut, though he had learned to fly long ago in his youth. He was a shadowy figure somewhere in the very highest echelons of space management. Most people within the Soviet aerospace industry called him ‘The King’ or the ‘Boss of Bosses’, or affectionately used his first two initials, ‘S. P.’ His full name was never spoken in public because the authorities had declared his identity an absolute State secret. In the many press and radio reports of Soviet rocket achievements broadcast over the years, he was referred to only as the ‘Chief Designer’.
Born in 1907 in the Ukraine and educated in Moscow, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev began his career as an aircraft designer in 1930, before developing a fascination with rockets. At first he saw them as a useful power source for his aircraft, but by the late 1930s he recognized that rockets had a special potential as vehicles in their own right.1
Pre-war military strategists showed a keen interest in the work performed by the early rocket pioneers. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky sponsored a new research centre, the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, hidden away behind the heavy ramparts of the Petropavlovskaya Fortress in St Petersburg (scorchmarks in the masonry can still be seen), while another laboratory in central Moscow, the Reaction Propulsion Laboratory, worked on similar problems. From these parallel efforts Korolev’s rival, Valentin Glushko, emerged as the most promising designer of rocket thrust chambers and fuel pumps, while Korolev himself thought in broader terms about how to combine the engines with fuel tanks, guidance equipment and a payload, to create rocket vehicles that could perform some kind of useful work – delivering bombs, making weather measurements in the upper atmosphere and, one day, exploring space.
Marshal Tukhachevsky was primarily interested in winged rocket bombs and other useful armaments for the Red Army. In 1933 he began a major consolidation of the various rocket programmes into a unified military programme. Unfortunately Stalin was terrified of intelligent soldiers, and by 1938 he had initiated a wide-ranging purge of the officer class as part of his general regime of terror throughout all levels of Soviet society. Tukhachevsky was arrested on June 11, and was shot dead that same night.2 Immediately all the rocket engineers he had assembled and sponsored came under suspicion of harbouring anti-Stalinist sentiments and were arrested. Korolev was dragged away on June 27 and was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia: essentially a death sentence.
In June 1941 the invading Nazis achieved devastating victories against a thoroughly unprepared Red Army. Stalin soon had cause to regret his earlier purge of the officer corps. His remaining commanders were almost exclusively talentless toadies with little experience of warfare or military strategy. Sergei Korolev and many other vital engineering personnel were released from their prison camps so that they could work in aircraft and weapons factories – still under guard. Towards the end of the war Korolev was freed from captivity, with his reputation partially reinstated, and in September 1945 he was allowed to venture into the crumbling German heartland in search of any remnants of Wernher von Braun’s brilliant but infamous V-2 rocket programme that the American forces had not already taken away. Then, throughout the 1950s, with incredible energy and determination, Korolev developed an increasingly sophisticated range of rockets and missiles, while Glushko designed some of the most effective propulsion engines that the world had ever seen.
For a man who had survived a Siberian labour camp, mere administrative battles with competitors or unhelpful officials at the Kremlin must have seemed relatively easy, particularly under the far less oppressive post-Stalinist regime of Nikita Khrushchev throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Korolev was intensely driven, and he established a network of influence far more complex and subtle than anything his rivals in the aerospace sector could muster. By 1956 he was securely in control of his own industrial empire, the heart of which was a secret factory facility in Kaliningrad, just north-east of Moscow, known only as the Special Design Bureau-1 (OKB-1). Here Korolev was the absolute ruler, although he was answerable at Kremlin level to the Defence Ministry under Marshal Ustinov, and also to the vaguely named Ministry of General Machine Building. (In this context ‘general’ meant nothing of the kind; it was a cover word for rockets and satellites.)
In 1961 the Moscow journalist Olga Apencheko described the effect that Korolev seemed to have on those around him, as he strode through the corridors and shop floors of OKB-1, although she carefully avoided naming either him or his factory. As per regulations, she referred to him only as the ‘Chief Designer’:
A dark-complexioned, rather severe-looking man with massive features, the Chief Designer of the spaceship had something more in him than he cared to show. I heard a busy rustle around me whenever he appeared in a room or work area. It was difficult to say what this whisper expressed – awe, respect, a mixture of both. When he entered a workshop everything changed somehow. The movements of the technicians became more collected and precise, and it seemed that even the hum of the machines assumed a new overtone, intense and rhythmic. This man’s energy stepped up the motion of shafts and cogs.3
Yuri Mazzhorin, one of Korolev’s senior experts on guidance trajectories, says that he was ‘a great man, an extraordinary person. You could talk to him about simple as well as complicated things. You’d think his time in prison would have broken his spirit, but on the contrary, when I first met him in Germany when we were investigating the V-2 weapons, he was a king, a strong-willed purposeful person who knew exactly what he wanted. By the way, he was very strict, very demanding, and he swore at you, but he never insulted you. He would always listen to what you had to say. The truth is, everybody loved him.’
Almost everybody . . . Valentin Glushko, an equally driven personality, operated out of his own specialist design bureau. As long as his engines were fitted into Korolev’s rockets, the two men avoided outright confrontation, but these two giants of Soviet rocketry did not get along. The tension between them undoubtedly dated back to the summer of 1938 when, for some reason, Glushko was punished with eight months of relatively mild ‘house arrest’ while Korolev was sent to a prison camp. Presumably Glushko betrayed most of his colleagues, while Korolev kept a cost
ly silence. Mikhail Yangel was another rival, developing missiles strictly for military use from his bureau in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine; while the fourth major figure in Soviet rocket development, Vladimir Chelomei, had the presence of mind to hire Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei as an engineer.
By far the most serious challenge to Korolev’s autonomy came from high-ranking military officers based in and around the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defence, who were concerned that his space projects were blocking the development of necessary weapons systems. He outflanked them by creating a dual-purpose missile-space launcher, and then proving that his design for a manned spaceship could be adapted as an unmanned spy satellite. By satisfying significant military goals in tandem with his own, Korolev out-manoeuvred both Yangel and Chelomei, and maintained a firm grip on most of the important Soviet space programmes up until his death in 1966. His genius, unmatched by the engineers at NASA, was to standardize many of his principal spacecraft components so that a dazzling succession of manned and unmanned vehicles could be assembled around similar hardware.
American space analyst Andy Aldrin (son of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin) explains Korolev’s cunning. ‘The people who were running the military missile programmes had been with him since the war. To a large extent they owed their careers to him, so they were unwilling to take him on frontally. At the same time, the military didn’t really understand his technology, and they implicitly trusted him. So when Korolev said, “Spy satellites won’t work yet, we have to [lay the groundwork and] develop manned capsules first,” they had little choice but to take him at his word. You could say, he conned them . . . He really understood how to work the political system.’
