by Jamie Doran
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:
All the test pilots believed these concerns were stupid. Many pilots had flown in the stratosphere at night, or in heavy cloud conditions . . . We made a great noise about the key panel. It was our feeling that the chance of a pilot going crazy was much smaller than the possibility of a failure in the radio communication . . . Korolev didn’t like the keypad either, but he decided to accept it to quiet the physicians . . . Suppose a cosmonaut made a mistake punching the buttons? Who would punish him?6
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 Tito
v 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:
Some controversy surrounds the name of the first man in space. Edouard Bobrovsky, a French broadcaster who visited Moscow in April 1961, revealed that according to reliable sources, Sergei Ilyushin, son of the famous Russian plane designer and a dare-devil pilot, used his influence to go into space himself, three or four weeks before Gagarin. After his return to earth the recovery team found him badly shaken. Sergei Ilyushin has been in a coma ever since.10
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.’
