by Jamie Doran
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
6
108 MINUTES
An hour before the launch, Korolev came on the link. ‘Yuri Alexeyevich, how are you hearing me? I need to tell you something
.’
‘Receiving you loud and clear.’
‘I just want to remind you that after the one-minute readiness is announced, there’ll be about six minutes before you actually take off, so don’t worry about it.’
‘I read you. I’m absolutely not worried.’
‘There’ll be six minutes for all sorts of things, you know.’ He meant that a minor instrument problem had created a six-minute delay in the launch sequence.
Then cosmonaut Popovich came on the line. ‘Hey, can you guess who’s this talking to you?’
‘Sure, it’s “Lily of the Valley!”’
‘Yuri, are you getting bored in there?’
‘If there was some music, I could stand it a little better.’1
Concerned for every last detail of the flight, Korolev took care of this personally, ordering his technicians to find some tapes or records and set something up straight away.
‘Haven’t they given you some music yet?’ he asked a few minutes later.
‘Nothing so far.’
‘Damned musicians. They dither about and the whole thing is sooner said than done.’
‘Oh, now they’ve done it. They’ve put on a love song.’
‘Good choice, I’d say.’
8.41. Gagarin felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut; the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. ‘Yuri, we’re going down to the control bunker now. There’ll be a five-minute pause and then I’ll talk to you again.’
8.51. The music stopped. Korolev’s deep, stern voice on the link, all seriousness now. ‘Yuri, the fifteen-minute mark.’ This was the signal for Gagarin to seal his gloves and swing down the transparent visor on his helmet. In these last minutes before lift-off there was no NASA-style 5–4–3–2–1 ‘countdown’ on the public-address system (and no public-address system). The rocket would be fired at the appointed instant: 9.06 a.m. Moscow Time. Vostok’s guidance expert Yuri Mazzhorin says, ‘The Americans only counted down to add drama for their television.’ Gagarin’s final seconds on the ground were almost anti-climactic.
‘Launch key to “go” position.’
‘Air purging.’
‘Idle run.’
‘Ignition.’
All kinds of vibrations now, high whinings and low rumbles. At some point Gagarin knew he must have lifted off, but the exact moment was elusive, identified with precision only by the electrical relays of the gantry’s hold-down arms as they moved aside, the four sturdy clamps disconnecting from the rocket’s flanks within a single hundredth of a second of each other. Gagarin lay rigid in his seat and tensed his muscles. At any moment something could go wrong with the booster, the hatch above his head might fly away and his ejection charges punch him out into the morning sky like a bullet. This ‘life-saving’ jolt might kill him – crunch his spine; snap his neck like a chicken’s; the hatchway’s rim might snag his knees and tear them right off. He had to be prepared.
The g-load climbing. No emergency ejection yet . . . He didn’t remember it later, but they told him he shouted out, ‘Poyekhali!’ – ‘Let’s go!’ His officially sanctioned account of the lift-off in The Road to the Stars clearly shows his fascination with the launch:
I heard a whistle and an ever-growing din, and felt how the gigantic rocket trembled all over, and slowly, very slowly, began to tear itself off the launching pad. The noise was no louder than one would expect to hear in a jet plane, but it had a great range of musical tones and timbres that no composer could hope to score, and no musical instrument or human voice could ever reproduce.2
‘T-plus seventy.’
‘I read you, seventy. I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing. All is well.’
‘T-plus one hundred. How do you feel?’
‘I feel fine. How about you?’
Two minutes into the flight Gagarin was finding it a little hard to speak into his radio microphone. The g-forces were pulling at his face muscles, ‘but really this was not so difficult. The stress was hardly more severe than in a MiG doing a tight turn,’ he recalled afterwards. There was a strange moment when all the weight lifted and he was thrown violently forwards against his straps. A shudder told him that the R-7’s four side-slung boosters were falling away. The ‘Little Seven’ paused in its acceleration, as if taking a big breath before the final spurt. Then the central core picked up the pace and the sensation of great weight returned.
At three minutes, the nose fairing fired its pyrotechnic charges, pulling away to expose the ball. Gagarin caught a glimpse of dark blue, high-altitude sky through his portholes. Now he became slightly annoyed at the brightness of the television lamp, which made him squint if his head was tilted a certain way – when he was trying to look out of a porthole, for example.
Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of roubles-worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground. Vostok climbed the rest of the way into orbit atop a stunted upper stage, with just one small rocket engine. Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never travelled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘the eerie silence of outer space’. The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system, and yet more fans behind the instrument panels to cool the electrical circuits. Anyway, Gagarin’s ears were covered with microphones hissing with their own special static, or with ground control’s ceaseless demands for news. ‘Weightlessness has begun,’ he reported. ‘It’s not at all unpleasant, and I’m feeling fine.’
Vostok was rotating gently, partly so as not to waste thruster fuel on unnecessary maneouvres, and partly to prevent the sun from heating any surface area of the craft for too long. Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upwards out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball, before drifting downwards out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again – the horizon not straight, but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.
Travelling eastwards, ever eastwards, flying at eight kilometres per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!’
As Vostok swept over Siberia, less than twenty minutes after launch, its steeply tilted orbit carried it to the Arctic Circle, then over the north-eastern hemisphere and towards the North Pacific. At Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, almost on the extreme east of the Soviet subcontinent, a remote radio monitoring station calculated Vostok’s speed and altitude from the incoming telemetry. This would be the final opportunity for accurate measurements before the less well-equipped sea-borne stations took over. Alexei Leonov had arrived at Petropavlovsk a day or two before Kamanin and the State Committee at Baikonur had made the final cosmonaut selection for the flight. As Leonov waited for Vostok’s signals, including the crude television picture from within its cabin, he had no idea which of his friends would be in there. ‘When Yuri flew, there wasn’t a central mission-control complex like the one we have today [at Kaliningrad, north-east of Moscow]. Therefore a number of cosmonauts, familiarized with all aspects of the mission, were disbursed among all the major radio listening posts around the Soviet Union, and as part of that operation I came to Petropavlovsk. I had a small television monitor, and when I saw the picture coming back from Vostok I didn’t know if it was Yuri or
Gherman, but then I saw some body movements that were characteristic of Yuri. As soon as we made contact he heard my voice and said, “Hi, to the blond man!” That was his nickname for me.’
Petropavlovsk received the telemetry from Vostok, and the signals were laboriously keyed into a secure code, then relayed over ground links to Moscow, where Yuri Mazzhorin, Academician Keldysh and a squad of computer operators unscrambled the codes and fed the data into their gigantic machines.
Petropavlovsk’s window of opportunity for radio contact was very brief. Less than thirty minutes after launching into Baikonur’s early morning, Vostok swept over the Pacific, into the vast shadow of earth’s sleeping half. Down below, the Americans were asleep. Their night-shrouded continents, North and South, sped beneath the ship, and Gagarin would have noted them only as geographers’ rumours on his little navigation globe. Now, in this darkest realm, he could see the stars. They were sharp and bright, and did not flicker. There were more stars than he had ever seen from the ground, even on the clearest winter nights.
As its tilted orbit carried Vostok into the southern hemisphere, it sped over Cape Horn and across the South Atlantic. The ground controllers instructed Gagarin to make his switch settings for the re-entry procedure. He checked the ‘Vzor’ to confirm that the systems had aligned the ship correctly, with the retro-rockets pointing against the direction of travel and aimed above the horizon at a certain precise angle. But Gagarin did not have many switches to alter. It was more a question of telling the controllers on earth what the ship around him was doing of its own accord. As far as any published account shows, he never once touched the controls, or punched the three secret numbers into his keypad.
