Starman

by Jamie Doran

  Rumours about the dialogue between Komarov and ground control have circulated for many years, based on reports from American National Security Agency (NSA) staff monitoring the radio signals from a USAF facility near Istanbul. In August 1972 a former NSA analyst, interviewed under the name ‘Winslow Peck’ (real name Perry Fellwock), gave a very moving account of the interception:

  They knew they had problems for about two hours before Komarov died, and were fighting to correct them. We taped [the dialogue] and listened to it a couple of times afterwards. Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a video-phone conversation, and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero . . . The guy’s wife got on too, and they talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs, and what to do with the kids. It was pretty awful. Towards the last few minutes, he was falling apart . . . The strange thing is, we were all pretty bummed-out by the whole thing. In a lot of ways, having the sort of job we did humanizes the Russians. You study them so much, and listen to them for so many hours, that pretty soon you come to know them better than your own people.8

  As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey intercepted his cries of rage and frustration as he plunged to his death, cursing for ever the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship – although his ‘final screams’, mentioned later in Fellwock’s account, may be an exaggeration.

  Korolev’s inadvertent prophesy about ‘flying under rags’ was fulfilled when the parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out, but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay – yet another serious design flaw. A back-up parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue. There was nothing to slow the capsule’s fall, and Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro-rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.

  Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut ‘requiring urgent medical attention’. It seems unlikely that any recognizable portion of Komarov’s body would have survived intact, although Russayev says that a heel bone was found among the ashes.

  This was the first Soviet fatality during an actual space flight, and it came as an immense shock; nor could the basic truth of the disaster be discreetly hidden from the outside world (although the Soviet authorities admitted only to an unfortunate parachute failure, and not to a series of design and preparation flaws dating from long before the ship took off). This time it was NASA’s turn to send letters of condolence. Both sides in the superpower divide had learned that the space environment showed no concern for nationalities or flags, but treated all trespassers – Russian and American alike – to the same set of risks.

  Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment, but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs – listening devices buried in the walls or hidden in light fittings and telephones. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells and along the corridors. Anything to keep moving and confuse the eavesdroppers.

  The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the optimistic and carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. ‘He told me the story about the huge research effort undertaken to try and prevent the flight,’ says Russayev. ‘He said the results were supposed to have been reported to the Main Man [Brezhnev]. He explained how they’d thought of me as an envoy in charge of getting the letter to the relevant offices. I told Yuri how I’d worked on it, and everything that had happened . . . He warned me, “Walls have ears.” It was Yuri’s idea to avoid the lifts. Somebody must have told him my apartment was bugged . . . I found out for sure when my wife woke me up at three in the morning, and we both heard a rustling behind the ventilation grille where they were installing the bug. The thought of it made me furious. How could they bug one of their own agents? I suppose that’s the essence of Soviet life. There were always so many bugs around.’

  At one point Gagarin said, ‘I must go to see the Main Man personally. Will he see me, d’you think?’

  Russayev says, ‘I was amazed he could ask me this. I said, “But Yuri, you’re the one who’s always standing next to him on the Mausoleum. You’re always chatting together, and now you’re asking me if I can tell you whether or not he’ll see you? I haven’t even shaken the guy’s hand.”

  ‘“Yes, but I never talk seriously with him. All he ever wants to do is hear dirty stories and jokes from all my foreign trips.”’

  Gagarin was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to talk properly to Brezhnev and persuade him to cancel Komarov’s launch. As Russayev explains today, ‘Relations between Khrushchev and Gagarin were absolutely excellent, but with Brezhnev it wasn’t so good. If people don’t want you, it can be hard to get through.’

  Shortly before Gagarin left, the bitterness and intensity of his anger became obvious. ‘I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.’

  Russayev goes on, ‘I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’

  Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. ‘I told him, “Talk to me first before you do anything, and I’ll try to advise you. I warn you, be very careful.” But I wasn’t in the space department any more. I wasn’t even in Moscow, so there wasn’t much I could do. I don’t know if Yuri ever got to see Brezhnev, and I’ve felt guilty ever since that I couldn’t stay with Yuri to guide him.’

  One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.

  Although Gagarin grieved for Komarov, who had always been one of the ablest and most likeable cosmonauts, he remained as determined as ever to fly, and was extremely disappointed when his superiors decided to ground him from further rocket flights. Alexei Leonov explains, ‘After Komarov, the State Committee decided it wasn’t possible to fly Yura, because all the problems with the Soyuz had to be corrected, and it was going to take two years to redesign the vehicle.’

  It was not just the slippage in the launch schedule, but renewed nervousness at the possibility of losing Gagarin to an accident, that contributed to his grounding – and there were certain military traditions to uphold. Sergei Belotserkovsky reluctantly agreed with the decision to ban the First Cosmonaut from further missions. Although he is well aware that Gagarin desperately wanted a moon flight, he says, ‘The main candidate [for a possible lunar attempt] was Andrian Nikolayev. Regarding Yura, Korolev told me shortly before his death that he probably shouldn’t fly any more. Yura was in a difficult situation, because he was Deputy Director of the Cosmonauts’ Training Centre, and the responsibilities of that job are clearly laid out – the control and training of other cosmonauts. It’s not usual for the chief of a training centre to make flights himself.’

  Gagarin was very depressed by this decision, and wrote a letter to the State Committee in which he pleaded, ‘I can’t be prevented from flying. If I stop flying, I will have no moral rights to lead other people whose life and work are connected with flying.’

  With the straight-talking wisdom of an honest working man, Gagarin’s favourite hairdresser Igor Khoklov says, ‘Yuri couldn’t live without flying. It was his whole life. A man can’t live without his trade. He can’t survive.’

  When the redesigned Soyuz finally flew successfully for the first time, on October 26, 1968, Gagarin’s harshest critic, Georgi Beregovoi, was at the controls.

  The truth behind Komarov’s accident and Gagarin’s grounding is only now coming to light, but most Western analysts knew by now that somethi
ng was wrong with the First Cosmonaut’s career. As long ago as 1982, in his ground-breaking book Red Star in Orbit, the American space writer James Oberg wrote:

  There was Yuri, transformed before his death at thirty-four from a personable, cocky jet pilot into a demi-god to be worshipped, emulated and protected from all risk and adventure, until his own attempts to break out from the protective walls around him went just a little too far.

  Gagarin diverted himself with more partying, prompting a ­disappointed Kamanin to note, ‘Since Komarov’s death, Gagarin has been dismissed from all space flights. He has undergone a new, more stormy process of personality disintegration.’

  At the beginning of March 1968, the last month of Gagarin’s life, a comfortable accommodation centre for cosmonauts was at last completed in Star City. Alexei Leonov remembers some hard partying, perhaps triggered by the cosmonauts’ desire to block out the emotional horror of Komarov’s terrible death. ‘We probably met at Gagarin’s apartment more often than anybody else’s place. The traditions of hospitality were already established, from where we lived before, at Chkalovsky. There was this law – if you arrived late for a party you had to strip down to the waist and get into a bath of cold water and submerge your head. Even famous people had to go through this. The law was the law! Actually this was a tradition started by Yuri, and the point was that after a cold bath you were revived with a big jolt of vodka so as not to catch a cold. The trouble was, everybody started to turn up late to get their vodka.’

  One distinguished guest was the architect Komarovsky, responsible for the tall tower at Moscow State University, where the first cosmonauts had been dropped down the lift-shaft back in 1960. He was welcomed with an ancient peasant gesture of hospitality, still observed by modern Russians, even those aboard the Mir space station: gifts of vital foodstuffs to protect the traveller against hunger. ‘We took Komarovsky up to the top floor, where there was some bread and salt and vodka,’ says Leonov. ‘Then from the eleventh floor down to the tenth, where there was more bread and salt and so on, all the way down through every floor. Komarovsky, and some other famous people, they said at the end of all this, “Well, we’ve seen many extraordinary things in our lives, but never so much bread and salt!” Anyway, that’s how we thanked the people who built our apartments.’

  Certainly for Gagarin, these parties distracted him from his anxieties. Zoya recollects that when he was back home in Gzhatsk, his innermost fears occasionally surfaced:

  ‘Yes, it’s true, it was on December 5. He always came home at that time of year to see us, and to go hunting. Just as he was getting ready to leave, Mamma had some sort of anxiety, and I remember Yura saying, “Everybody in the world asks me for something. I’m always helping complete strangers, but you never ask anything of me. You never tell me what you need.” Valya and the girls [Lena and Galya] were already waiting in the car, but I had the feeling Yura didn’t want to leave us. I think he was worried about something.’

  12

  WRECKAGE

  American astronauts in the 1960s took great pride in their flying skills, and their employers at NASA gave them every opportunity to hone their skills in the air. They were assigned discretionary access to Northrop T-38 training jets, which they used as personal transports between the major NASA facilities in Texas, Florida and Alabama. These fast, lightweight planes were the space-age equivalent of company cars.

  By contrast, pilots recruited into the Soviet space programme from various Air Force squadrons found to their dismay that their flying time was greatly reduced, and they were forbidden to make any solo flights, no matter how great their previous experience in the air might have been. Although the airbase at Chkalovsky near Star City provided an obvious venue for flights, very few aircraft were made available to the cosmonauts. Equipping Star City with modern jets was always a struggle, because most of the hardware had to be requisitioned from rival organizations: the Air Force in particular. Vladimir Shatalov, ex-cosmonaut and Chief of Training after Kamanin’s enforced retirement in 1971, described how hard it was to obtain new jets for Star City’s use:

  We have to expend a lot of nervous energy to resolve very straightforward matters. For example, we need three aircraft. It’s quite obvious what they’re for – but no, in order to get decisions we have to go round in circles to the Finance Ministry, the Aviation Ministry, to one appointment after another. And time goes by . . . We have to become hustlers . . . Is this how it should be? The most complex space flight is simpler than all this terrestrial red tape.1

  All aircraft pilots need to fly a minimum number of hours per year in order to maintain their qualifications. Cosmonauts at Star City who wanted to top up their conventional flying hours had to share a couple of MiG-15UTI tandem-seat trainers, which were among the most antiquated aircraft in the Soviet armoury. The first single-seat MiG fighters (with engines based on designs acquired from the Rolls-Royce company) had entered service as far back as 1947. Throughout the 1950s they were refined into one of the world’s most potent combat weapons, but by the end of the next decade these old machines were no longer at their best. Communist allies abroad still purchased them in large numbers, but the domestic Air Force was switching to far more advanced fighters. Denied further flights into space after Komarov’s death, Gagarin wanted to qualify in one of these newer jets, but first he had a great deal of catching up to do.

  Although he was the most famous pilot in the world, he was not a particularly experienced one. Telltale clues can be discovered even to this day in the museum at Star City, where a number of Gagarin’s personal effects are preserved. His pilot’s log book is a much-venerated object, yet it makes disturbing reading. When he was recruited into the first cosmonaut squad at the end of 1959, his total flight time amounted to 252 hours and twenty-one minutes. Of this, only seventy-five hours had been spent as a solo MiG-15 pilot, first at Orenburg, then on station at Nikel in the Murmansk region.

  For a young Air Force lieutenant starting out on his career, this was not an especially poor total, although most of the other cosmonauts in his group had logged 1,500 hours or so. If he had stayed on active duty with the Air Force, Gagarin could have built up his flying time to become a superbly skilled fighter pilot. After he was recruited for training at Star City, however, he lost this opportunity altogether. Throughout the entire period of his cosmonaut career, from 1960 to 1968, he accumulated only seventy-eight hours additional time in the air – none of them solo. This amounted to less than ten hours per year.

  On February 18, 1968, Gagarin at last received his diploma papers from the Zhukovsky Academy, greatly improving his future career prospects (on the ground at least) with a significant and hard-earned qualification. Meanwhile the position of his immediate superior at Star City, Nikolai Kamanin, was under threat because of the Soyuz accident that had killed Komarov. Although not directly responsible for the many hardware problems that contributed to the crash, Kamanin was one of the officers in authority who had sanctioned the flight in the first place, and there was a chance that his head might roll for it. There was a real possibility that Gagarin might be promoted to the rank of General, and appointed Head of Cosmonaut Training in Kamanin’s place. The main worry on his mind was how to maintain the respect of the cosmonauts, a good many of whom had far more piloting experience than he did – as Beregovoi had so charmlessly pointed out.

  According to an Izvestia journalist, Boris Konovalov:

  It all worked out rather oddly. Everybody assumed that cosmonauts were pilots by profession, but they got fewer hours of flying time. When Gagarin was made Deputy Chief of Training at Star City, he made a firm stand for flying. One cosmonaut, Vladimir Shatalov, had flown every kind of jet fighter, but at Star City he was only allowed to fly a training plane with an instructor present. This was absurd.2

  Alexei Leonov justifies Gagarin’s desire to get himself – and others – back into the air. ‘People were asking, “Why does he have to fly?” It was because he was Deputy Chief of Trai
ning at Star City, and in order to do that, he needed to be an impeccable pilot.’ In other words, a man in the position of teaching other fliers needed to keep their respect by being a good pilot himself. Gagarin’s wife Valentina hinted at the problems he faced in a 1978 interview with Yaroslav Golovanov:

  He lived through some very difficult moments when the question of whether or not he was to be allowed to fly was being decided. ‘And does he really need to fly at all?’ someone asked. But you had to know Yura – to him, not flying would have meant not living. His passion for flying was incurable. ‘Don’t be upset,’ I said, trying to calm him. ‘How can I be in charge of training others if I don’t fly myself?’ he replied, much offended.3

  By March 1968 Gagarin had not flown for five months. He turned for help to Vladimir Serugin, an experienced flier and a good teacher. As a young man, Serugin had flown 140 combat missions against the Nazis. Taking into account the late collection of confirmation signatures from his superiors, his total number of sorties probably reached 200. He shot down seventeen enemy aircraft, putting himself in the ‘fighter ace’ category. By the war’s end he was just twenty-four years old, and a prime candidate for flying the best available new planes well into the 1960s.

  In 1968 Serugin was in his late forties. Perhaps a little too old and too slow by then? It seems unlikely. As a test pilot he gained a reputation for pulling safely out of bad situations, or ‘coming unscrewed’ as the saying went. On March 12, 1968 he took out a newer version of the MiG, a model 21, and halted his take-off run just before he became airborne. He was convinced that something did not feel right. He taxied the plane back to the hangar and insisted that the mechanics check his engine. They found nothing wrong with it. Again Serugin took the plane to the runway, and again he turned back at the last moment. Sure enough, on closer examination the mechanics found a problem with the engine. This story suggests a flier at the peak of alertness, his instincts undimmed by early middle age.