Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Cooper’s hotshot characteristics were balanced by a misleadingly quiet voice and laid-back personality, to such an extent that he frequently fell asleep during the lengthy physical checks… and, famously, dozed off aboard his Faith 7 spacecraft, atop the fully-fuelled Atlas, on launch morning. Al Shepard, for his part, had lost his last chance to fly the final Mercury mission. Despite having himself engaged in flat – hatting as a naval aviator, he told Walt Williams that he felt Cooper had shown ‘‘unusually bad judgement’’. However, wrote Neal Thompson, ‘‘it wasn’t the height Shepard thought was dumb; it was buzzing the administration building’’.

Four hours after a still-enraged Williams had given his consent to let Cooper fly, early on 14 May, the prime and backup astronauts ate breakfast… and Shepard got more revenge for his ‘lost’ mission through another tension-relieving, though somewhat mean-spirited, gotcha. Press spokesman Shorty Powers arrived early that morning with a pair of cameramen to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper as he prepared for launch. However, they found, to their shock, that none of

the overhead lights were working, nor, indeed, were any of the electrical sockets. Someone, it seemed, had cut the wires, removed every light bulb, inserted thick tape into the sockets and replaced the bulbs. No one pointed any fingers, but Powers recognised the grin on Shepard’s face “that is typical of him when he has a mouse under his hat’’.

Another gift from Shepard awaited Cooper when he boarded Faith 7 at 6:36 am: a small suction-cup pump on the seat, labelled with the legend ‘Remove before launch’, in honour of the new urine-collection device aboard the spacecraft. Cooper would become the first Mercury astronaut who would be able to urinate in a manner other than ‘in his suit’. At this stage, the only expression of doubt over whether Faith 7 would fly came from meteorologist Ernest Amman. His fears were soon realised, not because of the weather, but due to a malfunctioning C-band radar at the mission’s secondary control centre in Bermuda. Shortly after this had been rectified, at 8:00 am, with an hour remaining before the scheduled launch, a simple 275- horsepower diesel engine, responsible for moving the gantry away from the Atlas, stubbornly refused to work. More than two hours were wasted in efforts to repair a fouled fuel injection pump on the engine and the count resumed around noon. The gantry was successfully retracted, but the failure of a computer in Bermuda – crucial for a ‘go/no-go’ launch decision to be made – caused the attempt to be scrubbed.

Cooper, after six hours on his back inside Faith 7, remained upbeat and summoned a forced grin. ‘‘I was just getting to the real fun part,’’ he said. ‘‘It was a very real simulation.” He spent part of the afternoon fishing, while checkout crews prepared the Atlas for launch the following morning. Arriving at Pad 14 for the second time, he greeted Guenter Wendt, with mock formality, reporting as ‘‘Private Fifth Class Cooper’’, to which the pad fuehrer responded in kind. The roots of their joke came two years earlier, when Cooper had stood in for Al Shepard in a launch – day practice run prior to Freedom 7. Upon arriving at the pad, Cooper had expressed mock terror, begging Wendt not to make him go, in true Jose Jimenez fashion. Some of the assembled media were amused, but NASA’s public affairs people were not and one even suggested that Cooper be ‘‘busted to Private Fifth Class’’. Ironically, the astronaut and Wendt liked the idea and ran with it.

This time, his wait inside the spacecraft lasted barely two and a half hours. The countdown ran smoothly until T-11 minutes and 30 seconds, when a problem developed in the rocket’s guidance equipment and a brief hold was called until it was resolved. In fact, so smooth was the countdown that flight surgeons were astonished to note that Cooper’s heart rate had fallen to just 12 beats per minute: he had dozed off. It took Wally Schirra, the capcom at Cape Canaveral, to bellow his name over the communications link to awaken him. Agonisingly, another halt came just 19 seconds before liftoff to allow launch controllers to ascertain that the Atlas’ systems had assumed their automatic sequence as planned.

Thirteen seconds after 8:00 am on the morning of 15 May, the Atlas rumbled off its launch pad in what Cooper would later describe as a smooth but definite push. A minute into the climb, the silvery rocket initiated its pitch program and the astronaut felt the vibrations of Max Q, after which the flight smoothed out and he heard a loud clang and the sharp, crisp ‘thud’ of staging as the first-stage boosters cut off and separated. Unneeded, the LES tower was jettisoned and, at 8:03 am, Faith 7’s cabin pressure sealed and held, as intended. Two minutes later, the sustainer completed its own push, shutting down and inserting the spacecraft perfectly into orbit. It was so good, in fact, that the heading was 0.0002 degrees from perfect, Cooper’s velocity was right on the money at 28,240 km/h and his trajectory set him up for at least 20 circuits of the globe. Said Wally Schirra as America’s sixth spaceman entered orbit: “Smack-dab in the middle of the plot!’’

Cooper watched for about eight minutes as the sustainer tumbled away and then moved to his checklists, running through temperature readings, contingency recovery areas and began the process of adjustment to weightlessness. So rapid was Faith 7’s passage across the Atlantic – accomplished in a matter of minutes – that he expressed surprise when called by the capcoms in the Canaries and Kano in Nigeria. Sigma 7 had been near-perfect and it seemed that Cooper’s mission would match or excel it; he dozed off for a few minutes during his second orbit, as the spacecraft passed over a lonely stretch of the Pacific, between Hawaii and California. Flight surgeons would note that his heart rate surged momentarily from 60 to 100 beats per minute, suspecting that he was having an exciting, though somewhat brief dream. At one stage, things were running so well that Capcom Al Shepard had nothing to say, except to offer Cooper some quiet time. Not until the following day, 16 May, would serious problems arise and allow him to demonstrate his skills as a pilot.

He was by no means inactive. His tasks including eating – brownies, fruit cake and some bacon – as well as Earth observations, photography, collection of urine samples and monitoring Faith 7’s health. His efficient use of the cabin oxygen even prompted Shepard to tell him to “stop holding your breath and use some oxygen if you like’’. Cooper’s response was that, as the only non-smoker among the Mercury Seven, his lungs were in better shape than his colleagues. Not only was his oxygen expenditure economical, but so too was his fuel usage, prompting mission managers to nickname him, good-naturedly, a “miser”. As Faith 7 embarked on its second orbital pass, Shepard reiterated that the flight was proceeding beautifully and “all of our monitors down here are overjoyed’’. In fact, Cooper’s only complaint during this period was of a thin, oily film on the outside pane of his trapezoidal window.

Beginning with the third orbit, the astronaut set to work on the first of 11 scientific experiments assigned to his mission. One of these was a 15 cm sphere, instrumented with two xenon strobe lights, part of efforts to track a flashing beacon in space. Three hours and 25 minutes after launch, he clicked a squib switch and heard and felt the experiment separate successfully. However, despite repeated efforts, he could not see the flashing beacon in orbital darkness. He would later catch a glimpse of it pulsing at sunset, during his fourth circuit of the globe, telling Capcom Scott Carpenter with jubilation: “I was with the little rascal all night!’’ Cooper reported seeing the beacon flickering during his fifth and sixth orbits, too. Another major experiment, the deployment of a 76 cm Mylar balloon, painted fluorescent orange for visibility, was less than successful. Nine hours into the mission, he set cameras, attitude and spacecraft switches to release the balloon from Faith 7’s nose, but it refused to move. Another attempt also proved fruitless. The intention of the balloon – similar to that flown on Carpenter’s mission – was for it to inflate with nitrogen and extend out on a 30 m nylon tether, after which a strain gauge would measure the differences in ‘pull’ at Faith 7’s apogee of 270 km and perigee of 160 km. Sadly, the cause of the failure was never determined.

Cooper was, however, able to observe not only a flashing beacon in space, but also a xenon ground light of three million candlepower, situated at Bloemfontein in South Africa. He would also make detailed mental notes throughout the flight as he flew over cities, large oil refineries near Perth in Australia, roads, rivers, small villages and even saw smoke from Himalayan houses. Although he pointed out that the finer details could only be seen if lighting and background conditions were right, his sightings were disputed after the mission, but Gemini astronauts would later confirm them. Further theoretical confirmation came from visibility researchers S. Q. Dunt and John H. Taylor of the University of California at San Diego. In a paper published in October 1963, they highlighted Cooper’s observation of a dust cloud, presumably kicked up by a vehicle travelling along a dirt road near El Centro, on the border between Mexico and the United States.

‘‘Calculation shows that the vehicle, plus the dust cloud behind it, is more visible than the road itself,’’ agreed Dunt and Taylor in their report. ‘‘It is possible, moreover, that the appearance of the dust cloud would create the impression of having a lighter tip at its eastern end. There is reason to believe, therefore, that the presence of a moving Border Patrol vehicle on the dirt road near El Centro could have been seen from orbital altitude under the atmospheric and lighting conditions which we believe to have prevailed at the time of Major Cooper’s observation.’’

Several other scientific experiments, in fact, encompassed photography. Before the mission, Cooper spent time with University of Minnesota researchers on an investigation into the mysterious phenomena of the zodiacal light and the nighttime airglow layer, as part of efforts to better understand the origin, continuity, intensity and reflectivity of visible electromagnetic spectra along the basic reference plane of the celestial sphere. His work would also help to answer questions about solar energy conversion in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Many of the zodiacal light photographs turned out to be underexposed and the airglow shots overexposed, but they were nonetheless of usable quality and complemented Carpenter’s images from Aurora 7. Flying over Mexico, Cooper photographed horizon-definition imprints in each quadrant around his local vertical position, part of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology project to design a guidance and navigation system for Apollo. Light­heartedly complaining that all he seemed to be doing was taking pictures, Cooper acquired some excellent imagery, including infrared weather photographs.

Surpassing Wally Schirra’s nine-hour endurance record for the United States, Cooper settled down to a battery of radiation experiments to ascertain that the effects of the Operation Dominic artificial aurora were indeed diminishing. He also undertook the hydraulic tasks of transferring urine samples and condensate water between storage tanks. Physicians had expressed particular interest in urine checks and the Soviets had already highlighted significant accumulations of calcium in their cosmonauts’ urine, suggesting that extended spaceflights could adversely affect human bones. Cooper found the hypodermic-type syringes used to pump liquid manually from bag to bag to be unwieldy and exasperatingly leaky, even telling his on-board tape recorder that “this pumping under zero-G is not good. [Liquid] tends to stand in the pipes and you have to actually forcibly force it through”.

Ten hours into the mission, the Zanzibar capcom officially informed Cooper that his flight parameters – circling the globe every 88 minutes and 45 seconds – were good enough for 17 orbits. Shortly before retiring for a scheduled sleep period on his ninth revolution, Cooper ate a supper of powdered roast beef mush, drank some water and checked Faith 7’s systems to ensure that they could be powered down for the next few hours. His orbital speed was truly phenomenal: after speaking to Capcom John Glenn, based on the Coastal Sentry Quebec tracking ship, near Kyushu, Japan, he swept south-eastwards over the Pacific and gave a full report to the telemetry command vessel Rose Knot Victor, positioned near Pitcairn Island… just ten minutes later!

The Pitcairn communicator told Cooper to get some rest, but that proved almost impossible. Passage over South America, then Africa, northern India and Tibet, during daylight, offered wonderful viewing and photographic opportunities. The Tibetan highlands, with their thin air and visibility seldom obscured by haze, allowed him to make rudimentary estimates of his speed and ground winds from the direction of chimney smoke. In their paper, Dunt and Taylor suggested that ground – reflectance modelling made it not impossible for Cooper to have seen such fine details. Thirteen and a half hours into the flight, Glenn told him that the communicators would leave him alone and Cooper pulled a shade across Faith 7’s window to get some sleep. The astronaut dozed intermittently for around eight hours, anchoring his thumbs at one stage inside his helmet restraint strap to keep his arms from floating freely. He woke briefly when his pressure suit’s temperature climbed too high and over the next several hours he napped, took photographs, taped status reports and cursed to himself as his body-heat exchanger crept either too high or too low.

Faith 7 swept silently over the Muchea tracking site on its 14th orbit and Cooper, by now fully alert, again checked its systems, finding his oxygen supply to be plentiful and around 65 per cent and 95 per cent of hydrogen peroxide fuel, respectively, in his automatic and manual tanks. At around this time, he said a brief prayer to offer thanks for an uneventful mission: “Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight. Thank you for the privilege of being able to be in this position, to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.’’ Slow-scan television images of Cooper, the first ever transmitted by an American astronaut, were broadcast during his 17th orbit and he even sang one revolution later. The prayers and light moments, it seemed, actually marked the beginning of Faith 7’s troubles.

Early on his 19th circuit of Earth, some 30 hours after liftoff, the first of several serious problems reared its head. Cooper was flying over the western Pacific, out of radio communications with the ground, when he dimmed his instrument panel lights… and noticed the small ‘0.05 G’ indicator glow green. This should normally have illuminated only after retrofire, as Faith 7 commenced its manoeuvre out of orbit, and should also have been quickly followed by the autopilot placing the spacecraft into a slow roll. Initial worries that Cooper had inadvertently slipped out of orbit were refuted a few minutes later by the Hawaii capcom, who told him his orbital parameters held steady, suggesting either that the indicator was faulty or that the autopilot’s re-entry circuitry had been triggered out of its normal sequence.

An orbit later, the astronaut was advised to switch to autopilot and Faith 7 began to roll. This had its own implications. For proper flight, Time magazine told its readers a week later, there were other functions for the autopilot to perform prior to retrofire. Since each function was sequentially linked to the next, Mercury Control knew that several earlier steps had not been performed. Cooper would have to control them by hand, a situation not entirely unpalatable, since Scott Carpenter had flown part of his re-entry in a similar manner. Still, at Cape Canaveral, a training mockup of the spacecraft in Hangar S was set up to practice various scenarios and provided an assurance that all would be well. Then, on its 20th orbit, Faith 7 lost all attitude readings and, a revolution later, one of its three inverters, needed to convert battery power to alternating current and operate the autopilot, went dead. Cooper tried to activate a second inverter, but could not. (The third inverter was needed to run cooling equipment inside the cabin throughout re-entry.) His autopilot, in effect, was devoid of all electrical power.

As flight controllers scrambled to relay questions, corrections and instructions and practice procedures on the ground – including the possibility of bringing Cooper back to Earth on battery power alone – the astronaut himself remained calm, though he watched in dismay as carbon dioxide levels rose both inside the cabin and within his pressure suit. The lack of electrical power meant that he could not rely on his gyroscopic system to properly orient Faith 7 for re-entry; it would have to be lined up manually. He could not even rely on the spacecraft’s clock. “Things are beginning to stack up a little,’’ he told Capcom Scott Carpenter in a cool and typically understated manner, but acquiesced that he still had fly-by-wire and manual controls as a backup. “We would have found some way to fire the retros,’’ Mercury engineer John Yardley said later, “if it meant telling him what wires to twist together.’’

Guided by John Glenn, aboard the Coastal Sentry, Cooper ran smoothly through his pre-retrofire checklist, steadying Faith 7 with the hand controller and lining up a horizontal mark on his window with Earth’s horizon; this brought the spacecraft’s nose down to the desired 34-degree angle. Next, he lined up a vertical mark with pre­determined stars to gain the correct yaw angle. Glenn counted him down to retrofire and Cooper hit the button on time, receiving no light signals, because of his electrical system problems, but he confirmed that he could feel the three small engines igniting. Re-entry was uneventful, with Cooper damping out unwanted motions and manually deploying his drogue and main parachutes. The spacecraft broke through mildly overcast skies and splashed into the Pacific, some 130 km south-east of Midway Island, only 6.4 km from the recovery ship Kearsarge. Floundering briefly, Faith 7 quickly righted itself and Cooper requested permission, as an Air Force officer, to be allowed aboard a naval carrier.

Forty minutes later, permission having been granted, the hatch was blown and America’s sixth astronaut set foot on the deck of the Kearsarge. His mission had lasted 34 hours, 19 minutes and 49 seconds – nowhere close to the four days chalked – up by Andrian Nikolayev a year earlier, but a significant leap as NASA prepared for its ambitious series of long-duration Gemini flights. Even more significantly, Cooper had returned to Earth as all the astronauts had wanted: as a pilot in full control. It also offered a jab at the test pilot community, some of whom had ridiculed Project Mercury as little more than ‘a man in a can’ or, even more deridingly, as ‘spam in a can’. Walt Williams, who only days earlier had tried to have Cooper removed from the flight, now warmly shook the astronaut’s hand. ‘‘Gordo,’’ he told him, ‘‘you were the right guy for the mission!’’

The future seemed bright. Ahead, in a year’s time, lay Gemini. . . and then the Moon.

Shortly after their arrival in orbit, with a packed five hours ahead of them, things did not appear to be going well for the Gemini 3 crew. Twenty minutes into the mission, as Molly Brown passed out of range of the mid-Atlantic tracking station in the Canary Islands, Young noticed the oxygen pressure gauge suddenly drop. At first, he suspected a malfunction, but his attention was soon drawn to a number of peculiar readings from other instruments, suggesting that he and Grissom may have a power supply problem on their hands. Quickly, Young switched from the primary to the backup electrical convertor, which powered the dials, and the glitch vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. From the moment Young first spotted the problem to its resolution took barely 45 seconds.

The cell-growth study, to be run by Grissom, proved a dismal failure; perhaps, he said, the adrenaline was pumping a little too much and he twisted the handle too hard, broke it and ruined the whole experiment. (Ironically, the scientist on the ground, operating the control sample, also broke his handle!) For his part, Young experienced difficulties with the radiation investigation on his side of the cabin and, although he completed it correctly, the results were inconclusive. Exposed to nearly identical doses of radiation, the in-flight blood samples showed higher levels of damage than their control counterparts on the ground. After the mission, both men would blame differences between the experiment packages they flew with and trained with as the cause of the problem, but admitted that observing sea urchins did not carry the same ‘‘oh, wow’’ factor as manoeuvring their spacecraft and experiencing the wonders of microgravity.

At the end of the first orbit, with Molly Brown flying nose-first, Grissom fired the forward-facing OAMS thrusters for a carefully timed 74 seconds to slow down by about 15 m/sec and almost circularise the orbit. Then, passing over the Indian Ocean in darkness on the second orbit, he yawed 90 degrees to one side and fired first the forward-facing thrusters and then the aft-facing thrusters in an effort to cancel out the 3 m/sec of the previous burn, which he was almost able to do, with the residual marginally increasing the inclination of their orbit with respect to the equator. These two manoeuvres had been made ‘out of plane’ so as not to disturb their circular orbit.

On the third and final orbit, with Molly Brown flying base-first, a 109-second ‘fail-safe’ burn lowered the perigee to 72 km to ensure a successful re-entry in the event of a retrorocket malfunction. No such malfunction materialised, thankfully, and, after running through their checklists, Young fired the pyrotechnics to separate the equipment module from the adaptor and armed the automatic retrofire switch. One by one, the four braking engines ignited, another set of pyrotechnics released the spent retrorocket compartment and Molly Brown plunged, its ablative base forward, into the atmosphere. ft was during this dynamic phase of the mission, at an altitude of 90 km, that another experiment – the communications task – was to begin and Young duly threw the switch on his side of the cabin as the plasma sheath broke the radio link with Mission Control. Unlike the other experiments, this one proved encouraging: at high rates of water flow, investigators later concluded, both UHF and C-band signals from the spacecraft could be received by ground stations. ‘‘We could see the whole retro pack burning up as it came in right behind us,’’ Grissom remembered of the dramatic re-entry.

By monitoring the trajectory during re-entry, the on-board computer could predict the splashdown point and display this to Grissom, who could adjust the ‘lift vector’ by using the thrusters in the nose to roll left or right of the ‘neutral’ position in order to steer towards the target. When this indicated that they were coming in short, his efforts to ‘extend’ made little difference. ft was later concluded that theoretical and wind tunnel predictions of Gemini’s lift capability did not match its actual lift. fn fact, Molly Brown would splashdown 84 km short of the intended point and 110 km from the recovery ship, fntrepid. Nevertheless, the role of an engineering test flight was to determine the vehicle’s performance and this empirical data would be taken into account on future missions.

As the drogue parachute deployed, Molly Brown was oriented with its heat shield down. However, after the main canopy had inflated, Grissom threw a switch to adjust the parachute line to a two-point configuration that would angle the capsule’s nose at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. Even though both men were strapped in, this transition was so violent that it pitched them into their windows, cracking Young’s helmet faceplate and punching a hole in Grissom’s. Fortunately, splash­down at 2:16:31 pm was relatively smooth, although Grissom could see little through his window, as the still-attached parachute caught the wind and dragged Molly Brown’s nose underwater. Fearing a similar demise as had happened to Liberty Bell 7, Grissom jettisoned the parachute and Gemini 3 bobbed upright. This time, he had not lost his spacecraft. . . but, alas, with the swelling waves, quickly lost his breakfast.

That breakfast had, of course, been augmented somewhat by Young’s crafty corned beef sandwich, one of the few events of the mission still remembered decades later. “I was concentrating on our spacecraft’s performance,” Grissom recalled after the flight, “when suddenly John asked me: ‘You care for a corned beef sandwich, skipper?’ If I could have fallen out of my couch, I would have! Sure enough, he was holding an honest-to-john corned beef sandwich!’’ As Grissom sampled the treat, bits of rye bread began to float around the pristine cabin, forcing him to put it away. His only complaint was that there was no mustard on it. Still, it proved somewhat tastier than Gemini 3’s staple of reconstituted apple sauce, grapefruit juice and chicken bits.

In his autobiography, Deke Slayton admitted that he had given permission for Young to carry the sandwich, but in view of the complaints NASA later received over its ‘frivolous’ astronauts’ antics, he was obliged to render a formal, though mild, reprimand. For Grissom, though, it would be a highlight of the mission. It did not affect Young’s career and on 6 April, barely two weeks later, he and Grissom were assigned to the backup crew for Gemini VI, the rendezvous mission, scheduled to take place in the autumn.

With Intrepid still some distance from them, it is hardly surprising that Grissom refused to open Molly Brown’s hatches until Navy swimmers from a rescue helicopter had affixed a flotation collar to the spacecraft. The splashdown point was in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island in the Atlantic. Although the spacecraft proved lousy as a boat, its performance in orbit had been nothing short of outstanding. ‘‘I do know that if NASA had asked John and me to take Molly Brown back into space the day after splashdown, we would have done it with pleasure,’’ said Grissom. ‘‘She flew like a queen, did our unsinkable Molly, and we were absolutely sure that her sister craft would perform as well.’’ Still, the seasick Grissom was first to leave the capsule and Young kidded him about his failure to adhere to the old saying about captains being last to leave. Without missing a beat, Grissom replied ‘‘I just made you captain as I got out!’’ Indeed, in a little more than a year’s time, Young would captain his own Gemini into orbit.

Eight weeks after the joint flight of Nikolayev and Popovich, the Cold War took its most dramatic turn. It was a turn which has since been regarded as the moment at which the Soviet Union and the United States came closest to full-scale nuclear conflict. It began on 14 October 1962, when reconnaissance photographs taken by a U-2 aircraft revealed the construction of ballistic missile bases in Cuba. President John Kennedy regarded it as a significant threat to both his own nation and others in the western hemisphere and, moreover, a pro-communist country in Latin America was unthinkable at this tense time. Events had not been helped by the president’s own half-hearted support of a group of Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro’s regime in April 1961. This had prompted the revolutionary dictator to declare his fledgling nation a socialist republic, ally himself openly with the Soviet Union and begin efforts to modernise Cuba’s military infrastructure.

Kennedy’s other attempts at aggression included Operation Mongoose, which sought to destabilise and overthrow Castro through a series of (ultimately unsuccessful) covert military activities, together with continuous reconnaissance overflights and harassment from the United States’ Guantanamo naval base. In April 1962, Nikita Khrushchev agreed to supply surface-to-air and surface-to – surface missiles to Cuba for coastal defence and, a few weeks later, began installing Soviet-controlled nuclear weapons on the island. This emplacement was a clear response to Kennedy’s own installation of 15 Jupiter missiles at Izmir in Turkey, all of which were aimed at cities in the western Soviet Union, including Moscow. By late July, more than 60 Russian ships had reached Cuba and fears grew that an American invasion was imminent. A joint Congressional resolution had already authorised the use of force if their interests were threatened and a huge military exercise, Operation Ortsac, was planned in the Caribbean for October.

Although it was widely known that the United States possessed a far larger nuclear arsenal than the Soviet Union, the close proximity of missiles stationed in Cuba would reduce the warning time of any launches to little or none. Meanwhile, between June and October, Soviet merchant ships delivered two dozen launch pads, 42 missiles, 45 nuclear-tipped warheads, 42 fl-28 bombers, a 40-strong MiG regiment, two Anti-Air Defence divisions and three mechanised infantry units to the island. Kennedy had initially expressed scepticism that Khrushchev would risk provoking an international confrontation: even in late August, he told Congress that the Cuban missiles were for defensive, not offensive, purposes. Further reassurances to this effect came from Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and from Khrushchev himself.

The military build-up, however, continued. On 8 October, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado told the United Nations General Assembly that, if his country was attacked, it would protect itself. “We have sufficient means,’’ he warned, “with which to defend ourselves; we have, indeed, our inevitable weapons, which we would have preferred not to acquire and which we do not wish to employ.’’ A few days later, a U-2 flight identified the construction of a missile base at San Cristobal in western Cuba; Kennedy first saw the photographs on 16 October and duly assembled the National Security Council’s executive committee, which concluded on three possible courses of action: an air assault on the bases, a full – scale military invasion or a naval blockade to prevent the arrival of more weapons. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported the second option, believing that the Soviets would not stop the United States from conquering Cuba, Kennedy was more cautious. He feared that “if they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin’’. An air attack, too, would be unwise, giving the Soviets an ideal excuse to take West Berlin.

The naval blockade – or at least a more selective ‘quarantine’, focusing solely on the weapons – was also endorsed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Under international law, it would represent an act of war, but Kennedy felt that the Soviets would not be provoked into an attack by a mere blockade. Despite a meeting with Soviet foreign affairs minister Andrei Gromyko, who assured him again that there were no offensive weapons in Cuba, Kennedy moved to obtain approval from the Organisation of American States (OAS) for military action. In support of the quarantine, which would occur in international waters, Argentina, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago offered destroyers, air force and other military units, escort ships and the use of naval bases.

In a telegram despatched late on 24 October, Khrushchev urged Kennedy to “understand that the Soviet Union cannot fail to reject the arbitrary demands of the United States”, regarding the blockade as “an act of aggression” which Russian ships would be ordered to ignore. Kennedy’s response was that his hand had been forced after repeated reassurances that no offensive weapons existed in Cuba and he implored his Soviet counterpart to “take necessary action to permit a restoration of the earlier situation’’. That same night, the Joint Chiefs instructed the Strategic Air Command to lift its defence readiness condition to ‘DEFCON 2’ – the second- highest state of military alertness – and the directive was deliberately transmitted uncoded to ensure that Soviet intelligence agents could understand it. The first efforts to enforce the blockade – intercepting the tanker Bucharest and boarding the Lebanese freighter Marcula – began the next day.

Tensions were raised still further when Kennedy authorised the loading of nuclear missiles onto American military aircraft and ordered low-level reconnaissance missions over Cuba to increase from twice daily to once every two hours. Secret negotiations began shortly thereafter to seek a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, with suggestions that the Soviets remove their weapons under the supervision of the United Nations and Fidel Castro publicly announce his refusal to accept them in future. In exchange, it was proposed that the United States would promise never to invade Cuba. The response from Kennedy was that his government was ‘‘unlikely to invade’’ if the missiles were removed. Early on 26 October, Khrushchev broadcast a message on Radio Moscow and wired Kennedy to the same effect: offering to remove the Cuban weapons in exchange for the United States dismantling their own Jupiter missile emplacements in Turkey.

Around midday, the crisis deepened when a U-2, flown by Rudolph Anderson, was shot down by one of the Cuban missiles; later, several Crusader aircraft on low – flying reconnaissance missions were also fired upon. Despite an earlier decision to order an attack under such circumstances, Kennedy reserved judgement. He was keen to accept Khrushchev’s offer, although the Turkish government was unhappy about relinquishing the Jupiter defences and such a trade would effectively undermine relations with a NATO ally. Ultimately, and after much deliberation, Kennedy agreed secretly to remove all missiles set in Turkey and respect Cuban sovereignty, in exchange for Khruschev’s removal of all weapons from the Caribbean island. However, the decision to remove the Turkish batteries was not made public at the time, with the effect that Khrushchev appeared to be the loser. His apparent ‘retreat’ from a situation which many observers felt that he had started – coupled with his perceived inability to handle international crises – has been cited as one of the factors in his overthrow two years later.

A woman in space 49

Before his selection as an astronaut, Glenn’s two claims to fame in the public eye were setting a supersonic cross-country record for flying from America’s west to east coasts in just three hours, 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds as part of the Navy’s Project

Bullet… and appearing alongside ten-year-old Eddie Hodges to win the CBS television show ‘Name That Tune’.

In the wake of his astronaut career, Glenn’s fame skyrocketed. Not only did he become the first American to orbit the Earth, which, in many minds, actually eclipsed the achievement of Al Shepard, but he enjoyed a highly successful career in politics, serving with distinction for a quarter of a century as a senator and running unsuccessfully for the presidency in the 1984 election. During his final days in the Senate, I wrote to Glenn’s office and was pleasantly surprised to receive a personally – signed black-and-white photograph of the great man, clad in the silver pressure suit that he wore for his five-hour Mercury mission more than three decades earlier. His fame resurfaced in October 1998, when he hurtled into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, securing yet another record which still stands: at 77, he remains the oldest person ever to journey into space.

To the media, Glenn was a hero from the very day that he and the other members of the Mercury Seven were introduced in April 1959. Freckle-faced, witty, articulate and charismatic, he was described by some journalists as epitomising ‘all-American’ qualities and many were surprised when he did not secure the first American suborbital flight. Others did not buy Glenn’s ‘boy-next-door’ act, including Chris Kraft, who had dealings with him years earlier when working on the Vought Crusader naval fighter. Kraft considered Glenn’s head to be ‘‘up and locked’’ – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the retraction of an aircraft’s landing gear – and, indeed, the astronaut’s politicking to secure MR-3 for himself had even led to a stern reprimand from Bob Gilruth to stop backbiting. After Gilruth’s decision to fly Shepard first, Glenn had complained bitterly that the December 1960 peer vote had turned the selection process into a popularity contest. Glenn felt strongly that his advice, given to his Mercury Seven colleagues about the damaging effect of womanising on their public image, had cost him what he perceived to be his rightful seat on MR-3. ‘‘I didn’t think being an astronaut was a popularity contest,’’ Glenn wrote years later. ‘‘I was wrong about that.’’

By the time he finally flew, in February 1962, Glenn was 40 years old, making him by far the oldest among the Mercury Seven. He had been born in Cambridge, Ohio, on 18 July 1921, although he grew up and received his education in the town of New Concord, studying engineering. Already, as a youth, he had undergone flight training and took the Army Air Corps’ physical examination and passed. However, when no orders materialised, he took the Navy’s physical, which he also passed and was sworn into the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. Initial training at the University of Iowa was followed by preparation at Olathe, Kansas, and finally at Corpus Christi, Texas. It was whilst stationed at the latter base that Glenn learned of his eligibility to apply for the Marine Corps, which he did, winning his wings and lieutenant’s bars in 1943. That same April, he married Annie Castor.

After a year of training, Glenn joined Marine Fighter Squadron 155, flying F-4U combat missions in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific during the Second World War. He returned to the United States shortly before the end of the conflict to begin test pilot work at Patuxent River, Maryland, evaluating new aircraft. Subsequently, he served as an instructor in advanced flight training at Corpus Christi from 1948-50, completed marine amphibious warfare training and flew 63 combat missions during the Korean conflict. It was whilst in south-east Asia that Glenn shot down three MiGs along the Yalu River, earning himself the nickname ‘MiG Mad Marine’. (He was also tagged ‘Magnet Ass’ for his ability to attract flak.)

Overall, in the Second World War and Korea, he flew 149 combat missions and his chestful of medals proved it: six Distinguished Flying Crosses and an Air Medal with 18 clusters. After Korea, he joined the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Pax River, later serving as project officer for a number of advanced fighters. Whilst serving in this capacity for the F-8U Crusader, in July 1957, he set the transcontinental speed record by flying non-stop from Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California to Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island. The attempt arose from Glenn’s desire to kill two birds with one stone: running the Crusader’s engines in afterburner at full combat power whilst at high altitude and seizing the Air Force-held transcontinental speed record, which then stood at three hours and 45 minutes.

‘‘We could do the test,’’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘‘and also call attention to the fine plane the Navy had purchased as its frontline fighter.’’ Under the name ‘Project Bullet’ – so-called because the Crusader flew faster than the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a.45-calibre pistol – Glenn volunteered himself as pilot for the attempt. ‘‘The plane flew beautifully,” he wrote of the epic flight on 16 July 1957. Glenn, who beat the previous record by 21 minutes, was awarded another Distinguished Flying Cross. It was in the wake of the flight that he was approached with an invitation to appear on the television quiz show ‘Name That Tune’, alongside Eddie Hodges from Mississippi. The pair won the $25,000 first prize.

Consequently, in the eyes of the public, Glenn was probably the most recognisable when the Mercury Seven were introduced at the Dolley Madison House less than two years later. ‘‘He was already first among equals,’’ wrote Scott Carpenter in his autobiography, co-authored with daughter Kris Stoever, ‘‘the oldest of the seven, with the most military and combat experience, a television celebrity and holder of a transcontinental speed record. He wore old clothes, old cowboy hats and lived next to his dearest friend, Tom Miller, his roommate and wingman from World War II.’’ His purchase, at the height of the sports-car craze, of a tiny $1,400 Prinz, barely big enough for two passengers, looked somewhat comical parked alongside Al Shepard’s brand-new Corvette. By his own admission, Glenn bought it for its great mileage, which got him from his home in Arlington to Langley for less than a dollar. Yet Glenn turned the humour around, one day writing on a classroom blackboard a quote that he had seen in Reader’s Digest: “Definition of a sports car: a hedge against male menopause!’’

Even during the initial press conference, when each astronaut candidate spoke about their lives, their wives, their families and their dreams, Glenn was by far the most eloquent: speaking at length about love of God, family and his desire to serve his country. The others rolled their eyes, but, in Glenn’s mind, it was part and parcel of achieving the goal of being the best of the seven and becoming the first man in space. Indeed, he was so adored by the public and the media that questions were asked of NASA press spokesman Shorty Powers as to why Shepard, not Glenn, had received the coveted Redstone mission. Powers’ response was that, out of the three

final candidates, Shepard was the best, but Glenn remained furious. Only when Gilruth firmly set him in line did he grudgingly abandon his effort to undermine Shepard and train as his backup. For the Marine Corps, however, the reason behind the decision was obvious: NASA was saving ‘the best’ flight, the first orbital flight, for a Marine.

JOURNEY TO SPACE

The frigid cold of space held no fear for Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov. Growing up in central Siberia at the height of Stalin’s purges, he had seen far worse times. One of the most traumatic was in January 1938. He was just four months shy of his fourth birthday when neighbours in the tiny village of Listvyanka, near the point where the Angara River leaves Lake Baikal, arrived in the bitterness of midwinter to strip bare his family’s belongings, their clothes, their meagre furniture and even their food. The young boy, one of a dozen Leonov children, was even told to remove his trousers. It was the punishment meted out by the harsh Soviet regime on Arkhip Leonov, a staunch Bolshevik falsely accused of being an ‘enemy of the people’. He had, it was said, deliberately allowed seeds for the next year’s harvest to dry out.

‘‘My father was thrown into jail without trial,’’ Alexei Leonov wrote decades later in a joint autobiography, co-authored with American astronaut Dave Scott. ‘‘As we were then regarded as the family of an ‘enemy of the people’, we were branded subversives. Our neighbours were encouraged to come and take from us whatever they wanted.’’ His elder siblings were removed from school and the family was forced to leave Listvyanka. Ultimately, remembered Leonov, his father was absolved from blame, thanks to glowing testimony from a former commanding officer, received compensation and was offered the headship of his local collective farm. Arkhip Leonov declined, however, and chose to work instead at a power plant in Kemerovo, on the Tom River, to the north-east of Novosibirsk, with his sister and brother-in-law. It was here that the man who would one day become the first to walk in space first experienced his life’s two passions: art and aviation.

In his autobiography, he recounted drawing pictures on the whitewashed stoves of his neighbours’ rooms, earning extra bread and receiving pencils and paints for his efforts. ‘‘I loved to draw,’’ Leonov wrote, and his interest was indulged by his parents, who stretched bed sheets over wooden frames to provide rough canvasses for his work in oils. His ambition to become a professional painter was, he added, eclipsed one day in 1940 by the desire to fly. ‘‘It happened the first time I set eyes on

a Soviet pilot,” he explained, “who had come to stay with one of our neighbours. I remember how dashing he looked in his dark-blue uniform with a snow-white shirt, navy tie and crossed leather belts spanning his broad chest. I was so impressed. I used to follow him everywhere, admiring him from a distance.”

The pilot, after a time, noticed the young boy’s interest and demanded to know why he was being followed. When Leonov told him that he, too, desired to be a pilot, the aviator smiled and explained that he would need to grow physically strong and study hard at school. Equally importantly, Leonov would have to wash his face and hands each morning with soap. “Like most little boys,’’ wrote Leonov, “I was not too keen on soap and water,’’ but he followed the pilot’s advice, running to him every morning to proudly display his clean face and hands.

Acquittal from false accusation was by no means the end of the family’s troubles, as German forces rolled into the Soviet Union in a sweeping advance on a very broad front. Leonov recalled seeing truckloads of wounded Russian soldiers arriving in Kemerovo and the mass construction of chemical plants, two of which were blown up by Nazi sympathisers. In the autumn of 1943, when Leonov started school, the Red Army had repulsed the Germans at Stalingrad, although times remained grim. Years later, he would remember chanting thanks to Stalin in school for his ‘happy childhood’ and, indeed, would grow up believing the despotic Soviet system to be the best in the world. Not until his mid-teens would he begin reading and learning of other, happier worlds beyond the borders of Russia. When Nikita Khrushchev came to power, Leonov took the black armband he had worn in mourning of Stalin’s passing and burned it.

His ambition to become a professional artist culminated, in early 1953, with a journey in the back of an open lorry to Latvia to apply for a college place in Riga. This, sadly, came to nothing. Despite being accepted by the principal, Leonov’s realisation that the expense of living in the Latvian capital was simply too high pushed him in another direction, toward his second love: aviation. In the autumn, he was offered a place at the Kremenchug Pilots’ College in the Ukraine and for two years learned to fly propellor-driven aircraft, then moved on to the higher military academy in Chuguyev to train on MiG-15 jets. Shortly afterwards, the effects of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising placed Leonov and other young Soviet Air Force fighter pilots on full combat alert. Graduation from Chuguyev coincided broadly with the launch of Sputnik, at which time he was flying MiG-15s, specially modified to take off and land on soil airstrips at night and during the daytime.

One harrowing incident in particular brought him to the attention of a mysterious recruiting team. . . and paved the road to the cosmonaut corps. Whilst flying in heavy cloud, a pipe in his jet’s hydraulic system snapped. Alerted by his on-board instruments to a fire, Leonov shut off the fuel supply to the engine and performed an emergency landing. He was too low, he wrote, to parachute to safety. His actions drew the recruiters to ask ‘‘if I would be willing to join a school of test pilots’’. In October 1959, two years after Sputnik 1, he was one of 40 semi-finalists selected from a pool of thousands of highly-qualified MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighter pilots. Interestingly, the same questions had arisen in Russia as the United States over what kind of individuals were best suited to space travel: and pilots were considered

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the best option, in light of their ability to work under extreme conditions, react with lightning speed and demonstrate a range of complex engineering skills.

For a month, he and the other candidates underwent gruelling physical and mental evaluations. “We were put in a silent chamber,” Leonov wrote, “and set a series of complex tasks while blinking lights, music and noise were played to distract us. We were given mathematical problems to solve while a voice was piped into the chamber giving us the wrong answers. We were put in a pressure chamber with very little oxygen in extreme temperatures to see how long we could withstand it.” By now, it was becoming clear to the 25-year-old pilot that this evaluation was for something more serious than test flying and suspicions abounded that missions into space were on the agenda.

At length, the candidates returned to their air bases – Leonov himself was shortly to be posted to East Germany, barely 20 km from the border with the West – to await further orders. Before leaving, he married his girlfriend, Svetlana. Within months, however, in March I960, he was recalled to Moscow to commence cosmonaut training. It was during this period that he first met Sergei Korolev, the man whom Leonov would credit with masterminding virtually the entire early Soviet space programme. “Our training was intensive,” he wrote, “a punishing regime which pushed us beyond what we thought we were physically capable of. Every day started with a 5 km run, followed by a swim, before we even began our individual programmes. Every aspect of our daily routine was carefully monitored by a team of doctors and nutritionists.” The trainees were also enrolled in the Zhukovsky Higher Military Academy for academic accreditation.

Five of Leonov’s colleagues rocketed into orbit between 1961 and 1963, together with a woman, and at around the time of Valentina Tereshkova’s flight, he received his first introduction to a new type of spacecraft: the ‘Voskhod’ (translated variously as ‘Dawn’, ‘Sunrise’ or ‘Ascent’). During a visit to Korolev’s OKB-1 bureau, he was captivated by the ‘‘more interesting design’’ of one capsule in particular. It had, he wrote, ‘‘a transparent airlock attached, with a movie camera installed’’. Korolev explained that all sailors on ocean liners were required to swim and, by extension, all cosmonauts should learn how to ‘swim’ in open space. The airlock, which extended like a large blister from the Voskhod, would be used for just such an exercise. Leonov was told to don a training space suit and evaluate the airlock. At that moment, he recalled years later, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, clapped him on the back and whispered that Korolev had just chosen Leonov for the assignment.

That assignment, which would reach fruition with a launch from Tyuratam on 18 March 1965, would make him not only the first man to walk in space, but also half of the world’s first-ever two-man cosmonaut crew. The Voskhod vehicle that Leonov and fellow pilot Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev were to fly would look physically similar to Vostok and had actually been adapted to carry crews of two or three men for, conceivably, up to two weeks at a time. It was, admittedly, another of Nikita Khrushchev’s cynical and short-sighted ploys to outdo American plans to launch their two-man Gemini capsules, three-man Apollo missions and conduct spacewalks. Although only two manned Voskhods ever flew – the first with a crew of three, including a scientist and physician, the second with Leonov and Belyayev – they

would prove themselves to be among the most dangerous and reckless space missions ever attempted.

As remarkable a success as Gemini 3 had been, it had been overshadowed, five days earlier, by Alexei Leonov’s spacewalk. Admittedly, NASA had its own plans for astronaut Pete Conrad to perform a short, ‘stand-up’ EVA on Gemini V that summer, but the Voskhod achievement encouraged the agency to move its own spacewalk forward to the next Gemini, by now redesignated with Roman numerals as ‘Gemini IV’. This proved good news for the crew of that flight, Jim McDivitt and Ed White, but continuing problems with the certification of General Electric’s fuel cells had already halved their mission from seven to four days. The long-duration flight would now be rescheduled for Gemini V, as would the Rendezvous Evaluation Pod (REP), although McDivitt and White would still come close to the five-day record set by Valeri Bykovsky at the end of Vostok 5 and would mark an enormous leap for the United States.

It would come as something of a disappointment for Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, who, on 15 April 1965, finished their duties backing up Grissom and Young and were named as the prime crew of Gemini VI, planned for later that year. At one stage, this mission was expected to conduct not only the first rendezvous with an Agena-D target, but Stafford would make the United States’ first EVA. The spacewalk was subsequently moved to Gemini V and Pete Conrad, before the Voskhod 2 surprise prompted NASA to provide extravehicular suits for White instead. Then, to Stafford’s chagrin, the planners began talking of accelerating the rendezvous, with McDivitt and White performing station-keeping manoeuvres with the second stage of their Titan II. “It looked as though we weren’t going to be left with any new challenges,” Stafford wrote, “though I was puzzled by the claim that station-keeping with an upper stage was a ‘rendezvous’.’’

Schirra viewed things differently. Conservative in his approach, he was reluctant to complicate his already-complex rendezvous mission with an EVA. He and Stafford both knew how crucial rendezvous was to a lunar landing; if they could not make it work, the chances of meeting John Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade goal would be severely jeopardised. Little did either man know at the time, but Gemini VI would indeed achieve the world’s first space rendezvous. . . albeit with a somewhat different target.

On the ground, meanwhile, the new Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) in Houston was slated to assume day-to-day command of future missions, taking over from the updated Mercury Control at Cape Kennedy, which had run Gemini 3. From the MOCR, Lead Flight Director Chris Kraft would oversee three shifts – his own, focusing on the flight schedule, that of Gene Kranz, to track systems performance, and finally that of John Hodge, to manage real-time mission planning – and the force of controllers tiered beneath them included experts on virtually every component within the Gemini capsule and its Titan II booster. They, in turn, had direct links to their own support teams, scattered in plants and factories throughout the United States.

McDivitt and White were assigned to Gemini IV on 27 July 1964, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell as their backups. The prime crew had known each other since their days at the University of Michigan, from which McDivitt graduated in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, the same year that White received his master’s in the same field. Borman and Lovell first met during the 1962 selection process and would fly two missions together; in fact, both born in March 1928, both blue-eyed, both of equivalent rank in their respective services, they were about as close to twins as unrelated astronauts could get.

Except, perhaps, for the close parallels between McDivitt and White. Barely a year separated the two men in age and both were married to women named Pat. Both had earned their aeronautical engineering degrees from the same institution and in the same year, after which both completed test pilot training at Edwards Air Force Base in California and secured approximately the same amount (around 2,000 hours) of experience in jets. Both also wore the gold leaf of a major in the Air Force at the time of Gemini IV. Above all, both had applied for, and been selected to join, the second group of astronaut candidates in September 1962. ‘‘Jim and I have

been following right along together,” White once said. “It seems that every time we got together we were taking examinations of some kind.” Their biggest test still lay ahead of them.

Among their earliest jobs was a thorough review of the Gemini IV spacecraft, whose construction in St Louis had met with delay following a shortage of parts. Not until November 1964, when the Gemini mission simulator became available in Houston, could they begin direct training… and lobbying. In fact, it has often been remarked that, without McDivitt and White’s determination in getting the EVA added to their mission, the G4C extravehicular suit might not have been available to be assigned to Gemini IV. This determination, wrote Barton Hacker and James Grimwood in their 1977 history of Project Gemini, showed that the astronauts’ role in the decision-making process “went far beyond that of the normal test pilot in determining what was to be done and when’’. Still, when NASA announced in May 1965 that White would indeed venture beyond the pressurised confines of his spacecraft’s cabin, some observers felt it was little more than a ploy to keep up with the Soviets.

In reality, spacewalking had been a major goal of the project virtually from its conception and the public had drawn a link between EVA and Gemini IV since McDivitt and White’s assignment to the mission. At the July 1964 press conference to announce their selection, Gemini’s deputy manager Kenny Kleinknecht had announced that one of the astronauts might open the hatch and stick his head outside. Even earlier, in January, a plan for EVA operations had flagged Gemini IV as the possible first flight to incorporate some kind of extravehicular activity, although, at the time, the availability and development of the required equipment presented a real question mark. As the year progressed, the situation improved: the AiResearch Manufacturing Company was contracted to build a shoebox-sized chest pack for White’s space suit, the David Clark Company received specifications to build the bulky all-white ensemble itself and McDonnell set to work modifying the Gemini IV capsule to support an extravehicular option.

Altitude chamber tests of the spacecraft in November provided an opportunity to quieten the naysayers in MSC’s Crew Systems Division, who felt a spacewalk should not be attempted until the astronauts had endured ‘realistic’ simulations on the ground. However, McDonnell had their own reservations. They did not want to risk injuring astronauts in the altitude chamber and, said John Young, many within NASA were none too happy about ‘‘putting guys in vacuum with nothing between them but that little old lady from Worcester, Massachusetts [the David Clark seamstress] and her glue pot and that suit’’. Nevertheless, the test went ahead, at 12,000 m altitude conditions, although the first EVA attempt left something to be desired when the astronauts could not close the hatch properly.

The suit itself was basically the same as that worn by Grissom and Young on Gemini 3, with the exception that it had redundant zippers, a pair of over-visors for visual and physical protection, automatic-locking ventilation settings and a heavier outer covering. Shortly after Voskhod 2, efforts gathered pace when MSC Director Bob Gilruth and his deputy, George Low, reviewed a hand-held manoeuvring device, which finally convinced the higher echelons of management that an EVA on Gemini IV was a realistic option.

By the end of April 1965, a model spacecraft had been installed in MSC’s vacuum chamber for advanced testing, and in mid-May Gilruth received the staunch support of Bob Seamans, who in turn described the plan to Jim Webb and his deputy, Hugh Dryden. One note of contention came from NASA’s manned spaceflight chief, George Mueller, who doubted that the EVA hardware could be ready in time for June, but was appeased on 19 May when Charles Mathews announced that all equipment for White’s excursion was ready to go. Webb supported the plan for Gemini IV, but Dryden felt it gave the impression of a knee-jerk reaction to Voskhod 2. However, after Webb asked Seamans to prepare a report on the need for an early spacewalk, Dryden relented and gave his approval. That approval, scribbled in the corner of Seamans’ report, was given on 25 May. Nine days later, Gemini IV was ready to fly.

Questions remained, however, over when to announce the EVA: before, during or after the event. Despite early plans in April to announce it at a news conference, if it was approved, NASA’s policy of openness obliged the agency to include it in their Gemini IV press kit. When the latter was published on 21 May, it included reference to a ‘‘possible extravehicular activity’’, which the press learned had become a certainty after its final approval by Webb and Dryden. Nor would it be a relatively puny case of White pushing open the hatch and poking his head into space: he would actually leave Gemini IV and manoeuvre around with the aid of the hand-held

propulsion device. This device, it was further added, could be used to move himself over to inspect the just-jettisoned second stage of the Titan II. Gilruth and Low had first latched onto this idea shortly after Gemini 3 arrived in orbit, when Capcom Gordo Cooper suggested that Grissom try to ‘rendezvous’ with the Titan, and lent their support for such a station-keeping exercise on McDivitt and White’s mission.

The plan was for McDivitt to match his spacecraft’s velocity with that of the second stage – a relatively short distance away and in the same orbital plane – and evaluate his ability to station-keep. Lack of a rendezvous radar on Gemini IV made the task more complex and, although Martin installed flashing lights on the GLV-4 rocket’s second stage, the two astronauts would have to rely upon their own eyes as navigational aids. Further, they had no way of rehearsing such a station-keeping exercise in the ground-based simulators; at least, that is, until McDonnell engineered a mockup view of the target against a starry backdrop.

In addition to station-keeping and the spacewalk, Gemini IV would attempt the longest American manned spaceflight to date. As far back as August 1964, Charles Mathews had announced that the unavailability of fuel cells would render it a four – day, battery-reliant flight. Another reason, McDivitt explained, could have been that only enough food was packed aboard the spacecraft ‘‘for two normal people’’ for four days. Unable to resist, backup pilot Jim Lovell quipped: ‘‘And these two ain’t normal!’’

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However, Chuck Berry, in charge of all Project Gemini medical matters, was reluctant to give his blessing for such a long mission: cardiovascular problems, he noted, had cropped up in the final Mercury-Atlas flights and it was feared that McDivitt and White’s bodies would be subjected to the same kind of physiological strain as that imposed by prolonged bedrest, followed by immediate and vigorous physical exercise. Four days in weightless conditions, Berry argued, could decondition the men to such an extent that they might not be able to withstand the stresses of re-entry, perhaps even losing consciousness. As a result, bungee cords requiring a force of 32 kg to fully extend would be carried for McDivitt and White to exercise their upper-body muscles.

For all of its goodies – rendezvous, long-duration flight, spacewalking – one of the things that Gemini IV lost was the chance for its astronauts to give it a name. Gus Grissom’s choice of ‘Molly Brown’ had not gone down well with NASA management and, despite McDivitt’s proposal of a patriotic ‘American Eagle’, a firm stance was maintained: the mission would be known simply as ‘Gemini IV’. (Ironically, in the wake of Gemini 3, even President Johnson congratulated Grissom on the success of ‘Molly Brown’, remarking that she ‘‘was as unsinkable as her namesake.’’) Instead, McDivitt and White insisted that they wear American flags on the sleeves of their space suits, making them the first United States astronauts to do so. Their crew patch, though, bore only the name ‘Gemini IV’. At a press conference, when asked if he intended to name his spacecraft, McDivitt responded: ‘‘Don’t know. What’s playing on Broadway these days?’’

Overshadowed by the dark events of Vietnam, civil rights, the Kennedy and King murders, the Bay of Pigs and a close shave with nuclear holocaust, the Sixties will hopefully also be remembered by history as the decade in which humanity first ventured into the heavens. Men and a woman left Earth’s atmosphere, spacewalked hundreds of kilometres above their home planet, rendezvoused and docked their ships together and travelled to the Moon for the first time. These triumphs, however, were tempered by tragedy: three astronauts asphyxiated in a launch pad fire, then a cosmonaut killed during his ill-fated descent to Earth. Still, by the end of the decade, both the United States and the Soviet Union had firmly established their presence in space. The excitement and euphoria which these years inspired were felt not just in America and Russia, but throughout the world. By the time Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders circled the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, it is said that no fewer than a billion people back home were watching or listening.

This book explores the history of humanity’s early exploration of space, beginning with the pioneering flight by Yuri Gagarin and ending with Apollo 8’s circumnavigation of the Moon. It will, I hope, form the basis of a series to commemorate the first half-century of human exploration in space. By the time of that momentous anniversary in 2011, perhaps, the ongoing drive towards private spaceflight and ‘space tourism’ will begin to make human journeys into the heavens so commonplace that it will be impossible to catalogue them all! It is my most fervent wish that a further volume – covering the decade from 2011 – will be impossible to write, because men and women will be in space so often and human spaceflight will have changed from the realm of the few and the privileged to the realm of the many.

My intention in writing this volume was to convey some of my own enthusiasm for what was one of the most remarkable decades in human history. Born in 1976, sadly, I missed it all, and still await the chance to see my first manned lunar landing. Still, I have attempted to introduce the reader to some of the problems faced in the early days: from the basic questions of whether men could breathe, eat and avoid going mad in space, to more complex issues of the kinds of fuels and atmospheres to be used in rockets and spacecraft and the techniques needed to accomplish orbital rendezvous, docking and reaching the Moon. Many of the techniques pioneered by the trailblazing heroes of the Sixties continue to be used today by Shuttle and

International Space Station crews and close parallels can be drawn between Apollo lunar mission design and plans for the United States’ proposed return to the Moon in 2020. However, in my mind, at least, the real achievement of that handful of early astronauts and cosmonauts is that they drew our attention away from petty problems on Earth and refocused it once more on the excitement of exploration, the thrill of discovery and the conquest of new frontiers. That legacy, that passion for adventure and that yearning to stretch our horizons, will surely drive the next generation of space explorers and inspire our next 50 years in space.

Ben Evans

Atherstone, February 2009

By the time Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich returned from their joint flight in August 1962, it was becoming clear to the western world that the Soviet space effort focused solely on scoring one ‘spectacular’ after another. Unlike the American programme, which was proving to be more gradual, yet had a longer-term aim with its Apollo Moon landing project, the Soviet leadership seemed uninterested in the exploration of space. Theirs was a programme exploited by Nikita Khrushchev’s regime purely for the political, military and propaganda advantages that it offered. One further advantage was first tabled by Sergei Korolev towards the end of 1961 and involved sending the first woman into space. On 30 December, the Central Committee of the Communist Party authorised the selection of five female cosmonauts and, by March 1962, after a lengthy evaluation and screening process, the candidates arrived at a male-dominated training facility, just outside Moscow, to begin preparations for the next Vostok stunt.

The women – Tatiana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomaryova, Irina Solovyeva, Valentina Tereshkova and Zhana Yerkina – were put through precisely the same training regime as the men. Their advantage was aided by the apparent disinterest of the United States in selecting female astronauts of its own. ‘‘At that time in America, women tried to make their way into the Mercury programme,’’ Ponomaryova recalled in an interview years later. ‘‘They had not been invited, but some first-class women pilots began to act on their own. They reached the vice-president with their request to be allowed to participate in the space programme. Nothing came out of it, but since the Americans did not hide anything, some publications about this appeared in the press. Thus the decision [not] to create a women’s group was made at the top.’’ It was the perfect propaganda coup for a socialist state: ‘proving’ that women were, on the face of it at least, equal to men.

In spite of the obvious political nature of the decision, the women chosen all had rudimentary flying or parachuting expertise and Nikolai Kamanin envisaged a training programme of five or six months to prepare them for orbital Vostok missions. According to Ponomaryova, they ‘‘were selected through aviation clubs in the European part of the Soviet Union. They mostly selected sports parachute jumpers, since in the Vostok spacecraft the cosmonaut had to land on a parachute. Parachute jumping is a complex skill and therefore to train a novice in a short time is impossible. I had been trained as a pilot and had only eight jumps. I was a third – category jumper; in comparison to the sports master Irina Solovyeva’s 800 jumps, my eight jumps were nothing’’. However, despite checking the documents of around 200 female aviation sports candidates, Kamanin was presented with only 58 ‘suitable’ candidates, of whom five were finally selected.

‘‘When we arrived,’’ said Ponomaryova, ‘‘we were enrolled as privates of the Soviet Air Force. We found ourselves in a military unit, in which we became an alien part, with our different characters and different concepts. Our commanders had great difficulty dealing with us, since we did not understand the requirements of the service regulations and we did not understand that orders had to be carried out. Military discipline in general was, for us, an alien and difficult concept. Specialists

from Korolev’s bureau visited us and gave lectures on the Vostok spacecraft [and] specialists from other organisations also gave lectures.’’

Intensive instruction in rocket technology, navigation techniques and astronomy also formed part of the syllabus. Like their male counterparts, each woman endured repeated runs in the centrifuge, together with daily physical and vestibular training, parachute jumps and flights in two-seater MiG-15 jets to prepare them as much as possible for the weightless environment. “There were many special devices for stimulating and training the vestibular system,’’ Ponomaryova said later, including “rotating chairs, electric current, chairs on unstable surfaces and so on. ‘Real’ weightlessness was simulated with flights, first on fighter planes and later on huge, specially-designed flying laboratories. Weightlessness there lasted 20-40 seconds, just enough to notice that a pencil sharpener was floating in front of you.’’

To evaluate their responses to weightlessness, each woman had to repeat phrases, write sentences, draw shapes and attempt to eat food from toothpaste-like tubes. However, one aspect in which they were not prepared was the actual operation of Vostok, since by this point there was a high level of confidence in the automatic controls. Years later, Ponomaryova admitted that, although weight issues may have been a contributory factor in Korolev’s decision to minimise on manual controls, they were secondary to a sheer lack of understanding of how a human would behave in space. Although Gherman Titov had performed his tasks well, his unexpected sickness underlined this lack of knowledge. Spacecraft designer and Voskhod cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov later argued that the role of the human was to conduct research, not become a ‘‘servant to the machine’’. Ponomaryova, and doubless many other cosmonauts, felt the opposite: in emergencies, it would be imperative to allow the pilot a chance to control their ship.

By the winter of 1962, the training of the five women was complete and, following their final examinations, they were asked by Kamanin if they wished to become regular Soviet Air Force officers. All five accepted and were commissioned as junior lieutenants. On 19 November, when the final selections were made, Ponomaryova actually scored the best test results, but, it is said, did not offer the ‘proper’ replies to examiners’ questions. When asked ‘‘What do you want from life?’’ she is reported to have responded with ‘‘I want to take everything it can offer’’. Valentina Tereshkova, on the other hand, spoke of her ambition ‘‘to support irrevocably the Communist Party’’, which may have contributed greatly to her eventual selection as the first woman in space. Ponomaryova later suspected that her own habit as a smoker, her somewhat aggressive feminism and her failure to vocally support communist ideals had been frowned upon by the selection board. Certainly, in his diary, Kamanin felt that Ponomaryova had ‘‘the most thorough theoretical preparation’’ and was ‘‘more talented than the others’’, yet he admitted her to be ‘‘arrogant, self-centred, exaggerates her abilities and does not stay away from drinking, smoking and taking walks’’.

Kamanin definitely favoured Tereshkova, although she had not received the highest marks, and considered her the best candidate and virtually a female version of Gagarin. His exact words were that ‘‘she is a Gagarin in a skirt’’. He recommended Irina Solovyeva (‘‘the most objective of all’’) as her backup, with

Ponomaryova and the “persistently improving” Zhana Yerkina as options for later Vostoks. Kuznetsova had missed so much training that she did not take the final exams. In particular, she had performed poorly in both the pressure chamber and the centrifuge.

Plans for the flight changed considerably in the months leading up to Tereshkova’s June 1963 launch. Early options, tabled in November 1962, included sending the female cosmonaut into orbit for three or four days or flying a dual mission with two female cosmonauts – much like that of Nikolayev and Popovich – or launching a man and a woman in separate Vostoks. The latter option was finally chosen by the Central Committee on 21 March 1963, in which cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky would fly Vostok 5 on a record-breaking mission of between five and seven days. During his time aloft, he would be joined in orbit by Tereshkova, aboard Vostok 6, for about two days. Several weeks later, at the end of April, Korolev and – surprisingly – also Kamanin were pushing for Bykovsky to attempt a mission of eight to ten days, extending Vostok’s life-support system and supplies to their limit. If successful, such a long-duration stunt would place the Soviet Union at least two years ahead of the Americans.

Still, there was some opposition to flying one woman, rather than two, particularly from the Soviet Air Force, which felt there was insufficient time to train Bykovsky for the other Vostok. Moreover, the shelf-life of spacecraft hardware expired in July 1963, necessitating a springtime or early summertime launch, and efforts to authorise ten more capsules for production had come to nothing. Plans were already underway to prepare a series of modified Vostoks, known as ‘Voskhod’, which would involve launching crews of two or three cosmonauts, crammed inside the tiny cabins, and conducting spacewalks. In March 1963, the Ministry of Defence categorically opposed building further Vostoks and it was decided that the Bykovsky-Tereshkova joint flight would be the last of the series. Kamanin, who now had four fully-qualified female cosmonauts, was livid that a dual-female mission had seemed the likely outcome and was now being eliminated at virtually the last moment.

Tereshkova, to be fair, was an enthusiastic flier and parachutist, but it was not just her careful replies to questions, or even her active membership of the Young Communist League, which endeared her to Nikita Khrushchev. Her occupation was a seamstress; an ordinary factory worker. She represented a plain Russian girl who would provide him with the chance to show that, under socialism, anybody could fly into space. Unlike the United States, which had scarcely considered female candidates during the selection of its Mercury astronaut team, Tereshkova would not be an elite intellectual, nor a professional fighter or test pilot, but instead would possess the kind of ‘common touch’ that Khrushchev liked. It was risky gamble.

A few days before Glenn’s historic mission, another historic event was underway on the Glienicke Bridge, linking Potsdam to West Berlin, as the Soviet intelligence officer Colonel Vilyam Fisher was exchanged for the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Two years earlier, in May I960, Powers had been shot down near Degtyarsk in the Urals by a salvo of S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles. He had been despatched from an American communications facility at Badaber, close to Peshawar in Pakistan, to photograph Soviet ballistic missile sites and was scheduled to land at Bodo in Norway. The incident came two weeks before the opening of a major East-West summit in Paris – a summit which Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev would leave in disgust when Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologise – and proved hugely embarrassing for the United States.

Powers had succeeded in ejecting from his stricken aircraft and parachuted to the ground, whereupon he was captured and placed on trial in Moscow. Khrushchev, meanwhile, announced to the world that a ‘‘spyplane’’ had been shot down, but deliberately omitted to detail the fate of its pilot. The Eisenhower administration, assuming that Powers had been killed, set to work creating a cover story that he had actually been flying a ‘‘weather research aircraft’’, which accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace after the pilot had reported ‘‘difficulties with his oxygen equipment’’ over Turkey. No attempt, continued Eisenhower, was made to deliberately violate Soviet territory. On 7 May, Khrushchev proved this to be a lie, revealing that the pilot was indeed alive and the remains of his largely-intact spyplane were displayed at the Central Museum of Armed Forces in Moscow. Powers’ survival pack, hardly representative of a weather research pilot, included 7,500 roubles in cash and jewellery for women and was also placed on display.

He was convicted that August of espionage and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and seven years’ hard labour, but on 10 February 1962 was exchanged for Fisher. The latter, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne of Russian-German parentage, had moved from England to the Soviet Union with his Bolshevik-sympathising parents in the early Twenties, where he became a translator and, after military duty, trained for the secret services. Sent to Canada and, later, the United States, to recruit and supervise intelligence agents, he was captured by the FBI in June 1957 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. His exchange for Powers and an American economics student named Frederic Pryor was followed by continued service with the KGB until his death in 1971.

Powers, meanwhile, was criticised upon his return to the United States for having failed to activate the U-2’s self-destruct charge, which would have eliminated the camera, photographic film and other classified components. He had also not used a CIA-provided suicide pin, secreted inside a hollowed-out silver dollar, to avoid capture and the possibility of torture. Three weeks after his release, as John Glenn paraded in triumph through the streets of Washington and New York, Powers testified before the Senate Armed Services Select Committee and was found to have followed orders appropriately and praised “as a fine young man under dangerous circumstances”. He subsequently worked for the U-2’s contractor, Lockheed, as a test pilot and was later hired by the Los Angeles television station KNBC to fly its new telecopter. In August 1977, returning from an assignment to cover brush fires in Santa Barbara, his telecopter ran out of fuel and crashed, killing both Powers and KNBC cameraman George Spears.

Plans for Voskhod had arisen in the wake of Tereshkova’s flight, when it became increasingly unlikely that ten more Vostok capsules would be built. This was later downsized to four additional spacecraft and, in July 1963, Korolev laid plans to use them to fly a dog to high altitude for ten days, followed by an eight-day solo mission and a dual-spacecraft joint endeavour lasting around ten days. By December, the manned missions remained more or less unchanged, although the canine flight had been extended to 30 days, to stretch the spacecraft’s life-support and other resources to their limits. All four were intended purely as stopgap measures as Korolev’s bureau struggled to prepare its next-generation spacecraft, Soyuz, for a maiden flight sometime late in 1964.

Unfortunately, the four additional Vostoks would not be available until the middle of that year, and in February it would appear that an order was received ‘from above’ to attempt a three-man mission to upstage the Americans and cloak the reality that the Soviets were falling behind in what was now being coined ‘the space race’. Certainly, Nikolai Kamanin hinted that the three-man stunt originated in ‘discussions’ between Korolev, government officials Leonid Smirnov and Dmitri Ustinov and the chair of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, and a schedule for the mission was established by the Military-Industrial Commission on 13 March 1964. This resulted in the delivery of four rockets and four spacecraft to Tyuratam in June and July, with plans to launch one of them as early as August. Meanwhile, on 13 April, a government resolution officially declared the Soviet Union’s intent to conduct the three-man mission, together with the mention of an ‘extravehicular’ – spacewalking – flight, dubbed ‘Vykhod’ (‘Exit’).

In his diaries, Kamanin revealed that neither he, nor Korolev, were happy with the notion of cramming three men into a one-seater Vostok. ‘‘It was the first time that I had seen Korolev in complete bewilderment,” wrote Kamanin. ‘‘He was very distressed at the refusal to continue construction of the Vostok and could not see a clear path on how to re-equip the ship for three in such a short time.’’ The crafty Chief Designer, however, ultimately turned the situation to his advantage, apparently agreeing to build a three-man Vostok in exchange for Nikita Khrushchev firmly committing the Soviet Union to a lunar landing project. Others, including Khrushchev’s son, have countered more recently that it was Korolev himself who originally proposed the idea of modifying the craft for three-man crews.

‘‘It is easy to forget,’’ acquiesced Asif Siddiqi, ‘‘that Korolev himself had an almost pathological desire to be first – to beat the Americans at all cost. It would not have been contradictory to his personality to pursue the three-cosmonauts-in-a – Vostok plan simply to upstage the early Gemini missions.’’ Siddiqi added that Korolev was, after all, firmly committed in 1963 to flying four more Vostoks right up to the limits of their survivability in space. At the same time, ‘‘the proposal to usurp

Gemini… completely ignored the natural progression of space vehicles and inserted a diversionary programme that would ultimately result in little qualitative gain for Korolev’s grand vision of an expansive space programme”.

Plans for a trio of unmanned precursor missions of this new machine were reduced to just one and, in August, its launch was scheduled for 15-20 September 1964. The name ‘Voskhod’ was devised to convince western observers that it was actually a totally new spacecraft, whereas in reality it was little more than a slightly – modified and somewhat heavier Vostok. Its launch vehicle, too, had been upgraded with additional lift capacity. However, it is said, Korolev opposed the idea of sending three men aloft in a converted Vostok as being unsafe, an assertion supported by his deputy, Vasili Mishin. ‘‘Fitting a crew of three people, and in space suits, in the cabin of the Voskhod was impossible,’’ Mishin said later. ‘‘So, down with the space suits! The cosmonauts went up without them! It was also impossible to make three hatches for ejection. So, down with the ejection devices! Was it risky? Of course it was. It was as if there was a sort of three-seated craft and, at the same time, there wasn’t. In fact, it was only a circus act for three people who couldn’t do any useful work in space. They were cramped, just sitting.’’

Other engineers and managers, too, were sceptical of the new spacecraft’s safety. Konstantin Feoktistov, who had played a crucial role in the development of Vostok and who would actually fly aboard Voskhod 1, recounted years later that ‘‘we argued that it would be unsafe, that it would be better to be patient and wait for the Soyuz to be built… In the end, of course, [Korolev] got his way’’. And how? Korolev offered one of the seats on the three-man Voskhod to an engineer from the OKB-1 design bureau. ‘‘Well,’’ continued Feoktistov, ‘‘that was a very seductive offer and a few days later we produced some rough sketches. Our first ideas were accepted. We unveiled our plans for this new ship in March or April [1964].’’ According to Siddiqi, it was Feoktistov himself who proposed omitting ejection seats and space suits from the cabin; the only means possible of fitting three men inside.

The remarkable achievement of sending three men into orbit at the same time thus hid the reality that they had no protection in the event of a depressurisation, no means of emergency escape and, unlike Vostok fliers, had no option but to remain in their spacecraft until landing. Further, the sheer volume available to house consumables meant that Voskhod 1 could not easily remain aloft for much longer than 24 hours. Saving graces came in the form of a backup retrorocket atop the spherical crew cabin to reduce the risk of stranding in space, together with two parachutes, instead of one, to bring Voskhod and its cosmonauts safely to the ground. The eliminated ejection seats, which made a soft-landing capability essential, were replaced with a trio of couches, fitted at a 90-degree angle to the Vostok position.

This soft-landing system, known as ‘Elburs’, consisted of probes attached to the parachute lines, whose contact with the ground triggered a solid-propellant braking rocket to effect a zero-velocity touchdown. So successful was this mechanism that the Voskhod 1 cosmonauts would recall that they did not notice the instant of contact. Still, the whole effort would later be seen as something akin to a ‘Potemkin village’: a false facade built over a shabby building. Unlike the ‘spam-in-a-can’ of

Project Mercury, Voskhod 1 represented something worse: sardines in a can!

Indeed, wrote Alexei Leonov, the capsule very much reminded him of Vostok. “Some of the control panels I was familiar with from Vostok had been shifted to different positions,” he explained. “The optical orientation system had been moved 90 degrees to the left… My first impression was that the cabin was very cramped. I later found that in zero-gravity, Voskhod took on a more spacious feel and could even become a quite comfortable and reliable temporary home.” Of course, on Leonov’s own mission, Voskhod 2, he and Belyayev would have more room available to them than the three-man Voskhod 1 crew, but this advantage was balanced by the reality that they had to both wear space suits. Although only Leonov would perform the world’s first spacewalk, Belyayev needed to be equally attired in case of depressurisation.

By March 1964, plans were laid to begin training the Voskhod 1 crew. The pilot, Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov, selected as a cosmonaut four years earlier, would be joined by physician Boris Borisovich Yegorov and – interestingly – a scientist named Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov, one of the physicists who had helped design Voskhod. . . and who had advocated the elimination of space suits and ejection seats. Nikolai Kamanin, for his part, felt that launching such ‘untrained’ men into space was insane and highly dangerous, suggesting that Korolev, Keldysh and Smirnov had gone too far in the ludicrous bid to beat the Americans. It has also been said that Nikita Khrushchev himself, when advised of the risks, opted to pursue the project regardless. Herein lay one of the key obstacles in the way of a truly competitive and guided Soviet space effort in the Sixties: it was governed, funded and operated on an ad-hoc and very much whimsical basis by a fickle Russian leadership. With Korolev’s death in 1966, its focus would drift yet further.

Vladimir Komarov, in command of Voskhod 1, would become one of the first physical victims of this faltering effort. Not only would the Soviet Air Force lieutenant-colonel lead one of the most dangerous missions to date, but in the spring of 1967 he would acquire the unenviable record of becoming the first man to die during the course of a spaceflight. Born in Moscow on 16 March 1927, he was among the oldest of the cosmonauts, serving as Pavel Popovich’s backup on Vostok 4 and probably headed for a later solo mission had the plans for ten more capsules not been scrapped. He had been raised in an old house in a district typical of ‘Old Moscow’, excelling in mathematics and working on a collective farm during the Second World War, later proudly declaring that he could saddle a horse equally as well as fly a jet.

Graduation from aviation school coincided with Victory Day in 1945 and, despite his mother’s admonitions to refrain from ‘dangerous’ flying, the young Komarov was determined to pursue high-speed, high-altitude test piloting. The Borisoglebsk and Bataisk schools introduced him to the skills and requirements of combat aviation and a period in Moscow’s Air Force Academy imbued him with the engineering knowledge essential to test flying. Completion of his work at the academy in 1959 was soon followed by the same mysterious telegram received by numerous other Soviet pilots, summoning Komarov to Moscow for weeks of medical and psychological testing. His selection, at the age of 32, made him one of the oldest cosmonauts and Asif Siddiqi has suggested that his experience and education carried him through. Although none of the I960 cosmonaut selectees were test pilots, Komarov, as an aircraft test engineer, came closest.

Aboard Voskhod 1, four years later, he would sit shoulder-to-shoulder with two men from very different backgrounds. Neither Konstantin Feoktistov nor Boris Yegorov possessed test-piloting credentials, but had established themselves as experts in the fields of physical science and medicine. Feoktistov, indeed, was lucky to be alive at all. Born on 7 February 1926 in the south-western Russian city of Voronezh, close to Ukraine, he was caught up in the Great Patriotic War shortly after the defeat at the Battle of Moscow. Amidst the retreating remnants of the Red Army, his mother gathered her belongings and, with the young Feoktistov, joined the steady stream of refugees fleeing eastwards.

At a village where they stopped to rest, Feoktistov met a group of Red Army soldiers, one of whom remembered him trying to enlist a short time earlier and offered to make him a scout. In early July 1942, Feoktistov provided his first information to his superiors; information which earned him a commendation from his commanding officer. Then, walking the streets of Nazi-occupied Voronezh, he was stopped by a patrol, marched around the city and ordered to stop near a pit. Shortly afterwards, Feoktistov felt a sharp pain close to his chin, as a bullet grazed his throat, after which his legs caved in and he toppled face-first into the pit. The Nazis, thinking him dead, left. Feoktistov waited until nightfall, crawled out of the pit and returned home. In later life, a scar on his neck and the proudly-worn medal ‘For Victory Over Nazi Germany’ would be his mementoes of the day – and night – when ‘Kostya’s’ luck held out.

After the war, Feoktistov, who had nurtured a fascination with space exploration since childhood, graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School as an engineer and would subsequently complete a doctorate in physics. In 1955, as a member of Mikhail Tikhonravov’s design bureau, he was part of the team which eventually placed Sputnik into orbit and worked on the design of ion-powered spacecraft for flights to Mars. When ‘cosmonauts’ were sought for Earth-orbital missions, Feoktistov volunteered, but was overlooked.

For his part, Sergei Korolev had long desired civilian engineers from his own OKB-1 design bureau to fly aboard space missions, but had thus far been thwarted by the Soviet Air Force. When Voskhod appeared on the horizon, he succeeded in persuading Mstislav Keldysh to approve this, although the latter seemed more interested in flying a qualified scientist than an engineer. Others, including Deputy Minister of Health Avetik Burnazyan, added their weight behind putting a physician on the crew. In March 1964, the decision was made to fly a pilot, a scientist and a physician on Voskhod 1 and by the end of the following month, the names of Komarov, Leonov, Yevgeni Khrunov and Boris Volynov had been thrown into the pot as candidates for the position of command. Then, on 26 May, a pool of physicians and scientists – Yegorov, Vladimir Benderov, Georgi Katys, Boris Polyakov, Vasili Lazarev and Alexei Sorokin – were selected for consideration. Two weeks later, as the sole member of ‘Civilian Specialist Group One’, Feoktistov was picked.

Early in July, Nikolai Kamanin selected Volynov, Katys and Yegorov to fill command, scientist and physician posts on Voskhod 1, with Komarov, Feoktistov and Sorokin backing them up and Lazarev in ‘reserve’. The second mission, meanwhile, dubbed ‘Vykhod’ and intended to make the first spacewalk, was assigned a team of pilots: Belyayev, Leonov, Khrunov and Viktor Gorbatko. Years later, Leonov would recall their intense work schedule. ‘‘Every week,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I returned to the spacecraft as its design was modified, to familiarise myself with every inch of the vessel. I knew every nut and bolt in that spacecraft. I used to sit in the cabin regularly in my space suit without turning the ventilation system on, to test my stamina.’’ Of the Vykhod candidates, Kamanin favoured Leonov and Khrunov, considering them both to have sharp, analytical minds. Pavel Belyayev and Viktor Gorbatko were assigned as candidates for the post of Voskhod 2’s commander.

Before Vykhod, however, would be the three-man stunt. On 12 August 1964, Volynov, Katys and Yegorov were confirmed as the prime crew, although Korolev expressed his desire for Feoktistov, a man with unrivalled technical knowledge of the Vostok and Soyuz spacecraft, to fly instead. Kamanin opposed the idea, considering the 38-year-old engineer to be in poor medical condition, ‘‘suffering from ulcers, near-sightedness, deformation of the spine, gastritis and even has missing fingers on his left hand’’. To Kamanin and many physicians, Feoktistov was uncertifiable. After heated debates, the Voskhod 1 backup crew was redefined as consisting of Komarov with physicians Lazarev and Sorokin. Circumstances changed quickly. In late August, Marshal Sergei Rudenko, the Soviet Air Force’s deputy commander-in­chief, objected to the selection and recommended the inclusion of an engineer on the crew, rather than two physicians. Meanwhile, a hastily-convened panel under Avetik Burnazyan cleared Feoktistov to fly, infuriating Kamanin, who felt that a fair and rational selection process was now being derailed by a hand-picking leadership.

The shift of Yegorov and Feoktistov from the backup to the prime Voskhod 1 crew came swiftly. At the end of August, it was discovered that Georgi Katys had a brother and sister living in Paris, a fact that he apparently did not reveal during the selection process. Combined with the fact that his father had been executed by the Soviet state, his suitability as a cosmonaut was immediately thrown into question. Katys fought for his seat, arguing that he knew nothing of his Parisian siblings, who had been born before 1910, long before his own birth. Moreover, his father was executed in 1931, when Katys was barely five years old. Ironically, Katys had the unwavering support of Mstislav Keldysh and several other academicians. It made little difference, with Nikolai Kamanin writing that Katys’ unfavourable back­ground ‘‘spoils the candidate for flight’’. Towards the end of September, Sergei Korolev again pressed for Feoktistov to take Katys’ place. Kamanin still opposed it, feeling that, with Yegorov, there would now be two ‘invalids’ aboard Voskhod 1.

On 24 September, Kamanin detailed his arrival at Tyuratam in his diary and recorded telling the prime and backup crews – and Feoktistov – that all seven must remain physically and psychologically prepared for the mission, since the final decision over who would fly would not come until a couple of days before launch. Nevertheless, when the cosmonauts flew to the site in October for final preparations, Kamanin was sure that they knew the State Commission had ratified Komarov,

Feoktistov and Yegorov for the mission. The third crew member, Yegorov, born in Moscow on 26 November 1937, was recognised – despite his youth – as an authority on the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear, responsible for controlling the sense of balance. He came from a distinguished medical family, his father having been a prominent heart surgeon and his mother an ophthalmologist.

Indeed, it has been said that Yegorov’s mother, able to speak German, French and English, with a plethora of hobbies from drawing to singing and playing the piano to a love of mathematics, was the making of him, even though she died when he was a teenager. The young boy grew up with a wide range of interests, devising gadgets to switch on lights and radios from his bed and open drawers, even crafting an eight-valve television device when he realised that the factory-made set in the family’s living room was not ‘his own’. Yegorov graduated from the First Moscow Medical Institute in 1961 and it has been suggested that his father’s influence within the Presidium assured him of his seat on Voskhod 1. Together with medicine, his interest in physics, cybernetics and radio electronics remained. Ironically, despite the label ‘physician’ which he held on Voskhod 1, Yegorov would not actually receive his doctorate until 1965, courtesy of Humboldt University in Berlin. He would also earn the degrees of a candidate and doctor of medical sciences some years later.