Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

ONWARD, UPWARD… AND OUTSIDE

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

ONWARD, UPWARD... AND OUTSIDE

The Mission Operations Control Room at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in

Houston.

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

ONWARD, UPWARD... AND OUTSIDE

Interior view from Gemini IV, showing McDivitt in the foreground and White behind. Note the cover over White’s tinted visor.

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!’’

Discipline, persistence, dedication 253

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?’’

Escaping the Bonds of Earth

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

A WOMAN IN SPACE

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.

SPY SWAP

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.

SARDINES

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.

DISCIPLINE, PERSISTENCE, DEDICATION

These three words alone could sum up Edward Higgins White II. The son of a West Point graduate and Air Force major-general, he was born on 14 November 1930 in San Antonio, Texas, and his parents instilled in him from a very early age the values of self-discipline, persistence and an absolute single-minded determina­tion to achieve his goals. ‘‘Flying was his birthright,’’ wrote Mary C. White in her biography of him, published by NASA, and, indeed, he was aboard an old T-6 training aircraft with his father – and taking its controls – at the tender age of 12. In fact, White’s father remained active as a pilot during 35 years of Air Force service.

Throughout his childhood, White travelled to bases scattered across the United States, from the East Coast to Hawaii, and, despite the semi-nomadic lifestyle, excelled both academically and as an athlete. In fact, it was only whilst enrolled in Western High School in Washington, DC, when he came to investigate college admission policies, that his lack of continuous residency posed an obstacle. With an extensive history of family service in the military, ‘‘there never seemed to be any question,’’ White said later, ‘‘that I would go there too’’. He was admitted to the Military Academy at West Point to study for a bachelor of science degree and excelled in academics and athletics: serving as a half-back on the football team, making the track team and setting a new record in the 400 m hurdles. His athletic

credentials were so impressive that he narrowly missed selection (by just 0.4 seconds) for the United States’ track team in the 1952 Olympics.

Whilst at West Point, White met his future wife, Pat Finnegan, and upon graduation in 1952 followed in his father’s footsteps by enlisting in the Air Force. Initial flight instruction in Florida and receipt of his wings were followed by assignments in Germany, where he piloted F-86 Sabre and F-100 Super Sabre fighters and completed the Air Force Survival School in Bad Tolz. His aviation career took a new path in 1957, when he read about plans to hire astronauts and “something told me: this is it – this is the type of thing you’re cut out for. From then on, everything I did seemed to be preparing me for spaceflight’’. By now married and the father of two children, White returned to the United States and enrolled in a master’s programme at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, specialising in aeronautical engineering. He was convinced that such a qualification would give him the academic edge over other astronaut candidates. It was whilst in Michigan that he met an undergraduate named Jim McDivitt.

White completed his degree in 1959, the same year that the Mercury Seven were introduced to the world. His next step on the road towards the hallowed membership of NASA’s corps was to achieve test-piloting credentials, after which he was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, evaluating research and weapons systems and making recommendations for improvements to aircraft design and construction. Whilst in Ohio, he also flew cargo aircraft on parabolic flights to prepare the Mercury astronauts for their weightless missions. “Two of my passengers were John Glenn and Deke Slayton,’’ he said later. “Two other passengers of mine were Ham and Enos, the chimpanzees.” In flying such missions, White would estimate that he “went weightless” at least 1,200 times before his selection to join NASA’s astronaut corps.

When the call went out in April 1962 for volunteers for the second astronaut team, then-Captain White’s was one of the first applications and five months later his perseverence proved successful. However, neither he, nor McDivitt, could have anticipated the sheer outpouring of adoration they received when they moved into the El Lago neighbourhood in Harris County, Texas: groups of children asking for their autographs and screaming “Astronauts in the house!’’ before either man had even begun training! Despite his credentials and drive, White did not see himself as a hero, but he certainly stood out for the old heads of Project Mercury. They regarded him as “a man who, when asked an intelligent question, will answer thoughtfully and to the point. . . but will rarely volunteer information’’.

Basic training included helicopter airdrops in pairs into the Panama rainforest, where they spent days with iguana, boa constrictor and palm hearts as their foodstuffs. White had always pursued physical exercise with a passion akin to religious faith: volleyball, handball, squash and golf were the staples of his sporting diet, together with daily long-distance jogs, bicycle rides to work and even squeezing a rubber ball whilst running to build strength in his hands and arms. He set up a climbing rope in the backyard of his El Lago home and was said to perform 50 sit – ups and 50 press-ups, back-to-back, without so much as a sharp intake of breath. Without doubt, he was the most physically fit of all of the astronauts – the Mercury

Seven included – and this conditioning would prove essential in undertaking America’s first spacewalk.

Physicians, in fact, remarked that they could not find the slightest hint of fat on White’s 77 kg frame. His appetite, though, was voracious, and it was said that he “could put away two full-course dinners at one sitting and then ask for dessert with a straight face!’’ His almost superhuman agility was remembered clearly by fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong’s wife Janet; their backyards were separated by a tall fence. One night in early 1964, a fire broke out in the Armstrongs’ home and White, heroically, was first on the scene with a water hose. “Still to this day,’’ James Hansen wrote in his biography of Armstrong, “Janet vividly recalls the image of Ed White clearing her six-foot fence. ‘He took one leap and he was over.’’’

After basic astronaut training, White was assigned to monitor the design and development of the Gemini flight controls, a task he appreciated ‘‘because it involves the pilot’s own touch – the human connection with the spacecraft and the way he manoeuvres it’’. As part of his work, White campaigned and succeeded in securing a standard hand controller to be used in all of NASA’s manned spacecraft. ‘‘It seemed inconceivable to me,’’ he said, ‘‘that… an astronaut would fly toward the Moon in an Apollo using one kind of stick, them climb into the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module, later renamed the Lunar Module] and use a different kind of controller to land him on the Moon.’’ Landing on the Moon and becoming the first to set foot on its surface was immensely important to White and, sadly, his death in January 1967 means that no one will ever know if he could have achieved his most exalted goal.

‘‘His goal,’’ said his father, ‘‘is to make that first flight’’. He would have a lot of competition.

From the East

CONTRASTS

The Sixties were a decade of contrasts. Their three thousand, six hundred and fifty – three days were marked by some of the most tumultuous, violent and devastating, yet far-reaching, inspiring and influential events in human history. They saw enormous political, social and cultural change and have been seen as a nostalgic era of peace and liberalism, overshadowed by a dark cloud of hatred, oppression and wanton excess. They began, ominously, under the longest shadow of the Cold War. Only days after the first man rocketed into space, a newly-elected United States president and a feisty Soviet premier locked horns over the fortunes of a young Cuban revolutionary, bringing the possibility of nuclear war onto an international stage.

As the decade wore on, that very same president was publicly cut down by an assassin’s bullet – as, indeed, was his younger brother a few years later – and the Soviet leader was toppled from office in 1964, hours after bragging to the world of his nation’s latest space triumph. Elsewhere, decades of servile colonialism drew to an end as a handful of African countries finally achieved independence from European mastery; some evolving into stable democracies fit for the modern world, others degenerating into corrupt and despotic dictatorships. Younger generations, inspired by the unequal conservative norms of the time, as well as an increasingly unpopular war brewing in Vietnam, cultivated a social revolution which swept across much of the western world.

Simmering discontent in America’s black community boiled over with the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis and, a year later, with the point-blank assassination of Black Panther Party co-founder Fred Hampton in Chicago. Meanwhile, Vietnam consumed ever-increasing numbers of lives on both sides – including, at My Lai, the infamous massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians – and enforced conscription led to massive opposition, culminating in the 500,000-strong Moratorium protests in late 1969. Voting rights were questioned: why, asked American youth, should they die for their country if they were barred from casting at

the ballot box? Remarkably, amid all this chaos and carnage, men visited the Moon and, as one observer told Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman, saved what was otherwise the darkest point of the decade.

On the fringes of Europe, equally divisive measures were being undertaken to forcibly separate eastern communists from the democratic west. Beginning in August 1961, less than a week after the Soviets launched their second cosmonaut, East German troops sealed borders and set about building a physical barrier between the eastern and western halves of Berlin. An initial barbed-wire fence was, by 1965, replaced by one of the most hated icons of the communist regime: the 157 km Berlin Wall. In spite of its clear violation of the Potsdam Agreement (which granted Britain, France and the United States a say over Berlin’s post-war future) little effort was made to challenge the wall by force. Even President John Kennedy’s administration acquiesced that its existence was “a fact of international life’’. Closed by chain fences, walls, minefields and manned by sharpshooters, the despised barrier would divide families, friends and communities for almost three decades.

As Soviets and Americans spacewalked outside their Earth-circling ships and raced to put a man on the Moon, efforts to promote democracy in eastern communist states, including Poland and Yugoslavia, but notably Czechoslovakia, came to nothing. The optimistic Prague reforms of Alexander Dubcek in the spring of 1968 raised such alarm that 250,000 Warsaw Pact troops and thousands of Soviet tanks rumbled into the country to stifle any attempt to create a new nation of pluralism, tolerance and improved human rights. The invasion provoked widespread opposition both within Czechoslovakia – visibly expressed through the self­immolation of student Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 – and from beyond, even from within the Soviet Union itself. Three hundred thousand emigrations from Czechoslovakia to the west represented an exodus so high in number that it has not been seen since. Dubcek himself was forced from office to ensure that, in future, his country would subordinate its interests to those of the Eastern Bloc.

Similar opposition and destruction, not merely of people and places, but of an entire way of life, commenced in 1966, as the abject failure of Chairman Mao’s Five – Year Plan to bring lasting economic prosperity to China culminated in the rampages of the Red Guards and the abolition of the so-called ‘Four Olds’, believed to stand in the way of socialist progress. Over the next few years, old customs, old cultures, old habits and old ideas were systematically eradicated, as the old world was smashed in favour of the new. It should have granted the Chinese people their most extensive period of free speech yet seen; in reality, it was a ‘freedom’ severely impaired by Maoist ideology, military brutality and the biggest single attempt by a nation to eliminate its own identity ever seen in the modern age.

A revolution of a somewhat different kind came one night in February 1964, with the triumphant arrival in New York of four mop-topped Liverpudlians called the ‘Beatles’; their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show transformed them overnight into one of the few British acts at the time to achieve enormous success in the United States. The so-called ‘British Invasion’ was followed by an infusion of new musical talent from across the Atlantic: the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Moody Blues, the

Rolling Stones and the Who. Yet, although the late John Peel once remarked that his distinctive Merseyside accent alone enabled him to break into American radio, the invasion was by no means restricted to music. British movies, characters and television series, from James Bond to Mary Poppins and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ to ‘The Avengers’, were met with great enthusiasm Stateside.

The British Invasion, though, formed only part of a wider ‘counter-culture’, which ran like a broad vein through the mid to late Sixties, encompassing demands for improved rights and freedoms for women, homosexuals and racial minorities. Rampant use of psychedelic drugs seemed to journey hand-in-hand with, and influence, the music, artwork, movies and attitudes of the time. Only months after three American astronauts died in a launch pad fire and a Soviet cosmonaut plunged to his death when his parachute failed, one of the defining moments of this counter­culture came with San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love and the associated rise of the hippie movement. Two years later came Woodstock, although the infamous Tate-LaBianca killings of August 1969 provoked growing mistrust of the counter­culture and its lax morals. Indeed, the excesses of the period prompted Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kanter to quip: ‘‘If you can remember anything about the Sixties, you weren’t really there!’’

It is fortunate, therefore, that another of the decade’s most persistent themes will remain forever entrenched in human memory. After countless millennia spent staring up at the heavens and wondering what lay beyond the thin veil of our atmosphere, men – and, in 1963, a woman – finally broke free of their home planet. Some would spend many days circling Earth, others would open hatches and venture outside in pressurised space suits to work, still more would dock their spacecraft together and a few hardy souls would visit the Moon. By the end of the first decade of humanity’s adventure in space, men would have left their footprints in lunar dust.

We would be naive and foolish to suppose that Russia and America – communist and capitalist rivals – undertook these escapades for purely scientific and peaceful purposes, although undoubtedly both of these reasons played a part. The development of rockets capable of hurling humans into space emerged from a long-nurtured desire on both sides to send weapons across thousands of kilometres and drop them onto each other’s cities. In fact, at an August 1961 press conference in Moscow to announce the flight of the second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, a New York Tribune journalist was not interested in the scientific accomplishments of the mission, but rather in its military implications. Was Titov’s Vostok 2 spacecraft, the journalist asked, capable of delivering bombs to pre-selected spots on Earth? The cosmonaut, with a hint of embarrassment, replied that it was not, but the question certainly demonstrated the reality that space was the new ‘high ground’ and would be exploited by both superpowers for their own ends.

THE PERFECT CANDIDATE?

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova’s parents provided the almost-perfect socialist background that Khrushchev wanted to present to the outside world. Her father, a

tractor driver, had fought in the Russian Army as a sergeant and tank commander, dying in the Finnish Winter War when Tereshkova was two years old. Following her historic mission, incidentally, she was asked about possible ways in which the Soviet Union could demonstrate its gratitude to her: she requested a search to be conducted for the exact location of her father’s death. This was duly done and a monument stands today in Lemetti, on the Russian side of the border with Finland, to commemorate Vladimir Tereshkov.

After her father’s death, her mother single-handedly raised three children whilst working at the Krasny Perekop cotton mill. The young Tereshkova, who had been born on 6 March 1937 in the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo, on the Volga River in the Yaroslavl Oblast of the western Soviet Union, did not commence her formal schooling until she was ten years old. She worked variously making coats, serving as an apprentice in a tyre factory and finally joined her mother and sister in 1955 as a loom operator at the cotton mill. She continued her academic studies in tandem, taking correspondence courses and eventually graduating from the Light Industry Technical School.

Her interest in aviation crystallised with membership of the Yaroslavl Air Sports Club, in which she quickly proved herself to be a skilful amateur parachutist, completing her first jump aged just 22. By the time she was picked as a cosmonaut candidate in March 1962, she had no fewer than 126 jumps under her belt and it was this achievement, coupled with the need for Vostok fliers to parachute out of their capsules during descent, which aided her selection. Her family and friends knew nothing of her plans: even her mother was under the impression that Tereshkova would be undertaking ‘special studies’ for a women’s precision skydiving team. In fact, the first that Yelena Tereshkova knew about her daughter’s achievement was on the day of her launch, via Radio Moscow.

Tereshkova’s technical qualifications, admittedly, were lower than those of her male counterparts in the cosmonaut team, but her role as an active Party member – she had been the secretary of her local Young Communist League in 1961 – together with a war-hero father certainly brought her to the attention of the selection board and, finally, Khrushchev.

She was also well-liked by Kamanin as being ‘‘suitably feminine’’ and modest and, indeed, would demonstrate such attributes in an article entitled ‘Women in Space’, published by an American journal some years later. ‘‘I believe a woman should always remain a woman,’’ she wrote, ‘‘and nothing feminine should be alien to her. At the same time, I strongly feel that no work done by a woman in the field of science or culture. . . however vigorous or demanding, can enter into conflict with her ancient ‘wonderful mission’ to love and be loved and with her craving for the bliss of motherhood.’’ She was also doggedly determined in her efforts. Although she did not score the highest of the five candidates in her exams, her consistent effort prompted Yuri Gagarin to once comment that ‘‘she tackled the job stubbornly and devoted much of her own time to study, poring over books and notes in the evening’’. That was Tereshkova. Modest. Determined. Hard working. A good communist. To Khrushchev, she was ideal; the perfect candidate.

THE BEST… AT LAST

John Glenn’s flight – dubbed Mercury-Atlas 6 or, in keeping with Shepard and Grissom’s spacecraft-naming tradition, ‘Friendship 7’ – was eagerly awaited by the United States, although it proved a long time coming. The choice of name, Glenn recalled in his memoir, had been made by his children, Dave and Lyn. ‘‘They pored over a thesaurus and wrote dozens of names in a notebook,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Then they worked them down to several possibilities, names and words, including Columbia, Endeavour, America, Magellan, We, Hope, Harmony and Kindness. At the top of their list was their first choice: Friendship.’’ Although the name would be kept quiet until the morning of launch, Glenn had privately asked Cecelia Bibby, the artist at Hangar S, to inscribe the name on his capsule in script-like characters, adding more individuality than the block lettering employed to stencil Freedom and Liberty Bell onto Shepard and Grissom’s spacecraft.

‘‘From what John Glenn told me later, [he] had decided that he wanted the name of his spacecraft applied in script and applied by hand,’’ Bibby said, ‘‘because Al Shepard’s and Gus Grissom’s names had been applied by some mechanic who went into town, got a can of spray paint, a stencil-cut of the names and then spray-painted them onto the capsule.’’ Apparently, added Bibby, Glenn felt that men had such poor handwriting that a female artist would be preferable. When she painted the name on the capsule, Bibby, clad in white clean-room garb, became the only woman to ascend the gantry to Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral and was even told by a disgruntled Guenter Wendt that she did not belong there. So pleased was Glenn with the design that Gus Grissom dared Bibby to secretly paint naked women on the spacecraft as well.

She rose to the challenge, not by painting on the exterior of Friendship 7, but by drawing a naked woman on the inside of a cap used to cover the periscope. Although the cap would be jettisoned before launch, it would be seen by Glenn as he boarded the capsule and hopefully might give him a laugh. Reading ‘It’s just you and me against the world, John Baby’, the drawing was placed there by Bibby’s friend, launch pad engineer Sam Beddingfield. The launch itself was scrubbed, but Bibby got into work the following morning to find a note from Glenn, ‘‘telling me he had

THE BEST... AT LAST

With artist Cece Bibby proudly looking on, John Glenn displays the Friendship 7 logo on the side of his spacecraft.

gotten a big kick out of the drawing”. Bibby was almost fired for her practical joke, although fortunately both Grissom and Glenn intervened on her behalf and saved her. Later in the launch preparations, she sent Glenn another gift: this time a drawing of a frumpy old woman in a house dress, bearing mop and bucket and the legend ‘You were expecting maybe someone else, John Baby?’ Not long afterwards, Glenn’s backup, Scott Carpenter, requested a naked woman for his own capsule, Aurora 7, which would fly the second American orbital mission in May 1962 …

Sadly, the news at the beginning of the year was nowhere near as light-hearted: a launch attempt on 16 January was postponed by at least a week, due to technical problems with the Atlas rocket’s fuel tanks. With each successive delay, more criticism was voiced from journalists and congressmen, who questioned whether Project Mercury – already a year behind the Soviets – would ever succeed in placing a man into orbit. Even President Kennedy, at a news conference on 14 February, expressed disappointment, although he felt that the final decision on when to launch should be left to the Mercury team. Others, however, commended NASA’s frankness in conveying the reasons for each delay. It was stressed that the orbital mission had been planned for over three years and a few more weeks’ delay was of little consequence, a sentiment shared by Glenn himself, who described being not “particularly shook-up” by the postponements.

Indeed, according to planning charts issued by NASA in April I960, the orbital mission was originally scheduled for May 1961, then July, October and ultimately December. A variety of manufacturing changes to Glenn’s capsule – Spacecraft No. 13 off the McDonnell production line – had contributed to delays in its progress: a shortage of environmental control components had virtually stalled work in October 1960 and then extensive re-planning ordered after the MA-3 failure in April 1961 prompted NASA to assign No. 13 to the first manned orbital mission. By the end of August, the capsule had been delivered to Cape Canaveral and early in January 1962 was mated to its Atlas launch vehicle on Pad 14.

Following the 23 January postponement, caused by poor weather, another attempt was scheduled for the cloudy morning of the 27th. Glenn rose early for his low-residue breakfast of filet mignon, scrambled eggs, orange juice and toast with jelly, before undergoing the laborious process of having biosensors glued onto his body and his pressure suit fitted. That day, he lay inside Friendship 7 for more than five hours, hoping for a break in the overcast skies. It never came and, at T-20 minutes, Walt Williams scrubbed the launch. “It was one of those days,’’ Williams remembered later, “when nothing was wrong, but nothing was just right either.’’ Another event, back in Arlington, Virginia, which did not go right, at least for Vice­President Lyndon Johnson, was his plan to visit Glenn’s home… complete with a television crew and a horde of the media.

Johnson also asked for Life journalist Loudon Wainwright, who was in attendance at Glenn’s house as part of the Mercury Seven magazine deal, to leave. Annie Glenn, who wanted nothing less than to have television lights in her home and wanted Wainwright to stay, flatly rejected Johnson’s request. “I understand the vice­president was pretty pissed off,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, “and that he wasn’t too happy with Jim Webb or Webb’s astronauts at that point.’’ In the weeks that followed, there were theories, Slayton added, “that Webb had gotten ticked-off at John Glenn’’ as a result of the episode and had begun searching for a way in which to better ‘control’ his astronauts. Some observers would speculate that Slayton, assigned to fly the next Mercury-Atlas orbital mission, would be an unfortunate victim of Webb’s politicking. Although it was not a theory that Slayton himself supported, he remained convinced, years later, that the decision made about his career just weeks after Glenn’s flight ‘‘was political’’.

After the 27 January postponement, Glenn’s launch was initially targeted for 1 February, necessitating the emptying, purging and refilling of the Atlas’ propellant tanks. Then, two days before launch, on the 30th, as the ground support team began refuelling, a mechanic discovered, by routinely opening a drain plug, that there was fuel in the cavity between the structural bulkhead and an insulation bulkhead which separated the propellant tanks. Initial estimates suggested at least a ten-day delay to correct the problem and recheck the rocket’s systems. The 600 accredited members of the media at the Cape could do little but groan as John Glenn’s launch was postponed yet again, this time until no earlier than 13 February.

Most of the journalists quickly dispersed, together with Glenn himself, who spent a few days with his family at home in Arlington, before travelling to the White House for a brief visit with President Kennedy. For the astronaut, it was time of peaks and troughs. “I think people normally build up to a peak when they are getting ready for an event as complicated as this,” he said later, “and here we had a situation where we kept building up psychologically and nothing happened. It was like crying ‘wolf5 over and over again. But I needn’t have worried at all. These people kept working and preparing and lost none of their sharpness.’’ Some psychologists were concerned that he would suffer emotionally under the strain. In Glenn’s mind, the delays simply gave him extra time to run each day, to study, to read and respond to mail (one of which told him that it was God’s way of letting him know that he shouldn’t tamper with the heavens) and to work in the simulators.

‘‘If I was suffering,’’ he said, ‘‘I wasn’t aware of it and neither were the psychiatrists whose job it was to keep track of my emotions. The nearest I came to getting upset was after I visited a friend’s house for a home-cooked meal and a quiet evening with his family. A couple of days later, it turned out that the friend’s children had the mumps. As far as I could remember, I’d never had them. Delays for weather and for technical difficulties were facts I could accept, but a postponement or a possible replacement while the astronaut recovered from a childhood disease seemed a bit silly. It would make quite a headline!’’

On 13 February, although weather conditions remained foul, NASA personnel began to move back into position to attempt a launch. The media’s pessimism was reflected in their turnout: by that evening, only 200 had checked in at the nearby Cocoa Beach motels. Their doubt was well-placed and the launch gradually slipped towards the end of the month. By the 19th, with liftoff rescheduled for the following morning, the Weather Bureau predicted only a 50 per cent chance of a launch: conditions in the recovery zones were fine, but the Cape was poor. A frontal system had been observed moving across central Florida, which, it was surmised, could cause broken cloud over the Cape in the early hours of the next day.

Glenn rose early on the morning of 20 February, to be greeted by physician Bill Douglas at 2:00 am, who told him that the weather still offered little more than a 50­50 chance of a successful launch. After breakfast, he underwent the now-customary pre-flight examination and was outfitted with biosensors and helped into his silver pressure suit. Technician Joe Schmitt tested the suit and Bill Douglas ran a hose into a fish tank to check the purity of the air supply – dead fish meaning bad air – which offered Glenn the chance for some humour. ‘‘Bill, did you know a couple of those fish are floating belly-up?’’ Douglas’ shocked reaction as he rushed over to the tank was soon arrested by a broad grin on Glenn’s face.

Out at Pad 14, clouds rolled overhead by the time the astronaut arrived outside the capsule at 6:00 am. However, forecasters were predicting possible breaks by mid-morning, producing a different atmosphere on the gantry, with less casual chatter, as if everyone sensed, said Glenn, ‘‘that we were going for real this time’’. Weather caused the original launch time to be missed and a broken microphone bracket inside Glenn’s helmet required repair before Friendship 7’s hatch could be finally closed and bolted at 7:10 am. One of the bolts sheared, necessitating the removal of the hatch while it was replaced. (Several months earlier, Gus Grissom

THE BEST... AT LAST

Godspeed, John Glenn!” The Atlas takes flight with a man aboard.

 

flew with a defective hatch bolt, but this time Walt Williams was taking no chances.)

Forty minutes later, the countdown resumed. By the time the pad crew moved clear of the Atlas, Glenn – whose pulse varied from 60-80 beats per minute – was granted his first view of blue skies as the realisation took hold that 20 February might be ‘The Day’. He was also assailed by the peculiar, eerie sense of being atop the silvery rocket. ‘‘I could hear the sound of pipes whining below me as the liquid oxygen flowed into the tanks and heard a vibrant hissing noise,’’ he said later. ‘‘The Atlas is so tall that it sways slightly in heavy gusts of wind and, in fact, I could set the whole structure to rocking a bit by moving back and forth in the couch!’’ Thirty-five minutes before launch, the rocket’s liquid oxygen supply was topped off and, despite another brief hold caused by a stuck fuel pump outlet valve and a last-minute electrical power failure at the Bermuda tracking station, the clock resumed ticking.

With 18 seconds to go, the countdown switched to automatic control and, at four seconds, Glenn ‘‘felt, rather than heard’’ the engines roaring to life far below. At 9:47:39 am, with a thunder that overwhelmed Scott Carpenter’s ‘‘Godspeed, John Glenn’’ send-off, the Atlas’ hold-down posts separated and the enormous rocket began to climb. The ‘gas bag’ was on its way.

“THE WORLD’S FIRST PASSENGER SPACESHIP”

As the crew debate continued, the spacecraft itself was put rigorously through its paces in the summer of 1964. Air-drop tests to verify its new soft-landing system were conducted close to the Black Sea resort of Feodosia. These proved initially successful, but on 29 August problems materialised when jettisoning the parachute hatch: an error in the circuit design caused it to fail and the test capsule – which some sources suggest was Gherman Titov’s old Vostok 2 – was destroyed. In retrospect, Korolev claimed the test capsule’s electrical system was not representative of a ‘production’ Voskhod and, at a State Commission on 18 September he declared that he was ready to certify the new spacecraft as ready to fly. The final air-drop on 3 October, with Korolev present, was successful. However, other glitches remained.

Firstly, the launch of a Vostok-based Zenit 4 reconnaissance satellite, employing a rocket identical to that planned for Voskhod 1, was aborted on the pad when one of its first-stage strap-on boosters failed to ignite. It was the first such failure in more than a hundred launches of Korolev’s Little Seven. Rescheduled for mid-September, the Zenit liftoff was normal, quantifying the rocket’s capabilities and clearing it for use with Voskhod 1. Then, as the launch neared, the spacecraft’s Tral telemetry system exhibited discrepancies, requiring a week to fix. Finally, on 6 October, a full – duration, day-long unmanned dress rehearsal of the Voskhod 1 mission was flown under the cover name of ‘Cosmos 47’.

Early plans called for dogs to be flown, although this was eventually set aside in favour of full-sized mannequins. The Cosmos 47 spacecraft duly entered a 177-413 km orbit, inclined 64.8 degrees to the equator, and flew for 24 hours before landing in Kustanai. It was returned to Tyuratam on the 8th for examination, which

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confirmed that both its interior, exterior and – perhaps most importantly – its soft – landing parachute were in good shape. Indeed, Cosmos 47 was described as having “zero velocity” on impact with the ground, penetrating merely 90 mm into the soil, and, although strong winds dragged the parachute and capsule some 160 m after touchdown, it was decided that a cosmonaut crew could jettison the canopy and endure this. The Little Seven, too, performed well, despite a slight depletion in thrust which was supplemented by the engine controller.

By 11 October, the Moscow rumour mill was billing Voskhod 1 as the ‘Soviet Apollo’; a false illusion that would endure for many years. Wire services relayed news of a forthcoming flight with a cosmonaut known only as ‘K’, who was described as a violin player, a full Communist Party member and the bearer of a Ukrainian accent! Some observers already suspected Vladimir Komarov’s involve­ment, particularly in light of an earlier rumour, in mid-August, when the Vostok 3 and 4 cosmonauts revealed that their backups were ready to fly. Those backups happened to be Komarov and Boris Volynov, which made some sense.

More problems with the Tral system on the evening before launch, which necessitated its last-minute replacement and, according to Nikolai Kamanin in his diary, caused Korolev to fly into a rage, did not conspire to delay the flight. The morning of 12 October dawned frosty, wrote Kamanin, although he considered it ideal: wind speeds were gentle and visibility extended to more than 20 km. The State Commission approved the launch at 3:00 am Moscow Time and, shortly thereafter, the Voskhod 1 crew – Komarov, Yegorov and Feoktistov – were awakened. The men washed, ate breakfast and were fitted with biosensors and dressed in blue flight garments. Since no pressurised suits would be worn, all three were fully outfitted by 7:00 am and ready to ride to the pad. During this quiet time, Kamanin advised them of secret code words to be used during the mission: ‘‘Outstanding’’ would mean just that, ‘‘Good’’ would denote the appearance of problems and ‘‘Satisfactory’’ would request an immediate emergency landing.

By 8:15 am, the cosmonauts had arrived at Gagarin’s Start and Komarov rendered a smart salute and a declaration to the State Commission’s chairman that he and his crew were ready to perform their mission. The two fliers whom Kamanin had labelled ‘invalids’ were first to enter the capsule; donning suede slippers, Yegorov boarded first, then Feoktistov moved to his middle seat and Komarov brought up the rear in his couch, closest to the hatch.

Launch itself came at 10:30 am Moscow Time – or 12:30 pm local time in Tyuratam – and the ride to orbit, thankfully, was uneventful. Indeed, Kamanin and Korolev had already discussed the crew’s dire predicament in the event of a booster failure: a safe recovery was simply impossible for at least the first half-minute of the ascent and even an abort during the remainder of the climb to orbit only ‘‘should’’ have been achievable and survivable. (Korolev, apparently, was so nervous that he was visibly shaking during Voskhod 1’s ascent.) With the benefit of hindsight, it is perhaps fortuitous that only two of these exceptionally high-risk ventures were ever attempted with men aboard.

Five hundred and twenty-three seconds later, Voskhod 1 entered orbit. Communications between Komarov and fellow cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at

“THE WORLD’S FIRST PASSENGER SPACESHIP”

The crew of sardines: Feoktistov, Komarov and Yegorov.

Tyuratam had been clear and consistent throughout the ascent phase and the first few hours of the mission were characterised by only minor problems. A false reading was registered by Yegorov’s biosensors, then there was a two-hour delay in confirming the correct operation of Voskhod 1’s orientation system and the cabin temperature rose unexpectedly from 15°C to 21°C. However, by the seventh orbit, all cabin readings – pressure, humidity, gas composition and temperature – were normal and voice contact and televised images from the cabin proved crisp and clear.

At 11:46 am, a UPI wire revealed that “… the Soviet Union today launched the world’s first passenger spaceship with three men aboard…’’ and Radio Moscow’s famous wartime announcer Yuri Levitan boomed out the news to an astonished world. Orbital parameters were given as 178-408 km, inclined 64.9 degrees to the equator, and radio hams in western Europe and North America picked up Morse transmissions from the spacecraft, identifying Komarov’s callsign of ‘Ruby’. The three cosmonauts extended greetings to the athletes of the 1964 Olympic Games, which had begun two days earlier in Tokyo, and spoke to both Nikita Khrushchev and his deputy, Anastas Mikoyan. At one stage, Khrushchev declared that Mikoyan ‘‘is standing next to me and is keen to take the telephone receiver from me’’. Within hours, not only the telephone receiver, but also the mantle of power as head of the Soviet Union, would have been taken from him. By the time Voskhod 1 parachuted to terra firma on the afternoon of 13 October 1964, Russia would be under new management.

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