Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Rollout of Voskhod 2, atop its R-7 booster, to Gagarin’s Start occurred on 17 March, with an anticipated launch the following morning. That same day, data from the just-landed Cosmos 59 proved encouraging: during re-entry, despite the presence of the airlock attachment ring, the rate of rotation of the capsule never exceeded 40­100 degrees per second, well within design tolerances for both the crew and the parachute deployment mechanism. By the evening, intense rumours were circulating in Moscow of the impending flight of what was dubbed a ‘space bus’, but about which very little else was known.

Three cosmonauts suited up in the small hours of 18 March, one of them – Yevgeni Khrunov, who had trained for both Belyayev’s and Leonov’s positions – ready to take over from either prime crew member if needed. He was not needed on this occasion, but his spacewalking skills would be put to the test four years hence, when he embarked on a far riskier endeavour: to transfer between two orbiting Soyuz capsules in a pressurised suit. In his autobiography, Leonov recalled the customs he and Belyayev observed before launch: a breakfast of boiled eggs, a small sip of champagne, a brief moment of reflection with Yuri Gagarin and Korolev and, finally, at the pad, the time-honoured tradition of urinating on the wheel of the bus. Belyayev, the commander, was first aboard Voskhod 2, followed by Leonov. Also loaded into the capsule were a few personal items for the cosmonauts. Leonov’s stash included a sketchpad and a set of coloured crayons. His childhood dream to become an artist would figuratively and literally reach new heights on this flight. He had already decided not to tell his wife of the spacewalk, instead informing her vaguely that he and Belyayev would be embarking on ‘‘a particularly complex and challenging mission’’. Indeed they would be.

Launch occurred at 10:00 am Moscow Time and the spacecraft entered orbit shortly afterwards. The entire ascent was flawless, although the first minute in particular proved stressful, with both men fully aware that they had no means of emergency escape. ‘‘As the engine of the rocket beneath us ignited, we felt a light vibration start to build,’’ wrote Leonov. ‘‘Lifting away from the launch pad, we were pushed back into our seats. Now we felt the full force of the rocket propelling us upward through the Earth’s atmosphere. It felt as if we were being lifted vertically by a speeding train. From this moment on we were required to report constantly on how we felt.’’

Leonov’s first glimpse of Earth from the edge of space actually disappointed him, since it did not appear much different to the vistas he had seen from the MiG – 15s he flew at Chuguyev almost a decade earlier. ‘‘I had expected to see the curvature of the horizon against a dark sky, but we were not yet high enough for that,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Ten minutes into the flight, at an altitude of almost 500 km, our capsule separated from the rocket with a loud flap. We were flying far beyond the confines of the Earth’s atmosphere.’’ At this instant came weightlessness, which manifested itself in a flurry of loose objects drifting serenely through the cabin… and by an absolute, ethereal silence. In fact, with the R-7’s roar gone, it was now so quiet inside Voskhod 2 that the two men could even hear the clock on their instrument panel ticking.

‘‘For two or three minutes,’’ continued Leonov, ‘‘it was extremely uncomfortable. I had the feeling that I was suspended upside down, which is a well-documented phenomenon: once the force of gravity ceases, the senses become confused. But we quickly got used to it and started going through a complex series of checks to verify that all systems inside the capsule were operating normally.’’ Shortly afterwards, Belyayev requested permission to extend the Volga airlock and promptly activated switches which pumped air into small rubber tubes running along the length of the chamber, inflating it from a coiled 74 cm to a fully-unfurled 2 m. Leonov, meanwhile, busily strapped bulky breathing apparatus, carrying sufficient oxygen for 90 minutes outside, onto his ‘Berkut’ (‘Golden Eagle’) space suit. When he was ready, Belyayev clapped him on the back and wished him luck.

In a similar manner to the ensemble already in the works for Gemini, the Berkut was of the purest white, ‘‘to reflect all possible sunlight,’’ Time magazine told its readers, ‘‘for maintaining tolerable temperatures is one of the major problems in the design of space suits. Because sunlight in space is twice as strong as at the bottom of the atmosphere and contains ultraviolet rays that quickly weaken many materials, the outer layer of a space suit must not only ward off light and heat, but must be proof against ultraviolet”. Equally hazardous was the intense cold, as Leonov passed from the direct sunlight of orbital daytime to the deepest black of frigid orbital nighttime, requiring the Berkut to perform adequately at both extremes. Not surprisingly, Time added, the Soviets had failed to describe the materials from which their suit had been manufactured, only admitting to its colour and general appearance. ft would be many years before the Berkut was revealed in its entirety.

‘‘Once inside the airlock,’’ Leonov wrote, ‘‘f closed the hatch and waited for the nitrogen to be purged from my blood. To avoid suffering from what divers call ‘the bends’, f had to maintain the same partial pressure of oxygen in my blood once f emerged into space. With the pressure inside the airlock finally equal to zero pressure outside the spacecraft, f reported f was ready to exit.’’ He was ‘lying’ on his back when the outermost airlock hatch opened, revealing the grandeur of Earth in its entirety for the first time. Years later, he would lucidly recall those first few, heart­racing moments as he pushed his upper body out of the airlock and, safely attached to Voskhod 2 by a 15 m tether, into open space. As the capsule neared orbital sunrise, he beheld the vast, deep blue panorama of the Mediterranean, together with the familiar shapes of Greece, ftaly and, as Voskhod headed eastwards, the Crimea, the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains and the mighty Volga, largest river in Europe and national waterway of Russia.

Leonov brought his feet to the rim of the airlock and held tightly to a handrail for an instant, before letting go. The exhilarating feeling of being the first human being ever to do this – to actually leave the confines of a spacecraft – would remain with him with surreal clarity for decades; he felt both insignificant and overwhelmed by the importance of his achievement. His departure from the airlock came at 11:34:51 am Moscow Time, barely 94 minutes after launch, just before Voskhod 2 reached the radio horizon of the Yevpatoriya ground station in the Crimea. ft was here that the ghostly images of humanity’s first spacewalk were received.

‘‘Dim and probably purposely fuzzy shots showed the round white top of a helmet poking slowly out of a hatch,’’ Time magazine reported a week later on 26 March. ‘‘Then came the visored face of a man, followed by his shoulders and arms. He seemed to push something away with his left hand before he moved his left arm back and forth as if to test its freedom. He reached for a handrail and quickly his entire body came clear of the hatch. Now it could be seen that he was dressed in a bulky pressure suit, with cylinders strapped on his back and a thick cable twisting behind him. . . ’’ ft was an image that would trigger dispute from some observers, who

argued that the film had been faked in a terrestrial studio, that Sun-glint angles were not ‘quite right’ for it to be authentic. Rather than expressing disgust, however, Leonov acquiesced that ‘‘the race between our two countries for superiority in space was intense… Personally, I did not believe in all this boasting about who did what first, the Soviet Union or the United States. If you did it, you did it’’.

Leonov may not have cared eitherway, but Leonid Brezhnev certainly did. In spite of the tumult surrounding the overthrow of his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, the new premier continued to support Soviet ambitions in space. . . although his knowledge of its practicalities would later prove the butt of jokes when he suggested beating the Americans to the Moon by landing instead on the Sun. When advised that the cosmonauts would burn up, Brezhnev supposedly told them to land at night! On the morning of 18 March 1965, however, he was full of pride. ‘‘We, all members of the Politburo,’’ the premier, surrounded by his stone-faced aides, began, ‘‘are here sitting and watching what you are doing. We are proud of you. We wish you success. Take care. We await your safe arrival on Earth.’’ Brezhnev’s pride was not, initially, shared by Leonov’s young daughter, Vika, or his elderly father: the former hid her face in her hands and cried, while the latter, not understanding that the point of the mission was to venture outside, demanded that his son be punished for acting “like a juvenile delinquent” by abandoning his spacecraft in orbit.

Years later, Leonov would reveal more detail of the Berkut suit and his own activities outside Voskhod 2. He described the gold-plated filter across his visor, which, although satisfactory in cutting out nearly all ultraviolet sunlight, did not significantly improve his vision in the incessant glare. “It was like being somewhere in the south, Georgia maybe,” he wrote, “without sunglasses on a summer’s day.” Every so often, he would ease open the filter to observe Earth through the clear faceplate of his helmet. The view was akin to a geography class, he said, with thousands of square kilometres laid out, map-like, beneath him. As an automatic television camera on the end of the airlock filmed his every move, the task of capturing the astonishing vista fell to Leonov himself. Mounted in the chest of his suit was a Swiss-built camera, together with a switch sewn into the Berkut’s upper leg, which, unfortunately, turned out to be just beyond his reach!

At the time of writing, around 300 spacewalks and Moonwalks have been conducted since Leonov’s excursion and some astronauts who did both would describe the sensation of floating high above the home planet as far more powerful than ambling across the surface of our closest celestial neighbour. The ‘ethereal’ nature of spacewalking, the almost godlike feeling of looking down from on high, was certainly not lost on its first practitioner. ‘‘I felt the power of the human intellect that had placed me there,’’ Leonov wrote. ‘‘I felt like a representative of the human race… I was overwhelmed by these feelings.’’ He would also describe the profound tranquillity of floating in the void, the only sounds coming from his own breathing, the crackle of the radio and the noise of the life-support apparatus that kept him alive. Getting back inside Voskhod 2, however, would prove far from tranquil.

The men’s physical and psychological wellbeing was of paramount concern. Fear of dehydration led physicians to remind them regularly to drink water – at least 1.2 litres a day – because their space suits’ cooling systems evaporated perspiration as it formed, thus increasing the loss of body fluids. Their food sounded appealing, but in reality its freeze-dried or dehydrated nature and the need to mix it with water and knead it until mushy, lessened its attractiveness. Still, beef pot roast, banana pudding, fruitcake and even a Roman Catholic treat of fish on Friday for McDivitt formed the basis of their four-day diet. They would also recall space sandwiches, “covered with waxy-tasting stuff to keep the crumbs from getting in your eyes, ears and nose’’, undoubtedly less desirable than Gus Grissom’s corned beef option. Spaghetti dishes, too, required rehydration by water pistol. “You cut the other end with a pair of scissors,’’ McDivitt recalled later, “put the tube in your mouth and squeezed the stuff.’’ Indeed, it provided much-needed sustenance, rather than desirable food.

Sanitation on such a long mission presented its own obstacles. Both men would return to Earth with four-day beards, neither having been able to shave, and ‘washing’ was effected with little more than small, damp cloths to mop their faces. Urine was dumped overboard, while faeces were stored in self-sealing bags with disinfectant pills. Living amidst all of this, they had 11 experiments to perform. Photography of selected land and near-shore regions for geological, geographical and oceanographical studies undoubtedly proved the most enjoyable and 207 images were acquired with a hand-held 70 mm Hasselblad 500-C camera. Among the most

visually stunning were terrain images of north-western Mexico, the south-western United States, North Africa, the Bahamas and the Arabian peninsula, although weather photographs captured a broad range of meteorological phenomena, including cellular cloud patterns, layers of clouds in tropical disturbances, lines of cumulus covering the oceans and vast thunderheads. The Hasselblad also proved essential for a series of two-colour images of Earth’s limb, part of efforts to better define the daylit horizon with red and blue filters.

Elsewhere, a proton-electron spectrometer monitored the radiation environment encountered through the South Atlantic Anomaly region (an intense ‘pocket’ of Earth’s ionosphere) and a tri-axis magnetometer measured the magnitude and direction of the local geomagnetic field with respect to the spacecraft. Five dosimeters, scattered throughout Gemini IV, kept watch on radiation levels, particularly as McDivitt and White passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly. In other areas, a bone demineralisation experiment revealed the first signs of mass loss in astronauts exposed to long periods of weightlessness and both men agreed that systematic exercise programmes were a necessity on future flights. A bungee cord was provided, but even the super-fit White found that his desire to do strenuous work dwindled as the mission dragged on, perhaps due to lack of sleep.

Rest, it seemed, was a precious commodity and one which both McDivitt and White found hard to capture. During their 33rd orbit, two days into the mission, Gus Grissom told them that they had a relatively free 18 hours and advised them to get as much sleep as they could. He recommended that one of them unplug their headset entirely to ensure uninterrupted rest. At other times, the chatter was incessant. Grissom radioed to McDivitt on one occasion that his son’s Pee Wee League team, the Hawks, had defeated the Pelicans 3-2, and to White that his son had scored a hit in a Little League game. The astronauts talked to their wives, with McDivitt asking Pat if she was behaving herself and assuring her that “about all I can do is look out the window’’. White’s wife, the second Pat, commented that her husband seemed to be “having a wonderful time’’ on his EVA and advised him to drink plenty.

On their third day in orbit, the spacecraft’s IBM computer failed. It was supposed to have been updated during a pass over the United States and McDivitt was asked to switch it off and then back on again. However, he quickly discovered that he could not bring it back to life. Attempts to try different switch positions came to nothing. Ironically, only days earlier, IBM had published an advert in the Wall Street Journal, praising its computers as being so reliable that even NASA used them. The failure caused no great alarm, but it did mean that a computer-controlled re-entry would now be impossible and, in Gemini IV’s final orbits, Chris Kraft advised McDivitt that ground computers would help steer the spacecraft for him. As the 7 June return to Earth neared, the astronauts were told to brace themselves for an 8 G re-entry, which McDivitt, only days short of his 36th birthday, joked was “too much for an old man like me!’’

Although in good spirits, neither astronaut felt particularly comfortable. McDivitt told Chuck Berry that he felt “pretty darn woolly’’, needed a bath, and, when asked if there was anything else he needed, replied “Yeah, my computer!’’ After the pre-retrofire checklist, the Hawaii capcom counted them down to the OAMS ‘fail-safe’ burn at 11:56 am, which reduced Gemini IV’s perigee to just 80 km. The burn lasted two minutes and 41 seconds and used most of the remaining propellant. They jettisoned the equipment section shortly before making contact with the station in Mexico. McDivitt initiated the retrofire one second late. The capsule hit the ocean at 12:12:11 pm, some four days and two hours since liftoff. Their splashdown point was about 725 km east of Cape Kennedy and, despite being slightly long of its target, McDivitt and White were soon joined by frogmen and landed by helicopter on the deck of the aircraft carrier Wasp at 1:09 pm. Their sturdy spacecraft was also safely aboard the carrier by 2:28 pm.

Re-entry, McDivitt recounted later, was the prettiest part of the flight. ‘‘We saw pink light coming up around our spacecraft,’’ he said. ‘‘It got oranger, then redder, then green. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.’’ The two men were described by Time as being heavily bearded and sweaty, their faces lined with fatigue, although that did not prevent McDivitt from letting out a whoop of joy. Medical examinations revealed that White, whose normal heart rate was 50 beats per minute, registered 96 whilst lying supine aboard the Wasp; this climbed to 150 when the table was tilted slightly. McDivitt, on the other hand, was found to have flecks of caked blood in his nostrils, probably attributable to the dryness of his mucous membranes after inhaling pure oxygen for so long.

Both men had lost weight – McDivitt shed 1.8 kg, White some 3.6 kg – although, summing up, Chuck Berry was more than satisfied that they were in good physical shape. Gemini IV and the condition of its astronauts promised, he said, “to knock down an awful lot of straw men. We had been told that we would have an unconscious astronaut after four days of weightlessness”. Clearly, that was not the case. As if further demonstration were needed, a day after splashdown, still aboard the Wasp, White noticed a group of marines and midshipmen having a tug-of-war and joined them for 15 minutes. Although ‘his’ team lost, the astronaut certainly appeared to be the epitome of health and fitness.

On the day of Gemini IV’s splashdown, the two men received congratulations from President Johnson, together with joint promotions from majors to lieutenant-colonels and NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Elsewhere, the University of Michigan awarded them both with newly-created honorary doctorates in astronautical science. Also promoted to the same rank, Johnson announced, were Gordo Cooper and Gus Grissom. ‘‘I can hardly get used to people calling me ‘Colonel’,’’ wryly observed Ed White. ‘‘I know in a million years, I’ll never get used to people calling me ‘Doctor’!’’ (The spot promotions may have been at least partly inspired by a remark made by Grissom. When asked if there were any differences between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, Gruff Gus had replied: ‘‘Yeah. They get promoted and we don’t!’’)

Before McDivitt and White could take their new titles, however, they both needed to take a shower. After four days without washing, White wondered what all the fuss was about. ‘‘I thought we smelled fine,’’ he said of his and McDivitt’s ‘distinct aroma’. ‘‘It was all those people on the carrier that smelled strange!’’

Twenty minutes after the R-7 blasted off, Nikolai Kamanin boarded an An-12 aircraft, bound for the industrial city of Kuibishev, today’s Samara. With him were Gherman Titov, Mark Gallai and a substantial delegation from Tyuratam. Whilst airborne, they learned of Gagarin’s landing in Saratov and toasted his success with cognac. The cosmonaut, meanwhile, had already spoken with Nikita Khrushchev by telephone from Engels, before heading on to Kuibishev. On the outskirts of the city, in a special dacha on the banks of the Volga, Gagarin was given a medical examination and a day’s rest before his journey to Moscow. The mission was over. Shortly, his new life as an international celebrity would begin.

But not yet. On 13 April, whilst still secluded in the Kuibishev dacha, he underwent his official, two-and-a-half-hour interview by the Vostok State Commission; the only opportunity for ‘the truth’ about the mission to be revealed, behind closed doors, to Korolev, Kamanin and other high-ranking officials. Although he undoubtedly described the problem with the instrument section, it remains unclear as to why this was not properly resolved in time for the next flight, Vostok 2, other than the possibility that changes were implemented, but failed to work. Meanwhile, efforts to secure the World Aviation Altitude Record had already led sports official Ivan Borisenko to hurriedly get the First Cosmonaut’s signature on FAI documents within hours of landing. In his fictitious account of the proceedings, published in 1978, Borisenko would recall “dashing up to the descent module, next to which stood a smiling Gagarin”. The reality that capsule and cosmonaut landed a couple of kilometres apart was kept closely guarded.

After his day on the Volga, during which time he also played billiards with Titov and described his experiences, Gagarin flew to Moscow on the morning of 14 April aboard an Ilyushin-18. He had already rehearsed the half-hour speech that he would deliver to Khrushchev – in which Nikolai Kamanin played the role of the Soviet leader – but could hardly have anticipated the sheer outpouring of adoration for him. On the outskirts of the capital, a squadron of seven MiG fighters intercepted his aircraft and escorted him down Lenin Prospekt, Red Square and along Gorky Street to Vnukovo Airport, where the Il-18 touched down just 100 m from Khrushchev’s flower-bedecked reception stand. The premier congratulated Gagarin, announcing that “you have made yourself immortal because you are the first man to penetrate space’’. Following the party line and successfully currying immense favour with Khrushchev, the First Cosmonaut responded by challenging the “other countries’’ to try to catch up with superior Soviet technology.

However, partly due to sour grapes, but mainly because of the intense mistrust that the Russians had themselves created through their ridiculous secrecy, some observers in those ‘other countries’ were already doubting that the mission had happened at all or – at the very least – that it had not occurred precisely as reported. The Soviet campaign of misinformation became evident when their sports officials filled in the FAI paperwork to register Gagarin’s flight on 30 May 1961. The name and co-ordinates of the launch site, they wrote, were ‘Baikonur’ at ‘47°22’00"N, 65°29’00"E’, whereas in reality the site was close to Tyuratam at 45°55’12.72"N, 63°20’32.32"E, a considerable distance to the south-west. Indeed, speculation abounded as late as July 1961 over conflicting reports, obscure photographs and a lack of reliable eyewitnesses. Other suspicions lingered over whether Gagarin landed in his capsule or by parachute. On 17 April, just five days after the mission, a correspondent for the London Times wrote that ‘‘no details have been given about the method of landing’’ and revealed that, when questioned at a press conference, Gagarin had ‘‘skated over the question’’.

Nonetheless, within hours of the flight, NASA Administrator Jim Webb appeared on American television to congratulate the Soviets and express his disappointment, but also to offer reassurance that Project Mercury – the United States’ own man-in-space effort – would not be stampeded into a premature speeding-up of its schedule. His remarks did little to dampen the fury of the House Space Committee, which verbally roasted both Webb and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, on 13 April. It made no difference; the Soviets had won the first lap of the space race and John Kennedy, still only months into his presidency, had to respond with something spectacular. Faced with persistent questions from Congress as to why the United States should remain in second place to Russia in space, together with a perceived ‘gap’ in missile-building technology, Kennedy knew that Project Mercury’s first manned flight would not even match, let alone surpass, Vostok’s achievement. Indeed, it was unlikely that a single-orbit piloted mission could be attempted before the end of 1961, so temperamental was the new Atlas launch

vehicle needed to achieve such a feat. By that time, the Soviets could well have pushed their lead even further.

A goal on a longer-term basis, with an above-average chance of success, was crucial for America’s young president. On 14 April, Kennedy called an informal brainstorming session with several aides to discuss suitable space goals. Landing a man on the Moon emerged as the best option to draw the Soviets into a race which the United States could conceivably win. Not only would it convey a message to the world of American technological prowess, but it would clearly beat Russia. A few days later, however, circumstances on a Caribbean island just south-east of Florida made Kennedy’s need for something – anything – to bolster his administration even more urgent.

The Bay of Pigs 27

Initially dubbed ‘Project Astronaut’ – a term later dropped because it placed too much emphasis on ‘the man’, rather than ‘the mission’ – the effort and its search for volunteers was carried out under the auspices of the newly-founded National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a government body established by President Dwight Eisenhower in the autumn of 1958. It represented the combined parts of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which, since 1915, had employed thousands of personnel at several research centres across the United States to design newer, better and faster aircraft. These included the Bell – built X-1 vehicle, in which Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. However, in addition to taking NACA’s old resources, the new NASA also assumed control of the United States Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and absorbed its ongoing aeronautical, rocketry and man-in-space projects.

Proposals for a civilian agency of this type had been made in the summer of 1957, during the International Geophysical Year, and led to a formal report, submitted to James Killian, chair of Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Council, that December. At around the same time, NACA Director Hugh Dryden, responding to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, also felt that ‘‘an energetic programme of research and development for the conquest of space’’ was acutely needed. In March 1958, Killian added weight to the proposal and suggested that a new agency should be based on a “strengthened and redesignated NACA’’, utilising all of its 7,500 employees, $300 million-worth of research assets and $100 million annual budget, ‘‘with a minimum of delay’’. Later that same month, Eisenhower outlined his administration’s future aims in space: to explore, to support national defences, to bolster the United States’ prestige and to advance scientific achievement. Future projects would begin with preliminary experiments, followed by automated exploration, then limited manned missions, robotic planetary flights and, eventually, journeys to the Moon and Mars.

A civilian space agency had already won the support of Eisenhower, who distrusted the significant role that the military was playing in space affairs, and the bill for its creation was quickly pushed through Congress, thanks to the efforts of Senator Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on 29 July 1958 and NASA officially came into being on the first day of October, headquartered at the Dolley Madison House until better facilities could be found. Its first administrator, Keith Glennan, was a former Case Western University president, and one of his earliest official tasks, on 17 December, was to announce America’s man-in-space effort to the nation and publicly give it a name: ‘Project Mercury’. Designed by NACA aerodynamicist Max Faget, the spacecraft would employ a truncated cone, sitting on a dish-shaped heat shield, to be launched on either a suborbital trajectory atop a Redstone missile or an orbital flight aboard an Atlas rocket. Project Mercury, however, was not the only man-in-space effort: for at least two years beforehand, the military had harboured its own plans. One of the most prominent of these, cultivated by the United States Air Force, was dubbed, somewhat unimaginatively, ‘Man In Space Soonest’ (MISS).

In July 1957, the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Committee arranged through the Los Angeles-based Rand Corporation to hold a two-day conference to discuss state – of-the-art space projects. Six months later, in the wake of Sputnik 1, a panel of scientists led by Edward Teller concluded that there was no technical reason why the Air Force could not launch a man into space within two years and an abbreviated plan was set in motion to explore the feasibility of placing a vehicle into orbit atop a converted Atlas. Contracts to build mockups of the spacecraft were awarded to North American Aviation and General Electric in March 1958 and, with a sense of great urgency, plans were implemented for an effort initially called ‘Man In Space’, then, from June, an accelerated ‘Man In Space Soonest’.

Animal-carrying flights, read the proposal, would be attempted in 1959, followed by a manned mission in October I960 and lunar landings as early as 1964. The five – year project would cost $1.5 billion. MISS, a ballistic capsule measuring 1.8 m in diameter and about 2.4 m long, would be fully automated and capable of supporting a single astronaut for up to 48 hours in orbit. Interestingly, the astronaut would lie supine in a contoured couch which could be rotated according to the direction of the G forces building up during ascent and re-entry.

Two camps existed over which missile – Atlas or Thor – should be used to loft the MISS spacecraft into orbit; the former was considered too unreliable and, moreover, would subject its astronaut to around 20 G, beyond the limits of human tolerance, in an abort situation. A two-stage Atlas, on the other hand, could provide a shallower re-entry flight path and reduce this to a survivable 12 G, but others expressed preference for a modified Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, fitted with a Nomad fluorine-hydrazine upper stage. Eventually, on 2 May 1958, detailed designs for the MISS spacecraft, its operational procedures and the decision to employ the

Thor missile, were forwarded to Air Force Headquarters, with a first manned launch tentatively scheduled for October I960.

However, it was felt in many quarters that development of the Thor-Nomad would take longer than planned, perhaps requiring 30 test launches and causing massive cost overruns. Consequently, the Air Force’s undersecretary was convinced that using a modified Atlas as the launch vehicle could cut the project costs below the $100 million mark. Unfortunately, this would also mean cutting the orbital altitude achievable by MISS from 275 km to just 185 km, essentially putting it out of range of the tracking network for much of its flight. Still, on 15 June 1958, the Atlas was brought on board, the project’s budget descended to $99.3 million and the first manned launch was targeted for April 1960.

Ten days later, the Air Force selected test pilots Robert Walker, Scott Crossfield, Robert Rushworth, William Bridgeman, Alvin White, Iven Kincheloe, Robert White, Jack McKay and – notably – Neil Armstrong as candidates to fly the MISS spacecraft. Arriving on the scene ten months before the Mercury Seven and almost two years before the first Soviet cosmonaut team was chosen they represented the first ‘astronaut’ selection in history. These astronauts would have been little more than passengers, inspiring the denigration of Chuck Yeager and others that the early space fliers were ‘spam in a can’, riding relatively simple ballistic capsules and parachuting to a water landing in the vicinity of the Bahamas.

Within weeks, however, Eisenhower’s plan to create a civilian space agency had developed into legislation and Brigadier-General Homer Boushey of Air Force Headquarters announced that the Bureau of the Budget was blocking the further release of funds for MISS. A chance remained to make the project a reality if its costs could be kept below an impossible $50 million ceiling in 1959, although this would have pushed the first mission into the spring of 1962. Eisenhower’s ingrained distrust of military involvement in the human spaceflight effort, coupled with the fact that the soon-to-be-formed NASA would not be spending more than $40 million on its own man-in-space project for 1959, signalled the final death-knell for MISS. By the third week of August 1958, Eisenhower assigned NASA specific responsibility for developing and carrying out manned space missions and $53.8 million, set aside for Air Force projects, including MISS, was transferred from the Department of Defense to the civilian agency. It has been speculated that, had it gone ahead with the required level of funding, it is quite possible that MISS would have beaten the Soviets into space, orbiting a man sometime in 1960.

At around the same time, the Army was planning its own, simpler, man-in-space effort, initially called ‘Man Very High’ (with Air Force participation, utilising the Manhigh gondola design) and, later, ‘Project Adam’. This had been the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, designer of the V-2 missile and among a handful of German rocketry experts brought to the United States in the wake of the Second World War. Had it gone ahead, its proponents claimed, it would have reached space even ‘sooner’ than the Soonest. Utilising a converted Redstone missile, it would have placed a capsule onto a ballistic, suborbital trajectory, probably similar to that followed by the first two manned Mercury missions. The Army’s astronaut would have been housed inside an ejectable cylinder, 1.2 m wide and 1.8 m long, which itself would have been encased inside the Redstone’s nosecone. The rather tongue-in­cheek justification for the project was as a step towards improving techniques of troop transportation, although Hugh Dryden scornfully remarked that “tossing a man up in the air and letting him come back. . . is about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon’’. By July 1958, the Army was told that Project Adam’s impracticability meant that it would not receive its requested $12 million of funding.

Meanwhile, the Navy, not to be outdone, proposed its own Manned Earth Reconnaissance (MER) initiative. This would have taken the form of a cylindrical spacecraft with a sphere at each end. After launch atop a two-stage booster, the spherical ends of the vehicle would expand laterally along two structural, telescoping beams to form a delta-winged, inflated glider with a rigid nose. The astronaut would then be able to make a controlled re-entry and water landing. Several studies were undertaken, including one jointly between Convair and the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. By the time the partnership made its report, in December 1958, Project Mercury was already well underway. Although MER was undoubtedly the most ambitious of these early projects, its emphasis on new hardware and cutting-edge techniques led many observers to doubt its chances of approval, with or without the advance of Mercury. Indeed, of all of the military plans, MISS probably came closest to fruition, before the clear direction was taken to place manned spaceflight in the hands of a civilian organisation.

The urgency with which NASA addressed the need to launch an astronaut was heightened by the fact that, within four months of Glennan’s announcement, the Mercury Seven were in place. ft was already known that the Soviet lead on space achievement was strong and that they were surely planning their own man-in-space effort, with I960 or shortly thereafter considered the most likely timeframe for a human launch. fndeed, Time magazine told its readers in September of that year that the long-awaited Soviet shot “could happen tomorrow’’, adding that “few of the world’s scientists doubted. . . that man at last was nearly ready to launch himself boldly and bodily into space’’. Eighteen bold bodies survived the punishing tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson and their names were forwarded to a NASA selection committee, with the original intent to choose six astronauts. However, after firmly picking five names, officials and physicians could not agree between two competing volunteers and ended up selecting both of them.

fn many ways, the Mercury Seven were quite distinct from their counterparts in the Soviet cosmonaut team. For a start, their ages were somewhat higher. According to Neal Thompson, in his 2004 biography of Al Shepard, NASA had opted for “steely, technology-savvy test pilots’’, who were “mature… who’d been around, been tested and stuck it out’’, rather than inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears young bloods for whom the fascination might lose its lustre when faced with the prospect of long hours and extremely hard work. As a result, Glennan’s agency stipulated that the astronauts had to be 25-40 years old at the time of selection, around 1.8 m tall and no heavier than 80 kg, to ensure that they could fit comfortably inside the tiny, conical Mercury capsule. They were also required to possess degrees in medicine, physical science or engineering, together with several years of professional expertise, including test piloting credentials, and at least 1,500 hours in their flight logbooks. Interestingly, this eliminated some of the most famous names in American experimental aviation – Chuck Yeager did not hold the required academic qualifications and Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was a civilian – although the former at least would publicly ridicule Project Mercury, believing that it did not require the talents or merits of a test pilot.

The choice of combat and test pilots seemed logical, but had actually come about after lengthy debate: submariners, high-altitude balloonists and even mountaineers were considered in the early days and original plans advocated a public call for volunteers, after which perhaps 150 might be chosen for testing and around a dozen finally selected. In fact, a notice to this effect, with an annual salary of between $8,330 and $12,770, had appeared in the Federal Register on 9 December 1958. Nowadays, of course, astronauts are chosen from both the military and civilian sectors, but the sheer unknowns surrounding space travel at the close of the Fifties prompted the selection committee and, in particular, Navy psychologist Bob Voas, to favour test fliers from the armed forces. It also did not hurt, wrote Deke Slayton, that “you wouldn’t have to be negotiating salaries with active-duty officers who volunteered”. Moreover, none of the Mercury Seven was obliged to resign their military commissions in order to work for a civilian agency and, indeed, continued Slayton, given the state of NASA in late 1958, “you’d have had to be an idiot to give up your Air Force or Navy career to join them’’. For his part, President Eisenhower heartily endorsed the idea of selecting purely from the military, effectively ending the national call for volunteers.

“The astronaut training programme,’’ Glennan told the Dolley Madison audience that April afternoon in 1959, “will last probably two years. During this time, our urgent goal is to subject these gentlemen to every stress, each unusual environment they will experience in that flight.’’ That training programme had scarcely begun and according to Chris Kraft, a legendary NASA flight director from those early days, “we were inundated with the newness of everything”. The astronauts expected their preparation to include many hours in the cockpits of jet aircraft – “we didn’t know what else to train on,’’ Gordo Cooper remarked – but their actual training for one of the most audacious feats in human history would encompass much more: physical and psychological conditioning, together with intense, PhD-level technical, scientific and medical instruction, to enable them to understand the intricacies of the spacecraft and rockets upon which their lives would depend. Spaceflight training had never been attempted and, in many ways, NASA and its first seven astronauts were forced to make it up as they went along. Indeed, Bob Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group, which included Project Mercury, stressed that they were not merely ‘hired guns’ and that, unlike the military, “where direction comes from the top’’, their direct input with respect to spacecraft design was expected and desired.

One particular training contraption, known as the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF), was used to simulate the motions of the Mercury capsule in orbital flight conditions. Located at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, it comprised a system of three interlocking concentric ‘cages’, one inside the next, with the innermost resembling the spacecraft itself. The cages could be

Described as one of the most sadistic trainers ever created, the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF) comprised three interlocking cages to simulate motions about roll, pitch and yaw axes.

programmed to spin, sometimes simultaneously, about all three axes – roll, pitch and yaw – at up to 30 revolutions per minute. Nitrogen-gas jets attached to the cages created these motions, which were intended to precisely mimic the worse-than-worst – case scenario of a complete loss of control of the capsule whilst in space. As the simulator tumbled, the astronaut, with all but his arms held firmly in place, had to read eye-level instruments and actuate the jets by means of a control stick to somehow interpret the motions and correct and steady the capsule accordingly. For three weeks in February and March I960, all seven Mercury astronauts were wrung through the MASTIF, which often left them nauseous and vomiting and which all would agree was one of the most sadistic trainers they had ever ridden.

Elsewhere, punishing centrifuge runs at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, subjected their bodies to forces as high as 16 G – enough to smooth back the skin on their faces and break blood vessels in their backs – in recognition of the fact that so little was known about deceleration during descent. Nicknamed, rather innocuously, ‘the wheel’, the centrifuge “took every bit of strength and technique you could muster to retain consciousness,” according to John Glenn. These exercises were perverted yet further by so-called ‘eyeballs-in, eyeballs – out’ testing, where the forces were extended by simulating another worse-than-worst – case eventuality that the Mercury capsule could splashdown in the sea on its nose, rather than its base; the astronauts were rotated 180 degrees and thrown violently against their restraining straps, which Al Shepard sarcastically called ‘‘a real pleasure’’. Indeed, one NASA physician who underwent the test could not properly catch his breath for some time afterwards. It later became clear that his heart had slammed into one of his lungs and deflated it. . .

The eyeballs-in, eyeballs-out testing eventually led to recommendations for more durable shoulder harnesses inside the capsules and, after their first visit to prime contractor McDonnell Aircraft Corporation’s St Louis plant in Missouri, the astronauts realised to their surprise that no window – only a blurry periscope – existed for them to see outside. Although their suggestion to include a viewing window was implemented, the first three Mercury spacecraft had already been built and outfitted, meaning that at least the first American in space would have to rely instead on two small portholes and the fisheye view transmitted through the periscope lens onto a circular screen in front of his face. The astronauts’ ability to apply their technical prowess and implement practical changes proved quite at odds with the experiences of Yuri Gagarin and his comrades, who had little or no input into the Vostok design process. In fact, with each of the Mercury Seven assigned a responsibility – Carpenter focused on communications and navigation, Cooper on Redstone rockets and trajectories, Glenn on cockpit layout, Grissom on controls, Schirra on environmental systems and space suits, Shepard on recovery equipment and Slayton on the Atlas booster – questions of whether to include aircraft-like rudder pedals or a control stick, whether to use gauges or easier-to-read tape-line instruments, where to position certain switches or handles to make them easily reachable or how best to remove the capsule’s hatch in an emergency were encountered on a regular basis.

In spite of the intense preparation, some psychologists remained fearful that the two-year wait for the first manned mission could lead to ‘over-training’ and staleness, although Shepard and others would strongly disagree and remark that the similarity of training with actual flight conditions was a key factor in making the real thing feel ‘routine’. The choice of Shepard as the first American in space was delivered on 19 January 1961 – the eve of John Kennedy’s presidential inauguration – when Bob Gilruth personally visited the astronauts at their headquarters at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. After 20 months of training, it did not come as a great surprise. Gilruth had already asked them, weeks earlier, to write the name of the astronaut, excepting themselves, that they would like to fly first. ‘‘We all intuitively felt that Bob had to make a decision as to who was going to make the first flight,’’ Shepard said, ‘‘and when we received word that Bob wanted to see us at five o’clock in the afternoon in our office, we sort of felt that perhaps he had decided.’’

Gilruth wasted little time and got straight to the point. Revealing that it was the hardest decision he had ever made, he announced that Shepard would fly first, Gus Grissom would fly second and John Glenn would support both missions. Years later, strong suspicions would abound that the choice of naval aviator Shepard had much to do with President Kennedy’s own nautical background and more than one member of the Mercury Seven would attribute the decision purely to politics. Indeed, even the Shepard-Grissom-Glenn trinity neatly represented the United States Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. (Army pilots had not been selected, on the basis that they lacked the required expertise in high-performance jets.)

No further public decisions on subsequent missions would be made, Gilruth told them, and, in fact, the three men’s names as mere ‘candidates’ for the first flight would not be announced to the world for another five weeks. Shepard’s selection as America’s first astronaut would not be revealed publicly until 2 May, as his first launch attempt was in the process of being scrubbed. Until then, the trio had to run through their own training facade of ‘not knowing’ which of them was to fly – ‘‘a ruse,’’ wrote Neal Thompson, ‘‘that all the astronauts thought was ridiculous and annoying’’. Oblivious, the media’s favourite had always been John Glenn, whose appearance, eloquence and warm demeanour typified the ‘all-American’ hero, and much surprise abounded when he, in fact, was not picked. Some newspapers even implied that inter-service rivalry was so strong that the Air Force may have deliberately leaked Glenn’s name to embarrass NASA and reduce his chances. Others supported Grissom, since his parent service – the Air Force – was already in the process of developing its own winged spacecraft called ‘Dyna-Soar’, together with an Earth-circling space station.

Glenn was the first to offer his hand to Shepard in congratulation, but others, including Wally Schirra, were ‘‘really deflated’’ by the decision. Deke Slayton, although he had privately ranked Shepard as the best in terms of piloting skills and general ‘smartness’, felt humiliated and could scarcely believe that he had not even made the cut of the final three. Gilruth’s choice did not surprise Scott Carpenter, though, who had been aware for two years that Shepard was ‘‘single-minded in his pursuit of the first flight’’. Moreover, according to Walt Williams, NASA’s director of operations for Project Mercury, Glenn’s image-consciousness, his untiring effort to perfect his ‘boy-next-door’ image and his currying of favour with top brass, led some officials to consider Shepard the best. His intense focus on the mission, his desire to know every aspect of the engineering and capsule design and his superb flying skills left him the obvious choice.

Admittedly, all seven knew that only one of them could make the coveted first flight, even though it would amount to little more than a 15-minute suborbital lob into the heavens atop a converted Redstone, but the disappointment was tangible. ‘‘I think Life magazine got into the act with some horseshit about the Gold Team (Glenn, Grissom and Shepard) and Red Team (the rest of us),’’ wrote Deke Slayton, ‘‘and I even had to have a press conference. . . a couple of days after the announcement to reassure everybody that we weren’t depressed.’’ In a situation once described as seven pilots all trying to fly the same aircraft, each man had been chosen at the very pinnacle of his profession; each was hyper-competitive and in their time together each had set himself the personal goal of ensuring that ‘the other guy’ never got so much as half a step ahead in ‘the game’. That game, and that intense competitiveness, ran from flying jets to mastering the MASTIF to winning a dispute over an aspect of Mercury design to racing the fastest in their flashy sports cars.

With the exception that all were military pilots and all would someday be flying into space, little commonality existed between them and their Soviet counterparts. The former were screened from the world and venerated only after their missions. The Mercury Seven, on the other hand, were placed on a pedestal of hero-worship from the day of their selection. They were, in a sense, ‘premature heroes’, with their personal stories sold by their lawyer Leo D’Orsey to Life magazine for $500,000 and a variety of perks – from sleek Corvettes on one-dollar-a-year leases from General Motors to the choicest picks of real estate – headed their way. They would battle the evil Soviet empire, take democracy to the new ‘high ground’ of space, and Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr, it was hoped, would be the first man to do it.

In theory, with Slayton’s removal from Mercury-Atlas 7, the new pilot should have been his backup, Wally Schirra. However, since Scott Carpenter had only recently been primed as John Glenn’s reserve and was considered the best-prepared, his name was announced instead at the 16 March press conference. “I figured,’’ wrote Walt Williams years later, “that MA-7 was likely to be more a repeat of John’s flight than anything groundbreaking, so why not give it to Scott, since he had already trained for something pretty similar. We were thinking about a seven-orbit flight later in the year, and that would be perfect for Wally.’’ Carpenter had trained since October 1961 in Glenn’s shadow and had accrued nearly 80 hours of‘pre-flight checkout and training’ time, considerably more than Schirra or even Slayton had accumulated during their preparations for MA-7.

Yet Schirra would learn of the assignment during an impromptu gathering at the Carpenters’ home. Moreover, what should have been the most exhilarating moment of his career turned into an ordeal for Carpenter and his wife, Rene. Slayton’s anger at having lost Delta 7, coupled with Schirra’s annoyance at having been dropped in favour of Glenn’s backup, led Carpenter to spend more time apologising than training. One evening, he got home and declared to Rene: ‘‘Damn it! I’m tired of apologising. This is my flight now.’’ Although he felt no bitterness towards Carpenter, Schirra would comment in his autobiography that he ‘‘felt the system was rotten’’. As far as Schirra was concerned, although Carpenter had been through test pilot school, he was a multi-engine aviator and had been a communications officer aboard an aircraft carrier. . . not a fighter pilot. In Schirra’s mind, Carpenter represented ‘black-shoe Navy’, a seagoing fleet officer, and despite his impressive flying credentials, was not truly a ‘brown-shoe’ naval aviator.

‘‘To make it worse,’’ Schirra wrote, ‘‘I was designated Scott’s backup! I did my best and worked my tail off on Scott’s mission. I don’t think anyone knew how angry I was.’’ Even Schirra, though, had to admit that his disappointment was nothing compared to the devastating news Deke Slayton had just received. The man who would effectively replace them both had, in the December 1960 peer vote, actually

been John Glenn’s personal choice for the first American in space. Malcolm Scott Carpenter had been born in Boulder, Colorado, on 1 May 1925, the son of chemist Dr Marion Scott Carpenter and Florence ‘Toye’ Noxon. Both parents had met as undergraduates at the University of Colorado, but separated soon after their son’s birth and divorced in 1945. His mother was hospitalised with tuberculosis for several years in Carpenter’s infancy and the boy – nicknamed ‘Buddy’ – attended school in Boulder, graduating in 1943 and entering the Navy’s V-12a wartime officer flight training programme at the University of Colorado.

A year later, he moved to St Mary’s Pre-flight School in Moraga, California, undergoing six months of training, followed by another four months at Ottumwa in Iowa. On his personal website, Carpenter would write that, despite his relief when the Second World War ended, as a fledgling naval aviator, he ‘‘was deeply dejected that I had not taken part in what I assumed was the greatest aeronautical contest of the century’’. In fact, he and his classmates had logged barely a few hours in the Stearman N2S ‘Yellow Peril’ training aircraft when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; three months later, he was demobilised. He did, however, win a regimental wrestling contest whilst a member of V-12a.

At war’s end, Carpenter enrolled in the University of Colorado to read mechanical engineering, with an aeronautical option. ‘‘CU did not then offer a degree in aeronautical engineering,’’ he wrote on his website, www. scottcarpenter. com. A near-fatal car accident in September 1946 severely disrupted his studies, but he returned to university early the following year. However, he missed his final examination in thermodynamics, leaving him one requirement shy of a complete undergraduate degree. He would make up for this on his one and only spaceflight. Carpenter married Rene Price in September 1948 and would father five children – four of whom survived – from the first of his four marriages.

He then joined the Navy, receiving flight training at Pensacola, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas, before working in the Fleet Airborne Electronics Training School in San Diego, California, volunteering for transitional training for Lockheed’s P2V Neptune patrol bomber. His decision to fly patrol planes was, he wrote in his autobiography, a difficult one. ‘‘His boyhood dream, held all through high school and beyond was to be a fighter pilot,’’ Carpenter and Stoever wrote. ‘‘But he was now. . . a husband and a father. . . His ego demanded he be a fighter pilot, but he remembered as a boy how he had hated being fatherless.’’ The decision, he wrote, continues to haunt him. Still, in November 1951, he was assigned to Patrol Squadron Six at Barbers Point in Hawaii and, throughout the Korean conflict, engaged in anti-submarine patrols, shipping surveillance and aerial mining activities in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and Formosa Straits.

After the war ended, Carpenter entered the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Pax River, graduating in the top third of his class, and subsequently conducted flight testing of the A-3D Skywarrior strategic bomber and the F-11F and F-9F fighters. He also tested numerous other naval aircraft – single – and multi-engine and propellor-driven fighters, attack planes, patrol bombers and seaplanes – before attending Naval General Line School at Monterey, California, in 1957 and the Naval Air Intelligence School in Washington, DC, the following year. His next assignment, in August 1958, placed him on the Hornet anti-submarine aircraft carrier, and he was serving as an air intelligence officer when he received cryptic orders from the Pentagon to report to Washington for a classified briefing. It was whilst on their way to the airport, after discussing the endless possibilities, that Rene, reading her copy of Time magazine, spotted a report about Project Mercury. “Their excitement mounted,” Carpenter wrote in his autobiography, “as they went through a list that described, well, Lieutenant M. Scott Carpenter.”

Whilst still assigned to the Hornet, he was invited to attend the second stage of testing, but met with the resistance of his skipper, Captain Marshall White, who emphatically declared that the young lieutenant was about to embark on an important training cruise. Carpenter’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, it seemed, and he was obliged to call NASA’s Dr Allen Gamble, who personally contacted the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke. The admiral, betwixt some “real sailor language’’, agreed to deal with the matter. He promptly spoke to White and, wrote Carpenter in his autobiography, the skipper “went on that training cruise without his air intelligence officer’’.

Interestingly, as the selection process for Project Mercury got underway, Carpenter and Deke Slayton were members of the same group at the punishing Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque. Slayton would later write that he had been particularly impressed to see Carpenter, during one test, blow into a tube of mercury “for about three minutes, twice as long as anybody else!’’ Carpenter’s remarkable endurance was also demonstrated after selection, when, during a centrifuge run at Johnsville, he devised a breathing technique, akin to explosive grunting, which allowed him to withstand 18 G with few ill-effects.

The world’s first spacewalk lasted barely 15 minutes, ending over eastern Siberia, when Belyayev radioed instructions for Leonov to begin preparations to re-enter the airlock. It would only become clear years later that the seemingly effortless ‘swim’ through space had actually required every ounce of physical exertion: the Berkut had ballooned, making bending extremely difficult, and Leonov noticed that his feet had pulled away from the boots and his fingers away from the tips of the gloves. It was, he wrote, “impossible to re-enter the airlock feet first’’ and his only option was to break mission rules and ease himself back into the Volga chamber head-first.

Reports hint that returning to the airlock in this manner caused him to get stuck sideways when he turned to close the outermost hatch. To relieve some of the pressure in his ballooned suit and move more easily, Leonov began bleeding off some of its oxygen by means of a valve in its lining, which placed him at severe risk of the bends. The Berkut, he found, behaved in a totally different manner in space to its performance on Earth. “The work became impossible. I tried to grab the handles [on the airlock] and my fingers wouldn’t work – the gloves’ fingers would just bend on me … I decided I was breathing oxygen long enough to prevent boiling nitrogen in the blood. There was some risk, but I had nothing else to do, and once I did, everything started going normal.’’

However, even after bleeding off the oxygen pressure, the problem of how to turn himself around in the 1.2 m-wide airlock remained. “I literally had to fold myself to do this,’’ he said later. “I spent tremendous effort trying to do this. I had a total of 60 litres [of air] for ventilation and breathing, which was not enough for this kind of action.’’ Physicians would later discover that he almost suffered heatstroke – his core body temperature rising by 1.8°C during the 13-minute excursion – and the cosmonaut would later describe being up to his knees in sweat, to such an extent that it sloshed around in his suit as he moved. Similar problems of over-exertion were closely mirrored in the reports of American astronaut Gene Cernan following his own extravehicular outing in June 1966.

The world’s first spacewalk, hazardous though it had been, ended at 11:47 am when Leonov re-entered the airlock. A minute and a half later, the outer hatch was finally closed and at 11:51 am he began repressurising the Volga. Shortly thereafter, with both pilots safely aboard the capsule, Belyayev fired pyrotechnic bolts to discard the airlock. Unfortunately, the explosive effect of the bolts placed Voskhod 2 into a 17-degree-per-second roll – ten times stronger than predicted – and, with only enough fuel for one orientation correction, the two men realised that they would be forced to live with it for the remaining 22 hours of their mission. Exhausted, and with no other option, they felt that they could bear it. Voskhod 2’s real troubles, however, were only just beginning.

As Leonov worked his way through routine instrument checks, he noticed that the oxygen pressure in the cabin was steadily increasing from a normal level of 160 mm to 200 mm, then higher, eventually peaking at 460 mm, which – in the event of an electrical short – would be more than sufficient to cause an explosion. The cosmonauts were advised to lower Voskhod’s temperature and humidity and, although it halted the upward climb of pressure, the situation remained highly dangerous. After a few hours of sleeplessness, they noticed to their relief that pressures had dropped below the critical level. Later, thankfully, the spacecraft’s automatic landing system came into operation, stopped the rolling and, wrote Leonov, “we were able to enjoy a few delicious moments of tranquil flight’’.

Initiation of the automatic landing system, on Voskhod 2’s 16th orbit, came from the Kamchatka ground station, but a solar orientation sensor fault meant that one command was not processed properly. It has been suggested that the effect of pyrotechnic gas from the jettisoned airlock led to the sensor failure. As a result, the rolling began again and, five minutes before the scheduled retrofire, Belyayev was forced to deactivate the automatic system. It was becoming apparent that the cosmonauts would have to perform a manual retrofire as Voskhod 2 passed over Africa on its 17th circuit, with the intention to land at around 52 degrees North latitude. At 10:16 am Moscow Time on 19 March, radio listeners overheard a ground station telling the cosmonauts – using their callsign ‘Almaz’ (‘Diamond’) – to perform a manual descent. The crew was asked, with more than a hint of urgency, to respond via Morse code.

Belyayev and Leonov would employ the Vzor optical device to orient their spacecraft, but this kept them out of their seats and delayed the retrofire by 46 seconds, which, coupled with an incorrect attitude, would ultimately conspire to bring them down in the wild Siberian taiga. They would land to the north of the industrial city of Perm, more than 2,000 km from their intended site. As Voskhod 2’s navigator, Leonov felt that overshooting Perm should still bring them down in Soviet territory, but “we could not run the risk of overshooting so much that we came down in China; relations with the People’s Republic were poor at the time”. Nonetheless, in his autobiography, Leonov praised the superb skills of Belyayev, now charged with performing the Soviet Union’s first-ever manual re-entry.

“In order to use the [Vzor] he had to lean horizontally across both seats inside the spacecraft,’’ Leonov wrote, “while I held him steady in front of the orientation porthole. We then had to manoeuvre ourselves back into our correct positions in our seats very rapidly so that the spacecraft’s centre of gravity was correct and we could start the retro-engines to complete the re-entry burn. As soon as Pasha turned on the engines we heard them roar and felt a strong jerk as they slowed our craft.’’ The completion of retrofire was greeted with silence and should have been followed, ten seconds later, by the separation of Voskhod 2’s instrument module. It did not happen. Leonov would recall the sight, also beheld by his comrade Yuri Gagarin four years earlier, of the useless section being dragged in the spacecraft’s wake by the thread of a communications cable.

Not until an altitude of around 100 km, when the cable finally burned through, did the ride stabilise. In rapid succession, the cosmonauts felt a sharp jolt as, first, the drogue parachute and, next, the main canopy were automatically deployed. “Suddenly,” wrote Leonov, “everything became dark. We had entered cloud cover. Then it grew even darker. I started to worry that we had dropped into a deep gorge. There was a roaring as our landing engine ignited just above the ground to break the speed of our descent. Finally we felt our spacecraft slumping to a halt.’’ Voskhod 2 had landed in a couple of metres of snow, somewhere in the western Urals, at 59 degrees 34 minutes North latitude and 55 degrees 28 minutes East longitude. It was 12:02 pm Moscow Time and the mission had lasted a little over 26 hours, yet the cosmonauts had not even reached the halfway mark of their time aboard the capsule. A long, cold afternoon and an even colder night awaited them. Moreover, they would also have unwanted company.

For the outside world, everyone was bewildered by what might have happened to the two men. Official accounts gave away few details. Some media reports suggested that the cosmonauts were “resting” after their mission, while Radio Moscow suspended transmissions and played Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto over and over in a sombre manner which hinted that Belyayev and Leonov had been killed.

Nikolai Kamanin would later write in his diary that tracking stations at Odessa and Saransk, both directly beneath Voskhod 2’s re-entry flight path, had provided the first reports that the descent was underway, although he noted that no one knew about the cosmonauts’ fate for at least four hours. Meanwhile, the Alma-Ata station in south-eastern Kazakhstan picked up a telegraph code via the high-frequency radio channel, which repeated ‘VN’ – ‘Vsyo normalno’ (‘Everything normal’) – over and over and the capsule’s Krug radio beacon had provided a fix on its location, ‘‘but we wanted more convincing data as to the condition of the cosmonauts’’, wrote Kamanin. Voskhod 2 was eventually spotted, together with its red parachute and the two men, by the commander of one of the search-and-rescue helicopters, wedged between a pair of firs on the forest road between Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, some 30 km south-west of the town of Berezniki.

Immediately after impacting the snow, the first task for Belyayev and Leonov had been to release the spacecraft’s hatch and get outside; unfortunately, upon flicking a switch, the explosive bolts activated and the sturdy plate of metal jerked, but refused to burst open. Only when they looked through one of the portholes did it become clear that the capsule was jammed between two firs. After much rocking backwards and forwards, Belyayev finally pushed the hatch away and the two men plopped out into the snow. Above them was the main canopy of their parachute, which had snagged the upper branches of firs and birches some 40 m high. Below, the base of the capsule, still simmering from the heat of re-entry, rapidly melted the snow and it thumped down onto solid ground.

As daylight faded and fresh snow began to fall, the two cosmonauts had reason to be grateful for their extensive experience in harsh climates. Leonov himself, of course, had been brought up in Siberia, whilst his older comrade, born on 26 June 1925 in Chelizshevo, in the Vologda region, north of Moscow, had spent much of his boyhood hunting in the forests near his home. As a youth, Belyayev dreamed of someday becoming a hunter and graduated from the Soviet Air Force Academy at Sarapul in 1944 and the Military Fighter Pilot School in Yeis the following year. He subsequently served in various Air Force units for more than a decade and became a squadron commander in naval aviation shortly before being selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 1960. Although he was the oldest member of the first group, Belyayev was hired for his experience, education and 900 hours of flying time. He would, wrote Asif Siddiqi, probably have flown in space sooner, but for an injury sustained during a parachute jump in August 1961.

As one of the older members of the corps, Belyayev’s last claim to fame would occur on 10 January 1970, when he became the first flown spacefarer to die of natural causes: after several years overseeing the training of newer cosmonaut recruits, complications, including pneumonia, arose following an operation on a stomach ulcer. Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, who had so expertly piloted Voskhod 2 through the Soviet Union’s first manual re-entry, died at the age of just 44. Although fellow cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov preceded Belyayev to the grave, his state funeral honours would be somewhat less than theirs. His remains would not be interred in the Kremlin Wall, but rather in Moscow’s Novodevich Cemetery, although pensions were paid to his wife and daughter and they were granted a seven-room apartment on Moscow.

With less than five years of life ahead of him, Belyayev, for now, felt that he could withstand anything. ‘‘Pasha and I both felt we had already been tested to our limits,’’ wrote Leonov, “though we knew there was no way of telling how long we would have to fend for ourselves in this remote corner of our country.” In the first few minutes after landing, they began transmitting their ‘VN’ code to confirm that they were alive and well. Interestingly, wrote Leonov, Moscow did not receive the signal, ‘‘because the vast expanse of forest in the northern Urals… interfered with the radio waves’’, although listening posts as far afield as Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East and Bonn in West Germany did pick it up.

However, the area was so heavily wooded and so deeply coated in snow that the rescue helicopters could not hope to reach them until loggers had cleared a landing site. One civil helicopter, Leonov recalled, tried to extend a rope ladder, but in their bulky pressure suits the two cosmonauts had no chance of scaling it. As the afternoon wore on, other aircraft dropped supplies – two pairs of wolf-skin boots, thick trousers and jackets, a blunt axe and even a bottle of cognac – to keep the men alive through the night. The news of the safe landing was announced by Yuri Levitan at 4:44 pm Moscow Time, almost five hours after it had occurred, and, later that evening, a helicopter succeeded in touching down a few kilometres away, although its crew could not reach the cosmonauts.

As the last vestiges of daylight disappeared, the temperature in the taiga began to drop precipitously and the pool of sweat in Leonov’s boots started to chill him. Fearing the onset of frostbite, both men stripped naked, wrung out their suits and underwear and separated the rigid sections from the softer linings, which they donned, together with boots and gloves. Their attempts to pull the snagged parachute from the trees for extra insulation proved fruitless and, as night approached, the snow started falling and temperatures plummeted still further to -30°C. Leonov would relate a cold and lonely night in the now-hatchless capsule, but stories would persist over the years that they were harassed by wolves which prevented them from disembarking and building a fire. Still others argued that mountain bears drew near Voskhod and others that the cosmonauts heard ‘strange noises’ outside.

Leonov mentioned nothing of this in his autobiography, although he admitted that when an Ilyushin-14 aircraft flew overhead at daybreak, the pilot revved his engine to scare away wolves in the vicinity. Later that morning, another helicopter reported seeing the cosmonauts chopping wood and setting a fire. At 7:30 am Moscow Time, an Mi-4 helicopter lowered a rescue team, including two physicians, to a point 1.5 km from the capsule and the first efforts began to fell trees and provide a suitable landing spot. Visibility was too poor to risk lifting them to a hovering helicopter and, as a result, the cosmonauts spent a second night in the dense taiga, together with their rescuers. ‘‘But this second night was a great deal more comfortable than the first,’’ wrote Leonov. ‘‘The advance party chopped wood and built a small log cabin and an enormous fire. They heated water in a large tank flown in especially by helicopter from Perm… And they laid out a supper of cheese, sausage and bread. It seemed like a feast after three days with little food.’’

It was a welcome relief to be among other human beings. At length, two landing spots were cleared, one of which lay just a few kilometres from the capsule, and at 8:00 am on 21 March the cosmonauts skiied there. They were then airlifted to Perm airport for a telephone call from Leonid Brezhnev and finally returned to Tyuratam

at 2:30 pm, more than two full days after landing. Belyayev and Leonov would be rewarded and decorated for their efforts: each received a Hero of the Soviet Union award, together with 15,000 roubles, a Volga car and six weeks’ leave. By the beginning of May, they had joined the circuit of official visits, international symposia and conferences and meetings with world leaders.