Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

To be fair, both McDivitt and White only received a minimum amount of rendezvous training and the primary focus of their mission was the EVA itself. For this task, James Alton McDivitt would be the Inside Man, although, fully-suited, he would be exposed to vacuum throughout White’s spacewalk.

The first Roman Catholic to be launched into space, son of an electrical engineer and the first American astronaut to command a crew on his first flight, McDivitt was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 10 June 1929. Described as “whippet-lean” by Time magazine, his 1.8 m frame was one that was forced to squeeze its way uncomfortably into the Gemini capsule before the Stafford Bump eased the tall astronauts’ suffering. Yet his background, unlike White’s, did not immediately mark him out as an obvious spacefarer. After graduating from high school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he worked for a year as a furnace repairman, then drifted into college in 1948, vaguely describing his ambitions for the future as either a novelist or an explorer. Two years later, he completed his education and opted to enter the Air Force, discovering a love of aviation whilst flying 145 combat missions over Korea. His achievements were rewarded with three Distinguished Flying Crosses and five Air Medals.

After Korea, in 1957, McDivitt was sent by his parent service to read for an aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Michigan, where he proved himself to be a straight-A student, graduating first in his 607-strong class. Whilst at Michigan, he met Ed White for the first time, though he could hardly have guessed how far their friendship would endure. He was selected for the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base and seemed a likely candidate to fly the X – 15 rocket-propelled aircraft, but applied instead for the 1962 astronaut class. Despite Time having labelled him as “a superb pilot and a first-class engineer’’, McDivitt approached his NASA career from a purely practical and technical standpoint. “There’s no magnet drawing me to the stars,’’ he was quoted as saying. “I look on this whole project as a real difficult technical problem – one that will require a lot of answers that must be acquired logically and in a step-by-step manner.’’

A little more than a year earlier, Gagarin had been just one of hundreds of Soviet military pilots who received unusual instructions to undergo classified briefings and physical and psychological tests as part of an entirely new, and mysterious, aviation project. The search for the world’s first spacefarers began in earnest in May 1959, when representatives of the armed forces, the scientific community and the design bureaux met at the Soviet Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Vice­President Mstislav Keldysh to discuss methods of selecting the most suitable candidates for Earth-orbital missions. Aviators, rocketeers and even car racers were considered in the early days, but, at length, bowing to Soviet Air Force pressure, Keldysh agreed to narrow the selection criteria to qualified pilots from this branch of the military.

Despite its obvious vested interest in wanting to have ‘its’ fliers taking the first manned spacecraft beyond the atmosphere, the logic was inescapable: Soviet Air Force pilots had proven themselves under exposure to hypoxia, high pressures and varying G loads and had undergone rigorous ejection-seat and parachute training. In addition to their flying experience, candidates would only be admissible if they could meet the height and weight requirements of the Vostok spacecraft: they needed to be no taller than 1.75 m and weigh no more than 72 kg. Moreover, anticipating that they would be embarking on lengthy careers as ‘cosmonauts’ (the word literally means ‘star sailor’), the age limit was set between 25-30 years old.

Throughout 1959, groups of physicians were sent to a number of air bases in the western Soviet Union and by August the selection teams had the records of more than 3,000 pilots ready for inspection. Most of these were eliminated at a fairly early stage, on the basis of not meeting the height, weight, age or medical criteria; some, indeed, were dropped for bronchitis, angina, gastritis and colitis, renal and heptic colic and pathological cardiac shifts. The remainder were then systematically interviewed from early September, still unaware of exactly what the so-called ‘special flights’ project entailed. Three thousand soon became a little over two hundred, who were despatched in groups of about 20 for further tests at the Central Scientific Research Aviation Hospital in Moscow. In addition to more interviews, the candidates were spun in stationary seats to assess their vestibular apparatus, placed in low-pressure barometric chambers and wrung through a centrifuge to evaluate their performance under high-gravity loads. Original plans, it seemed, called for seven or eight pilots, but Sergei Korolev insisted on tripling this number, for no other reason than because he wanted a larger team than the United States’ seven – strong Mercury group.

In January I960, Konstantin Vershinin, commander-in-chief of the Soviet Air Force, formally signed plans to establish a centre for cosmonaut training in Moscow. Although it was under the control of physicians, the Air Force General Staff eventually assumed command of cosmonaut affairs, under Nikolai Kamanin. It was Kamanin who formally approved a final shortlist of 20 Air Force cosmonaut candidates in late February: Ivan Anikeyev, Pavel Belyayev, Valentin Bondarenko, Valeri Bykovsky, Valentin Filatyev, Yuri Gagarin, Viktor Gorbatko, Anatoli

Kartashov, Yevgeni Khrunov, Vladimir Komarov, Alexei Leonov, Grigori Nelyubov, Andrian Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, Mars Rafikov, Georgi Shonin, Gherman Titov, Valentin Varlamov, Boris Volynov and Dmitri Zaikin. Their ages ran from just 23 in Bondarenko’s case to as old as 34 in that of Belyayev; this criteria was waived in a couple of instances out of respect for their exemplary performance during testing. Some of them would become the most famous names in spaceflight history, whilst others would disappear into anonymity. . . and, in a few cases, disgrace.

On 7 March, the 20 cosmonauts were given their welcoming speech by Vershinin at the Central Scientific Research Aviation Hospital. A week later, after settling their affairs at their respective air bases, they began training with Vladimir Yazdovsky’s first class in aerospace medicine. The following four months were consumed by a mixture of in-depth lectures and an intense physical fitness regime, the latter of which included two hours daily of intensive calisthenics at the Central Army Stadium in Moscow. Parachute training was also conducted in the Saratov region, near Engels, using a converted An-2 aircraft and within six weeks each of the candidates had made between 40-50 jumps over water and land, from high and low altitudes and during daytime and nighttime.

It was partway through this training regime that the Air Force began exploring a number of more suitable sites for the cosmonauts to continue their preparations. Two possible places were identified: one in Balashikha and the other close to the Tsiolkovsky Railway Station in Shelkovo. The latter was eventually chosen in recognition of its isolated location, large area and proximity to Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau, the Academy of Sciences and the Monino airfield. The new cosmonauts and their training staff relocated to the new site at the end of June I960 and the suburb itself, near Shchyolkovo, some 30 km north-east of Moscow, came to be known as Zelenyy (‘Green’). Nowadays, it has become world-famous as ‘Zvezdny Gorodok’ (variously ‘Star City’ or ‘Starry Township’).

With the appearance of the new cosmonaut town came the development of the first spacecraft simulators in which they could work. Known as ‘TDK-1’ and built by the M. M. Gromov Flight Research Institute, it received its first trainees – Gagarin, Kartashov, Nikolayev, Popovich, Titov and Varlamov, nicknamed ‘The Vanguard Six’ – in the summer of 1960. The make-up of this group changed almost immediately, however, when a reddening was discovered on Kartashov’s spine, diagnosed as haemorrhages and he was dropped from the Six. He was eventually dismissed from the cosmonaut team in April 1962. Shortly after Kartashov’s removal, Varlamov was involved in a swimming accident in which he displaced a cervical vertibra and disqualified himself from consideration. Their places were taken by Bykovsky and Nelyubov. The ‘new’ Six formed a cadre who would vie for the chance to become the Soviet Union’s first man in space. Indeed, with the exception of Nelyubov, they would fly five of the six Vostok missions. First among them, of course, was Yuri Gagarin, whom many cosmonauts felt had been a strong contender right from the first time he met Korolev. His journey to the stars had begun, rather strangely, as a child saboteur.

FARMBOY

After checking his safety, the boy crept over to a pile of Panzer batteries and began dropping fistfuls of soil into their accumulator caps. On other occasions, he might deliberately muddle up their chemicals, pouring them into the wrong compartments, so that SS commanders would return furiously to Klushino at nightfall to complain about their tanks’ dead batteries. Sometimes, he would even shove potatoes deep inside the exhaust pipes of German military cars. It was the autumn of 1942. The Nazi invasion had begun a year before, but, after scoring several major successes, they had now been drawn so deep into Soviet territory that the harsh Russian winter prompted a lengthy retreat. The Smolensk district, some 160 km west of Moscow and containing Klushino, lay directly in the path of the Nazi fallback. It was here that the young boy, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, born on 9 March 1934, saw war for the first time. Yet although his childlike attempts at sabotage certainly helped his village’s struggle against the German occupiers, he didn’t do it for patriotism. He did it to avenge himself on the Devil.

‘The Devil’ was a red-haired Bavarian known only as Albert, whose job included collecting flat batteries from German vehicles and replenishing them with acid and purified water. The Klushino children had already used broken glass to burst their tyres and, one day, in retaliation, Albert tried to murder Gagarin’s younger brother, six-year-old Boris, by stringing him from an apple tree with a woollen scarf. The attempt failed, but Albert still managed to evict the entire family from their home. Later, the two elder Gagarin children were abducted and taken to Poland, their father was beaten and their mother slashed with a scythe. It was just the start of what Gagarin’s fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov would later describe as ‘‘a very dark period for our country’’.

Following the expulsion of the Germans from Klushino in March 1944, the family eventually moved to nearby Gzhatsk, building a new home, and as Gagarin entered his teens he and Boris learned to read from Russian military manuals. However, it was witnessing a wartime dogfight between two Soviet Yak fighters and a pair of German Messerschmitts that kindled Gagarin’s interest in aviation, garnered a fascination with mathematics and physics and led to model aircraft clubs and maddening demands for his father to build him miniature gliders. By 1950, he had applied – but was not accepted – to study at the College of Physical Culture in Leningrad, hoping to become a gymnast or sportsman. Instead, he took his second option as an apprentice foundryman at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow. His work record led directly to training at the newly-built technical school in Saratov on the Volga River and, while there, he saw a notice for an aeroclub, which he promptly joined.

After graduating from Saratov in 1955, and by now with considerable flying experience in an antiquated Yak-18 trainer through the aeroclub, Gagarin was recommended by his instructor for the pilots’ school in Orenburg. This required him to sign up as a Soviet Air Force cadet, which neither of his parents found particularly appealing, and one of his Orenburg instructors, Yadkar Akbulatov, considered him by no means a piloting prodigy and felt that Gagarin may have failed the school

altogether if he could not land without bouncing on his tyres. Ultimately, Akbulatov recalled later, Gagarin solved his problem by placing a cushion under his seat to gain a clearer line of sight with the runway. Never again, it is said, did he fly without the benefit of a cushion.

Whilst at Orenburg, Gagarin met his future wife, Valentina, whom he married in October 1957, only three weeks after the launch of Sputnik 1. By this time, he had begun flight training in high-performance MiG-15 jets, successfully qualified with outstanding grades from the pilot’s school and earned a lieutenant’s commission with a posting to the Nikel base at the northern tip of Murmansk. During his time at this remote place, 300 km north of the Arctic Circle, he flew MiG-15 reconnaissance missions, enduring terrible weather conditions, with ice on his control surfaces and snow blindness proving an almost daily hazard. Then, in October 1959, with his wife and two-year-old daughter desperate to leave the sub-zero setting, something happened that would change his life forever.

At first, the recruiting team that arrived at Nikel sought interviews with the pilots, in which mysterious questions were posed about flying in “more modern planes’’, then “flying something completely new’’ and later “long-distance rocket flights’’. As the pilots were winnowed into smaller groups, they were sent to the Bordenko Military Hospital in Moscow for extensive medical and psychological screening. Finally, after more than 2,000 candidates had been poked and prodded, on 8 March 1960 a cadre of 20 pilots was selected from throughout the Soviet Union to fly the first missions into space. Most were twentysomethings – the intention being that they would be hired whilst young to prepare them for careers as cosmonauts – and each was less than 170 cm tall and below 70 kg in weight to meet Vostok’s limitations.

For the remainder of 1960, the trainees undertook academic and physical work in Moscow’s major scientific establishments, including the Zhukovsky Academy of Aeronautical Sciences on Leningradsky Prospekt and the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, near Petrovsky Park. Gagarin and the others were sealed, individually, inside isolation chambers for days at a time, with the barest of provisions, as pressure levels were alternately raised and lowered and the trainees given mind-numbing tasks to test their ability to overcome the tedium of lengthy flights. Towards the end of one 24-hour session, Gagarin even tried to alleviate his boredom by conjuring up songs about the electrodes taped to his chest. At other times, the cosmonauts were whirled in a centrifuge – sometimes peaking at 13 G – which caused their breathing to become laboured, their facial muscles to twist and contort and, said Gagarin, “the blood in my veins felt as heavy as mercury’’. Still more torture was effected through oxygen-starvation experiments, which made the more ‘normal’ pilot-training activities, such as parachute jumps, a blessed relief.

On 6 January 1961, six of the cosmonauts – Gagarin, Titov, Valeri Bykovsky, Andrian Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich and Grigori Nelyubov – were selected for final examinations prior to the announcement of who would fly first. Eleven days later, the six men were each sealed inside a Vostok simulator for almost an hour apiece to describe the equipment and operations to be conducted during each phase of a mission. Their understanding of how to orient the spacecraft for a manual retrofire and properly egress the capsule was scrutinised. Gagarin, Titov, Nikolayev and

Popovich were rated “outstanding” by the examiners, with Nelyubov and Bykovsky a close “good”. Written examinations followed, after which all six were proclaimed fit to fly, with Gagarin, Titov and Nelyubov categorised as the best candidates.

Three days before launch, Gagarin was chosen and Titov would later agree that from an image-conscious Soviet perspective, he was indeed the perfect choice. “Look at his biography,” Titov recalled years later. “Yuri Gagarin is an ordinary man from Smolensk. During the war, his brother and sister were driven away. After graduating, he went to a factory school and became a foundry worker, then followed the Saratov industrial specialised school, an air club and a flight school. He was a lad who made his dream come true all by himself, without a father and mother to help him.” In fact, on 12 April 1961, as Gagarin waited atop Korolev’s latest Little Seven, ready for his chance to make history, his parents, brothers and sister had absolutely no knowledge of what he was about to do. By nightfall, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin would be the most famous man on the planet.

Described by some western observers as resembling a tougher-looking Ingrid Bergman, rumours would abound for decades that Tereshkova’s mission had not gone well and, even, that she handled her return to Earth badly. Still, with radioed guidance from Gagarin, Titov and Nikolayev, she had managed to orient her spacecraft by manual control in a 20-minute-long experiment just before retrofire and successfully held the correct re-entry attitude. At 10:34:40 am Moscow Time on 19 June, the retrofire command was sent to Vostok 6 and executed 20 minutes later. However, the cosmonaut herself did not call out each event as required: she did not report a successful solar orientation, nor did she report the progress of the retrofire procedure, nor even the jettisoning of her spacecraft’s instrument section. In fact, the only information coming in to the control centre was downlinked telemetry data.

Tereshkova ejected on time, but apparently broke a mission rule by opening her helmet faceplate and gazing upwards; she was hit by a small piece of falling metal, it is said, which cut her face. Barely missing a lake in the violently-gusting wind, she landed at 11:20 am, some 620 km north-east of Karaganda, on the 53rd parallel. The bland fare she had eaten over the past three days was replaced, thanks to kindly locals, by fermented milk, cheese, flat cakes and bread, although this ruined the physicians’ chances of properly analysing her dietary intake. Three hours later, at 2:06 pm, after ejecting from Vostok 5, Bykovsky touched down 540 km to the north­west of the mining city and on the same parallel as Tereshkova. Unfortunately, in a worrying recurrence of the Vostok 1 and 2 problems, his instrument section failed to separate cleanly from the capsule, causing wild gyrations until the aerodynamic heating of re-entry finally burned the restraining straps away.

Little of this was evident in Bykovsky’s post-mission report. “The solar orientation for retrofire worked correctly,’’ he recalled, “and the braking engine fired for 39 seconds. Immediately after shutdown of the engine, the capsule separated from the service module. There were no big G forces during re-entry. There was a powerful explosion when the cabin hatch blew off” – it would appear that Bykovsky, too, ‘chose’ to eject – “and I was ejected from the capsule in my seat two seconds later. . . ’’ After landing, he was greeted by a man on horseback and a car which drove him to the charred Vostok 5, lying a couple of kilometres away. With a mission elapsed time of some 119 hours, just shy of five full days, he had set a new

Return to Earth 57

record for the longest solo manned spaceflight, which still remains unbroken. Tereshkova, too, had firmly ground all of America’s Mercury astronauts beneath her heel in terms of space time: her 48 orbits of Earth and 70 hours aloft soundly surpassed all six of their missions combined.

Khrushchev loved it. A few days later, in Moscow, he declared that, unlike bourgeois society’s emphasis on women as representing the weaker sex, the Soviet system permitted them to prosper and, literally, reach for the stars. Although the reality was decidedly more insincere, Tereshkova, for her part, agreed with him. “Since 1917,’’ she said, “Soviet women have had the same prerogatives and rights as men. They share the same tasks. They are workers, navigators, chemists, aviators, engineers. . . and now the nation has selected me for the honour of being a cosmonaut. On Earth, at sea and in the sky, Soviet women are the equal of men.’’ Many observers in the west agreed. The wife of Philip Hart, the Democratic senator for Michigan, remarked that Russia was providing its women with a chance that American women simply did not have. Others, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, added that “the Russians treat men and women interchangeably. We treat men and women differently’’.

The purely propagandist nature of the mission would be shown up, however, by the fact that no more Soviet women would venture into space until 1982. Even a decade after Tereshkova’s flight, fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov told an interviewer that her results indicated that “for women, flying in space is a hard job and they can do other things down here. After training, she will be 28 or 29 and if she is a good woman, she will have a family by then’’. Clearly, the real motivation of the Soviets in putting a woman into orbit was different from how it was presented to

– and, surprisingly, accepted by – the rest of the world. Andrian Nikolayev, who married Tereshkova in a lavish ceremony presided over by Khrushchev at the Moscow Wedding Palace on 3 November 1963, shared Leonov’s sentiment. “The mission programme makes big demands on her, especially if she is married,’’ Nikolayev said, “so nowadays we keep our women here on Earth. We love our women very much; we spare them as much as possible. However, in the future, they will surely work on board space stations, but as specialists – as doctors, as geologists, as astronomers and, of course, as stewardesses!’’

Whatever Tereshkova’s own opinions on the matter of future female space travellers, she dived with vigour into her post-flight life on the international speaking circuit, touring India, Pakistan, Mexico, the United States, Cuba, Poland, Bulgaria and elsewhere, assuming dozens of ceremonial posts and moving into the office of the president of the Committee of Soviet Women on Pushkin Square in Moscow. Like the other cosmonauts, she was honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union, together with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal. Five months after Vostok 6, amid much pomp and circumstance, she wed Nikolayev, previously the only bachelor cosmonaut. Apparently, their romance had developed during training

– one story told that she kissed him farewell at the foot of the Vostok 3 gantry – and at the wedding, a beaming Khrushchev himself gave the bride away. The truth, it seemed, was very different. Although a daughter, Yelena, was born to the couple in June 1964, becoming the first child whose parents had both flown into space,

Nikolayev and Tereshkova were not even living together by the end of that same year. They divorced in 1982. To this day, speculation exists as to whether or not their marriage represented a genuine love match or a cynical ploy engineered by Khrushchev.

Tereshkova herself has always argued vehemently against allegations that she performed poorly during her flight, saying only that she suffered from fatigue and lack of sleep. Sergei Korolev had already been heard to mutter that he would not deal with “broads” again and, at a private interview with her on 11 July 1963, he expressed severe displeasure with her performance. His anger was shared by his deputy, Vasili Mishin, who claimed that she had been “on the edge of psychological instability”. In fact, whilst drafting the official press release a few weeks earlier, the head of medical preparations, Vladimir Yazdovsky, had suggested including a paragraph to explain Tereshkova’s “overwhelming emotions”, coupled with tiredness and a sharply reduced ability to complete all of her assigned tasks. He was persuaded not to do so by Kamanin. Other rumours hint that she experienced significant menstruation whilst in orbit and at one stage became hysterical and began crying uncontrollably until she was scolded by Korolev over the radio.

Two decades later, in June 1983, shortly before the launch of America’s first woman into space, Time magazine speculated that perhaps Tereshkova’s poor preparation for the mission had contributed to the Soviets’ decision not to fly female cosmonauts more frequently. Despite these apparent slurs on her ability, it was revealed in 2004 that an error in Vostok 6’s control software had made the spacecraft ascend from orbit instead of descending; Tereshkova had noticed the fault during her first day aloft and had reported it to Korolev. She then calmly entered data to repair the mistake and landed safely. None of this was made public for more than four decades.

After her flight, Tereshkova would remain for many years a member of the cosmonaut corps, though in a purely honorific capacity, with little chance of another flight. She would study at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, graduating in October 1969 with distinction as a professional engineer, before learning of the dissolution of the female cosmonaut team later that year. To be fair, she and her female colleagues were never truly considered ‘regular’ members of the corps and the availability of flight assignments for them, realistically, ended shortly after Vostok 6. The entire woman-in-space effort was, for Korolev, simply a means of currying favour with Khrushchev: providing him with yet another propaganda coup to upstage the Americans, in exchange for signing off plans for the ‘real’ space programme to continue. That space programme would take two paths after Vostok: an improved version of the capsule (Voskhod) would fly from 1964 onwards with crews of up to three cosmonauts for long-duration and spacewalking exercises and an entirely new (Soyuz) spacecraft would be inaugurated shortly thereafter to pave the way for Earth-circling space stations and manned journeys to the Moon.

Meanwhile, Glenn continued putting his capsule through its paces, evaluating its abilities in manual, automatic and fly-by-wire modes. It was shortly after passing the two-hour mark of the mission, however, that he received an unusual request from Mission Control: to keep the switch for Friendship 7’s landing bag in the ‘off’ position. He confirmed that the switch was indeed off and pressed on with his work. Later, as he flew over Muchea, Gordo Cooper asked him to confirm it again. Then, during another pass over Canton Island, Glenn overheard an indication from a flight controller that his landing bag – located between the base of the spacecraft and the heat shield – might have accidentally deployed. He queried Mission Control and was assured that the ground was merely monitoring the situation. Glenn began to suspect that the fireflies could be related, perhaps, to some shifting of his heat shield and landing bag.

Already, as early as the second orbit, an engineer at the telemetry console named William Saunders, had noted that ‘Segment 51’ – an instrument providing data on the landing system – was generating unusual readings and Mercury Control instructed all tracking sites to monitor it carefully. A little over four hours into the flight, however, it became clear that the landing bag might be deployed or, at least, not securely locked into position. Whilst over Hawaii, the duty capcom informed Glenn that the signal was probably erroneous, but, to be sure, asked him to set the landing bag switch in its ‘auto’ position. ‘‘Now, for the first time, f knew why they had been asking about the landing bag,’’ Glenn wrote. ‘‘They did think it might have been activated, meaning that the heat shield was unlatched. Nothing was flapping around. The package of retrorockets that would slow the capsule for re-entry was strapped over the heat shield. But it would jettison and what then? ff the heat shield dropped out of place, f could be incinerated on re-entry.’’

ff the green landing bag light came on, Glenn wrote, it would clarify that it had indeed accidentally deployed. However, ‘‘if it hadn’t, and there was something wrong with the circuits, flipping the switch to automatic might create the disaster we had feared’’. He flipped the switch. No light. This suggested that the landing bag was secure. As retrofire approached, Capcom Wally Schirra, based at Point Arguello in California, told Glenn not to jettison his retrorocket package at least throughout his passage across Texas. ft marked the first of several efforts to ensure that, if the heat shield had been loosened, the retrorocket package might hold it in place just long enough to survive the hottest part of re-entry.

Glenn, meanwhile, had worries of his own. From the end of his first orbit, he had experienced problems with Friendship 7’s automatic control system, as the capsule started to swing over to one side along its yaw axis, corrected itself at considerable expense of hydrogen peroxide fuel, before doing the same again. ‘‘ft became necessary for me to control the capsule’s movements by hand,’’ he said later. ‘‘For most of the rest of the trip, f controlled the capsule myself. This did cut down on the other activities we’d planned. ft meant that f had to cancel several of the experiments and observations f wanted to make on the second and third orbits.’’ These would have included observations of the solar corona, terrestrial cloud structures, his ability to adapt his eyes to orbital darkness and further studies of the effects of weightlessness. ‘‘f was able to take far fewer pictures than f’d intended,’’ Glenn continued, ‘‘and f had to pass up my plan to have two meals during the flight to test my ability to get food down under various conditions.’’

Throughout most of his second orbit, as the ground pondered the Segment 51 situation, Glenn persevered with his efforts to determine the problem with the automatic control system. ‘‘f could hear the large fuel thrusters outside the capsule as they popped off their bursts of hydrogen peroxide in first one direction and then the other,’’ he said. ‘‘f could feel the slight throb of the smaller nozzles when f cut them in. The manual system had been a little mushy. ft did not respond quite as crisply as f thought it should have, but f still had good control. ft worked best when f switched to

the fly-by-wire mode, which combines the manual control stick and the fuel nozzles which are operated by the automatic system. This meant that f could work the automatic system by hand and conserve its fuel. Though this routine took most of my attention and kept me rather busy for the next three hours, f thoroughly enjoyed it. The idea that f was flying this thing myself and proving on our first orbital test that a man’s capabilities are needed in space was one of the high spots of the day. The value of this outweighed the loss of some of the things f did not get to do.’’ Coupled with the landing bag situation, however, these malfunctions contributed to shortening the mission from a possible seven orbits to the original three.

Six minutes before retrofire, Glenn duly manoeuvred Friendship 7 into a 14- degree, nose-up attitude. At 2:20 pm, the first retrorocket fired, causing a dramatic braking effect on the capsule and making him feel momentarily as if he was flying backwards, towards Hawaii. The second and third retrorocket firings came at five – second intervals, slowing the capsule sufficiently to drop it out of orbit. Once again, Schirra repeated: “Keep your retro pack on until you pass Texas’’. The tension at Mission Control was palpable. “f looked around the room,’’ wrote Gene Kranz, “and saw faces drained of blood. John Glenn’s life was in peril.’’

Throughout the early stages of re-entry, Glenn and Schirra chattered like a pair of tourists exchanging travel notes, as Friendship 7 came within sight of El Centro and the fmperial Valley, followed by southern California’s Salton Sea. Then, as he passed over Corpus Christi, Glenn was told again, with evident urgency, to “leave the retro package on through the entire re-entry’’. This meant that he would have to override the 0.05 G switch – which sensed atmospheric resistance and started the capsule’s re­entry program – and manually retract the periscope. Glancing at the on-board clock, which had ticked off four hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds since launch, his suspicions resurfaced that the reason for keeping the retro package on throughout re-entry was because the heat shield was loose.

He would later admit to irritation at being kept, officially, in the dark about the potential disaster looming ahead. fnformation about his spacecraft was his lifeblood, he wrote in his post-flight report, and it was knowledge, not absence of knowledge, which informed each of his decisions. Despite asking for Mission Control’s reasons for wanting the package kept in place, he was told only that the decision was “the judgement of Cape Flight’’. fn Florida, Al Shepard gave Glenn as much information as he had available. “We’re not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed,’’ he said. “We feel it is possible to re-enter with the retro package on. We see no difficulty at this time with this type of re-entry.’’

Although the package and its three metal straps would eventually burn up as Friendship 7 plunged deeper into the atmosphere, Glenn assumed that, by keeping it on, the capsule might be protected for long enough until the thickening air could firmly hold the heat shield against Friendship 7’s base. Max Faget, the father of the Mercury spacecraft, agreed with the plan of using the retrorocket package to hold the heat shield in place, but admitted that it posed its own risks: any unused solid fuel could explode when re-entry temperatures grew too hot, destroying the capsule. Flight Director Chris Kraft chimed in with additional concern that the attached retrorocket package could cause Friendship 7 to tumble, incinerating both it and

Glenn. Kraft, although eventually persuaded by Faget and Walt Williams, strongly felt that the ‘cure’ could be worse than the ‘disease’.

As the main phase of re-entry got underway, Glenn switched Friendship 7 from manual to fly-by-wire control, placing the capsule in a slow spin to hold it onto its correct flight path through the atmosphere. A little more than a metre behind his back, the base of the spacecraft steadily heated to a maximum of 5,200°C. Its ionised envelope of heat also blacked out communications, as Al Shepard’s voice in Glenn’s headset faded to nothing. A thud reverberated through Friendship 7 as the retrorocket package’s three metal straps melted, a fragment of which ‘‘fell against the window, clung for a moment and burned away’’. Glenn would recount years later that he expected, as each second passed, to feel the heat on his back and along his spine, but continued working his procedures, as flaming bits of – something – streamed past the window. He had no idea if they were pieces of the retrorocket package or, indeed, of the heat shield.

He was preoccupied for much of the re-entry with damping out the capsule’s oscillations with the hand controller, but had the brief opportunity to glance through the window and see the sky turn to a bright orange, which he described to the automatic tape recorder as ‘‘a real fireball outside’’. Every few seconds throughout the communications blackout, he attempted to contact Shepard, all the while working to keep Friendship 7 on the straight and narrow. At length, and by now through the worst of the re-entry heating, he heard the crackle of Shepard’s voice over his headset. The relief on the ground was audible.

Descending at subsonic speeds, by the time he reached an altitude of 13.7 km, Glenn felt the capsule rocking wildly and, as he looked upwards, could see ‘‘the twisting corkscrew contrail of my path’’. Eight and a half kilometres above the Atlantic, the stabilising drogue chute deployed automatically, followed by the main canopy a few seconds later. Shortly before splashdown, Glenn flipped the landing bag deployment switch. As expected, it lit up. Green. Subsequent investigation would discover that the rotary switch to be actuated by the heat shield deployment had a loose stem, which caused the electrical contact to break when the stem was moved up and down. This was believed to account for the false landing bag deployment signal. However, thinking back over the decision to keep the retro package attached throughout re-entry, Chris Kraft would resolve never to agree to such a dangerous exercise again.

Glenn splashed down with what he later described as ‘‘a good solid thump’’ at 2:43 pm. His landing co-ordinates were later given as 21 degrees 20 minutes North and 68 degrees 40 minutes West, some 320 km north-west of Puerto Rico. He was 60 km off-target, a discrepancy caused by retrofire calculations which had not taken into account Friendship 7’s weight loss in consumables. Seventeen minutes later, the destroyer Noa, codenamed ‘Steelhead’, drew alongside the capsule, followed, shortly afterwards, by helicopters from the Randolph, which had recovered Gus Grissom a few months earlier.

‘‘I could hear gurgling sounds almost immediately,’’ Glenn said of his first few seconds back on Earth. ‘‘After it listed over to the right and then to the left, the capsule righted itself and I could find no traces of any leaks.’’ He released his straps and shoulder harness, removed his helmet and put up his neck dam. He was sweating profusely, as physicians would later determine, and despite the open snorkels in Friendship 7’s hull, the humid air offered little respite. When the Noa arrived, he glanced through the window – coated with a smoky film from re-entry – and saw a deck full of sailors, so high in number that he asked the destroyer’s captain if anyone was actually running the ship! Within minutes, Friendship 7 had been winched aboard and, after obtaining clearance from the bridge, Glenn detonated the hatch. He received two skinned knuckles, through his pressure suit gloves, as the plunger snapped back. (It would be his only injury and, later, the realisation that manually activating the plunger caused such an injury would work in Gus Grissom’s favour.)

According to physicians Robert Mulin and Gene Mclver, Glenn was clearly fatigued, sweating and dehydrated; his only water intake had been from the apple sauce pouch, although his urine collector was full. After drinking water and showering, he became more talkative. He debriefed into a tape recorder aboard the Noa, before being flown to the Randolph for X-rays and an electrocardiogram and, later that evening, to Grand Turk Island for a welcoming committee of astronauts, physicians and NASA officials. When asked by psychiatrist George Ruff if there had been any unusual activity during his mission, Glenn replied “No… just a normal day in space!’’

The Voskhod 1 fliers were still in orbit when the first of the calamitous events of October 1964 took place. Indeed, when Komarov requested a one-day extension to the mission, he was cryptically refused by Korolev, who quoted Hamlet with the words ‘‘There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’’. This has been taken by some historians as a veiled hint at Khrushchev’s removal from office and, perhaps, that Voskhod 1 was originally intended to fly a somewhat longer mission. After a full day aloft, during which time Yegorov took pulse and respiration measurements, Feoktistov checked Voskhod’s equipment and atmosphere and Komarov evaluated the spacecraft’s orientation system, the time came for the fiery plunge to Earth.

According to Asif Siddiqi, the extreme shortness of Yegorov and Feoktistov’s training regime was reflected in their reactions to weightlessness. “Within two or three hours of the launch,’’ he wrote, “both began to experience disorientation in space. Yegorov felt as if he was bent over face-downward, while Feoktistov actually felt he was upside down. Although the sensations apparently did not impair their ability to work, both suffered these feelings throughout the entire length of the mission. . . an anomaly that had not been detected on any of the earlier Soviet space missions. Both cosmonauts also felt dizzy when they moved their heads sharply. It seems that Yegorov had been more afflicted, with his unpleasant sensations peaking about seven hours after launch. . .’’

Shortly after 9:00 am Moscow Time on 13 October, Komarov was advised of the landing instructions and completed the orientation of Voskhod and the firing of its retrorocket. Indications that everything did not go entirely smoothly were, however, relieved by an electrical signal from the spacecraft, which confirmed that the main capsule had separated from the instrument section. At 10:26 am, a tracking station in the Caucasus picked up the signal and followed Voskhod 1 as it hurtled over the Caspian Sea, sped high above the fishing port of Aralsk in south-western Kazakhstan and finally touched down 312 km north-east of Kustanai. Further electrical signals confirmed that the parachute hatch jettisoned properly, but for an anxious Sergei Korolev the key concern was whether the parachutes themselves had deployed. Airman Mikhailov, aboard an Ilyushin-14 some 40 km east of Marevka, confirmed that he saw two parachute canopies. . . then, thankfully, the welcome sight of the capsule on the ground with the three men, alive and well, waving at him.

Landing occurred at 10:47 am, completing a mission of scarcely a few minutes more than 24 hours, and the three cosmonauts were helicoptered to Kokchetav and thence to Kustanai and finally Tyuratam, arriving late in the afternoon. Komarov, the only ‘real’ cosmonaut on the crew, was described as looking tired, but the two ‘invalids’, Feoktistov and Yegorov, were in good condition and high spirits. Plans for the men to speak to Khrushchev, mysteriously, were postponed when it became apparent that he had returned from his dacha in Pitsunda to Moscow. All attempts to call him at his office in the capital were unsuccessful; only later would it become apparent that as Voskhod plummeted Earthward, so Khrushchev’s premiership had plummeted to its own ignominious end.

In their first conversations with the physicians, Feoktistov and Yegorov would describe their first – and only – experience of weightlessness: the former said that he found conditions not at all unpleasant and the latter, while admitting to feeling unwell during the first few orbits, recovered thereafter. Khrushchev remained uncontactable and, indeed, Marshal Sergei Rudenko was ordered to fly back to the capital immediately, delaying the cosmonauts’ report to the State Commission until the next day. In his diary, Nikolai Kamanin noted his concern that ‘‘something unusual was happening in Moscow’’. The cosmonauts’ post-flight visit to Red

Square was cancelled and their first meeting with the Soviet leader did not come until 19 October, nearly a full week after their landing. That leader was not Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, but Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

The three-strong crew, Time magazine told its readers on 23 October, “was a sure promise of multi-man space stations”, adding that “none of these feats have yet been accomplished by the lagging US space programme”. Indeed, at the beginning of the second decade of the human exploration of space, following their loss of the Moon race, the Soviets would become the first to establish a true foothold in the heavens with a long-term orbital base called Salyut. ft was a remarkable achievement that would, by the end of the 20th century, see cosmonauts spending more than a year apiece in space, and despite the harsh economic downturn after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian expertise continues to be drawn upon in today’s fnternational Space Station effort.

However, neither Time nor many of its readers were entirely fooled. The lack of transparency in the early Soviet missions meant that it was virtually impossible to determine what kind of spacecraft Komarov, Yegorov and Feoktistov had ridden into orbit. Rumours quickly abounded in the western press that longer multi­manned flights were planned. Other rumours, which suggested that Voskhod 1 had been brought home early due to communications difficulties, the illness of a cosmonaut or a malfunctioning rocket, were firmly refuted by the Soviets. fn fact, the only light they publicly cast on the ‘new’ spacecraft was that it was lined with “a snowy-white, soft, sponge-like synthetic fabric’’, that its trio of cosmonaut seats were arranged in a row and that its instrumentation consisted of a navigation globe, telegraph key and a multitude of buttons and switches. ft was, admitted Time, ‘‘little help in deciding whether the Sunrise was entirely new or merely an improved version of the standard one-man Vostok-type spaceships”. Senator Clinton Anderson, chair of the Senate’s space and aeronautics committee, speculated that it weighed some 6,800 kg – not too much higher than its real 5,680 kg – and, further, hinted that this would make it possible to fly aboard a similar rocket to that used by Vostok.

Within days, on 28 October, plans for subsequent missions were laid out. The Vykhod flight, to be flown by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, was tentatively pencilled-in for the first quarter of 1965, after which five others would undertake long-duration sorties of up to 15 days, conduct scientific research and perform another spacewalk. These would decisively surpass American plans to fly their first two-man Gemini in the spring of 1965, conduct a spacewalk that summer and attempt a 14-day endurance run thereafter. Hopes were high, wrote Nikolai Kamanin at the end of December, that five or six cosmonauts could be flown in a pair of spacecraft which would rendezvous and dock in orbit as early as 1966. After this, perhaps, a flyby of the Moon could be attempted.

Key to the success of the Vykhod mission – Voskhod 2 – was the 250 kg inflatable airlock through which Leonov would have to squeeze his way, all the time encased in a cumbersome, pressurised suit which would almost claim his life in orbit. On Gemini missions, an astronaut would venture outside by depressurising the capsule and opening the hatch. This was feasible because the American miniaturised electronic systems were capable of operating in vacuum. The fact that the Soviet

systems relied on air cooling meant that the capsule could not be depressurised and, hence, the airlock was born. Initial designs sketched out rigid structures, flexible contraptions and even one that could be rolled into a spiral before launch. The ‘winning’ design, codenamed ‘Volga’, envisaged a cylindrical device composed of 36 inflatable booms isolated in groups of 12. In this way, even if two groups of booms lost pressure, the airlock would retain its shape.

The airlock was not merely desirable, but necessary, since Voskhod’s avionics were cooled by cabin air and would overheat if the entire cabin was depressurised. Physically, it comprised a metallic ring, 1.2 m wide, which fitted over the spacecraft’s inward-opening hatch, and its length when fully deployed amounted to 2.5 m. Oxygen to inflate and pressurise the airlock booms was supplied by four spherical tanks and took around seven minutes to complete in orbit. The chamber boasted two lamps and three 16 mm cameras – two inside, one outside – and control of the inflation procedure would be performed from inside the cabin by Belyayev. However, a backup set of controls for Leonov’s use were suspended on bungee cords inside the Volga airlock itself.

For two years, the cosmonauts and their backups – Dmitri Zaikin and Yevgeni Khrunov – trained to a point at which the spacecraft’s cabin and airlock seemed like a second home, albeit a cramped one. In his autobiography, Leonov would recall his close friendship with Belyayev and express relief that attempts to remove ‘Pasha’

from Voskhod 2 on the basis of an old leg injury sustained in a parachute accident were not successful. “There were those,” Leonov wrote, “who had wanted Yevgeni Khrunov to command the mission… but I lobbied hard for Pasha, whom I thought more capable than Khrunov. I had worked with him more; I trusted him. In the end they agreed, though it caused some rancour with Khrunov.” Instead of commanding the prime crew, Khrunov would instead shadow Leonov on the backup team. Other attempts to fly another cosmonaut, 43-year-old Georgi Beregovoi, were quashed by Nikolai Kamanin; not on the basis of his age, but in view of his height and weight, both of which were greater than Belyayev, Leonov, Zaikin or Khrunov.

Much of Leonov’s preparation for the actual spacewalk, which would last between ten and 15 minutes, was undertaken in a modified Tupolev Tu-104 aircraft, flown in a series of parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness for periods of up to 30 seconds at a time. It was time-consuming and imperfect, wrote Leonov, since “there was no way of simulating pure weightlessness in any laboratory on the ground. . . such limited, disconnected periods meant that the hour and 15 minutes of exiting the spacecraft, performing the spacewalk and re-entering the airlock had to be practiced over the course of over 200 Tu-104 steep climbs’’. Astronaut Deke Slayton, who would fly with Leonov on the Apollo-Soyuz mission ten years later, remembered the world’s first spacewalker recounting that he needed to build his upper-body muscles and indulged in diving “to test his equilibrium”. Leonov also, according to Asif Siddiqi, “cycled about a thousand kilometres in less than a year, carried out more than 150 EVA training sessions and jumped by parachute 117 times’’. Elsewhere, pressure-chamber tests with Zaikin and Khrunov satisfactorily evaluated the performance of the airlock at conditions equivalent to an altitude of 37 km. At around the same time, early in February 1965, the mission was redesignated as Voskhod 2, rather than Vykhod (‘Exit’), which it was felt would give away its true nature.

As their March 1965 launch date drew nearer, plans were afoot to despatch an unmanned precursor, Cosmos 57, to demonstrate the performance of the Volga airlock. Early on 22 February, three weeks before Belyayev and Leonov were due to fly, it was blasted into orbit… and, shortly thereafter, it exploded! Telemetry signals intercepted by American intelligence hinted that its airlock had successfully deployed and tests of opening and closing its outermost hatch were in progress. Then, the hatch was automatically closed and further telemetry indicated that commands to repressurise the airlock had been issued and accepted by Cosmos 57. Television images transmitted from the spacecraft revealed that the airlock appeared to have fully inflated. ‘‘During the first orbit,’’ wrote Nikolai Kamanin in his diary, ‘‘the craft was observed by special television circuit at Simferopol and Moscow [ground stations] … Quite unexpectedly, a distinct image of the front part of the airlock appeared on the screen, causing an outburst of joy among all present.’’

Unfortunately, the Klyuchi and Yelisovo ground stations, both in Kamchatka, then issued simultaneous commands to deflate the airlock, which confused Cosmos 57 and which it interpreted as an instruction to commence descent. The spacecraft automatically set the retrofire process in motion, but the TDU-1 rocket fired improperly. Spaceflight analyst Sven Grahn has mentioned on his website that

Cosmos 57 apparently began to tumble; this was at least partly due to the unjettisoned airlock, whose presence would have displaced the spacecraft’s centre of mass and induced the spinning. Twenty-nine minutes later, as programmed, the on­board destruct system – designed to prevent sensitive hardware from falling into enemy hands – was automatically activated to destroy Cosmos 57. A post-flight accident commission found that Klyuchi alone was permitted to transmit the airlock-deflation command and that Yelisovo should only have done so as a backup measure and only if directed by the Moscow control centre. In his diary, Kamanin would blame the poor security of commands being issued to orbiting spacecraft and felt that such weaknesses could be exploited by the United States.

Sergei Korolev faced a quandary. Only one other Voskhod capsule was ready to fly and the spacewalk could not be attempted until the airlock had been satisfactorily evaluated on a fully-successful mission. On 7 March, a Zenit reconnaissance satellite, under the cover name of ‘Cosmos 59’, was launched. A key concern was that, assuming the inflatable airlock jettisoned successfully after Leonov’s spacewalk, its attachment ring would rise 27-40 mm above the surface of the capsule; however, if it only partially separated, the ring could be as much as 80 mm high. In such an eventuality there was a chance that the asymmetry of the ring on the upper heat shield could impart a rotation on the Voskhod, perhaps affecting the safe deployment of the drogue parachute during descent. Cosmos 59 was equipped with an identical airlock attachment ring to that planned for Voskhod 2 and its eight-day mission was entirely successful, proving, with just days to spare, that Belyayev and Leonov could survive re-entry and landing with this in place.

Nonetheless, in his autobiography, Leonov would recount the Chief Designer’s concern that he and Belyayev should have the final decision over whether to fly their mission. Leonov also wrote of Korolev’s visible exhaustion: he had suffered from high fever as a result of lung inflammation and, indeed, would die early the following year, after prophetically declaring Voskhod 2 as the ‘‘last major work of his life’’. Korolev told the men that they had two options: they could wait a year for another Voskhod to be built, fly one spacecraft unmanned to complete Cosmos 57’s mission and then launch Belyayev and Leonov, or they could take a risk and fly the manned mission immediately. ‘‘Then, very cannily,’’ wrote Leonov, ‘‘he added that he believed the Americans were preparing their astronaut Ed White to make a spacewalk in May. He knew how to get our competitive juices flowing. He must have known what we would say. We didn’t want to lose a year.’’

The fruitless station-keeping exercise had led to a 42 per cent depletion of their fuel supply, which would correspondingly reduce the extent to which McDivitt could manoeuvre the spacecraft while White was outside. It forced the astronauts to continue with their primary mission, the EVA, and leave rendezvous for Gemini VI. McDivitt, aware that his partner was tired and hot after the rendezvous attempt, told the Kano tracking station that he wanted the spacewalk postponed from the second to the third orbit. Chris Kraft agreed and the astronauts spent some time relaxing, admiring the view of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida and chatting to Gus Grissom, the Houston capcom. Then they dived headlong into the 54-item checklist to prepare the EVA equipment. At length, White snapped a gold-tinted faceplate onto his helmet, hooked up the 7.4 m umbilical to provide him with oxygen and a communications link to McDivitt and, with the aid of a small mirror, strapped the 3.7 kg chest pack into place. He checked his camera gear three times, wanting to make sure he did not leave the lens cap stuck on. “I knew I might as well not come back if I did,’’ White said later.

Since the EVA would place the entire cabin into vacuum, the astronauts had to steadily reduce its pressure from the normal 3.51 bars to 2.55 bars. Depressurisation commenced over Carnarvon in Australia, but quickly hit a snag when the overhead hatch refused to unlatch. A spring had failed to compress properly. Four hours and 18 minutes after launch, at 2:34 pm, White cranked a ratchet handle to loosen a set of prongs lining the opening of the hatch, raised it to 50-degrees-open and poked his head into the void.

After receiving assurance from Kraft that he was good to go, White pushed himself from his seat and caught his first glimpse of Earth from the ethereal vantage point known only to the spacewalker – with barely a helmet faceplate and 166 km of emptiness separating him from his home planet. ‘Below’, he beheld the intense blue of the Pacific and, coming up to the east, Hawaii. Losing no time, he tested the hand­held manoeuvring device and found that it responded crisply to his commands, as he ‘squirted’ it to propel himself firstly underneath the capsule, then to its top. Within a short time, the manoeuvring device’s gas supply was gone and for the remainder of his 21 minutes outside, White twisted and hand-pulled himself backwards and forwards along his tether. The umbilical imparted the force to the spacecraft, which reacted in response. ‘‘One thing about it,’’ noted McDivitt as he fired the thrusters to hold the craft stable, ‘‘when Ed starts whipping around that thing, it sure makes the spacecraft hard to control.’’ Also tricky was the fact that the umbilical kept drawing White towards the adaptor section and he had no desire to contaminate his suit with the toxic residue from burning monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.

The spacecraft was nearing the California coastline when Capcom Gus Grissom asked for photographs. ‘‘Get out in front where I can see you again,’’ McDivitt called and White duly complied. It is hard to comprehend that in little more than a quarter of an hour, White had ‘walked’ from the central Pacific, crossed California and, very soon, he and McDivitt were gliding high above Houston, talking to Grissom, somewhere, directly beneath them. ‘‘There’s Galveston Bay right there!’’ McDivitt yelled with excitement. ‘‘Hey, Ed, can you see it on your side of the spacecraft?’’ White concurred and snapped a picture with a 35 mm camera affixed to his hand-held pack. McDivitt, using a 70 mm Hasselblad, also took pictures, venturing ‘‘they’re not very good’’. On the contrary, these actually turned into some of the most iconic images from the annals of the early manned space effort. A 16 mm movie camera also recorded scenes of White in motion, bouncing backwards and forwards over a cloud-studded, blue-and-white Earth.

From his seat in the MOCR, Grissom was having a hard time trying to contact the two men. Every time McDivitt or White spoke, the spacecraft’s voice-activated system cut off messages from Mission Control – and they talked a lot during those exhilarating minutes. When McDivitt called Houston to ask if there was anything they wished to say, Kraft pushed his communications switch, something he rarely did, and ordered, ‘‘The Flight Director says ‘Get back in’!’’ The spacecraft was heading toward Earth’s shadow and White had to be inside by then with the hatch closed. As White returned to the cabin, he described it as ‘‘the saddest moment of my life’’. His last view was of the entire southern portion of Florida and the islands chain of Cuba and Puerto Rico. McDivitt turned up the interior lights to guide his partner to safety in case they hit orbital darkness before he was in. White pushed his feet back through the hatch, onto his seat and finally under the instrument panel. He had walked across America – and then some – in barely 21 minutes.

White’s return to the capsule was not entirely smooth, however, and his pulse rate soared from 50 to 178 beats per minute at the end of the spacewalk. He closed the hatch over his head and reached for the handle to lock it, quickly realising that it would be as hard to seal as it had been to open. As he pushed on the handle, McDivitt pulled onto him to give him some leverage and, eventually, the hatch was secured. The official ending time of the first American spacewalk was 3:10 pm, some four hours and 54 minutes into the mission and 36 minutes between the opening and closure of the hatch. Repressurisation started two minutes later. White had long since exceeded the cooling capacity of his space suit, resulting in severe condensation inside his helmet and sweat streaming into his eyes. The hatch problems led to a decision from the MOCR not to re-open it again to discard unneeded equipment.

After the mission, White would recount that the hand-held manoeuvring unit worked in the pitch and yaw axes, more or less as it had done during ground simulations. In the roll axis, however, he considered it more difficult to control without using excessive fuel. He experienced no sensations of vertigo or disorientation; nor, indeed, did he feel any inkling of the tremendous 28,100 km/h at which he was moving. White’s excursion also demonstrated that astronauts would be able to cross from the Apollo lunar module back to the command module, if necessary, in the event that the two spacecraft could not dock properly after ascent from the Moon’s surface.

Meanwhile, aboard Gemini IV, White relaxed and McDivitt began powering down some of the spacecraft’s systems to conserve electrical power and OAMS fuel, intending to drift for the next two and a half days. Plans called for the men to sleep alternate periods of four hours each, although this would prove difficult with the constant crackle of radio chatter from MOCR, frequently bumping into each other and an inability to turn down the volumes on their headsets. In spite of the drama of the past few hours, they had barely begun their 98-hour mission. It would be an uncomfortable and tedious slog.