Category Escaping the Bonds of Earth

The fire in the AS-204 spacecraft on 27 January 1967 left plenty of blame to go around and both North American, whose workmanship was seen as shoddy, and NASA, who had overseen them and given their seal of approval, were savaged by the media, by the public and by lawmakers alike. The media, indeed, were making up their own stories. On 10 February, for example, Time magazine cited the New York Times as having quoted an unidentified official who claimed that Grissom, White and Chaffee had screamed repeatedly for help in those frantic seconds. Their bodies, the official added, had been incinerated. . .

Fearing that Congress could pull the plug on Apollo with immediate effect, the agency set to work on the night of the disaster on its own internal review, with an eight-man panel headed by Langley Research Center director Floyd Thompson. Although Olin Teague, chair of the House Space Subcommittee, was keen for NASA to complete its work, others within the Senate were impatient and called for a hearing on 27 February. There, Administrator Jim Webb was verbally grilled, with representatives condemning ‘‘the level of incompetence and carelessness” as ‘‘just unimaginable”. Recriminations took an uglier turn when Senator Walter Mondale probed Webb for details of something called ‘The Phillips Report’.

Apollo’s programme manager, a retired Air Force general named Sam Phillips, had strongly criticised North American’s performance as prime contractor for over a year. He considered their relationship with NASA to be quarrelsome and disagreeable and had established a ‘tiger team’ to inspect the situation. This had

Seated before a Senate hearing, NASA’s senior management were verbally grilled and NASA’s “carelessness” and “incompetence” were particularly attacked. From left to right are Bob Seamans, Jim Webb, George Mueller and Sam Phillips.

left him with serious concerns, so much so that on 16 December 1965 he wrote a scathing memo to North American chairman Lee Atwood, placed the company on notice to improve and told George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of Manned Space Flight, that he had “lost confidence” in the prime contractor. Now, in the spring of 1967, Jim Webb revealed that he had never been made privy to the contents of Phillips’ report.

Others, including North American inspector Thomas Baron, had since 1965 condemned the level of poor workmanship they saw at Cape Kennedy, together with infractions of cleanliness and safety rules. Although Baron’s judgements were refuted by North American in its congressional testimony, they cannot have helped to quieten those who were looking for blame. Some, including the writer Erik Bergaust in his 1968 book ‘Murder on Pad 34’, even implied that NASA had blood on its hands for racing recklessly with the decade and killing the three men in the process.

Against this backdrop of public and media fury, the Thompson board worked for ten weeks, assisted by 1,500 technicians, and traced all possible sources of fire in Apollo’s 30 km of electrical wiring and even re-enacted the blaze in a command module mockup. Additionally, Spacecraft 014, the Block 1 vehicle originally assigned to Wally Schirra’s Apollo 2 mission, was shipped from Downey to Cape Kennedy for systematic dismantling and inspection alongside the burnt-out Spacecraft 012. Cabin pressures, the investigators found, had soared from the normal test pressure of 1.15 bars, slightly above sea-level equivalent, to 2.0 bars, rupturing the spacecraft’s hull, but it was Bureau of Mines expert Robert van Dolah who revealed the damning truth: an escape hatch, capable of being opened in a couple of seconds, might have saved the astronauts. Thompson’s report was published on 9 April and ran to 3,300 pages. It found no definitive cause for the fire, but suspected an unexplained arc on wiring beneath Grissom’s left footrest, which spurted to another object and ignited the 100 per cent oxygen atmosphere.

The report cited ‘‘deficiencies in command module design, workmanship and quality control’’, including uncertified and highly-flammable materials in the cabin, as having contributed to the tragedy. Additionally, it revealed that many safety checks simply were not done, nor was there enough fire-suppression equipment at Pad 34. ‘‘It was,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, ‘‘about as scathing a document as you’d ever see from a government agency towards itself.’’

Days later, Thompson and others found themselves testifying before the House and quickly discovered that even pro-Apollo congressmen were fiercely unsympa­thetic. Some lawmakers even went so far as to suggest reviewing the business of selecting contractors for the lunar effort. At one stage, responding to a question from Congressman John Davis of Georgia, North American’s John McCarthy raised the possibility that Grissom himself might have inadvertently started the fire by kicking a batch of loose wires. Although Slayton admitted that McCarthy’s comment was only raised in response to a question, he wrote that ‘‘it really pissed me off… because there were no grounds for the story – it was pure speculation, not to mention physically impossible’’.

The effect of the fire elsewhere in the space agency was equally dramatic. Bob Gilruth, who had become a virtual father figure to many of the astronauts, broke down in tears upon learning of the tragedy. In his autobiography, Wally Schirra recalled taking him out on for a spin on his Cal 25 sailboat a few months after the accident and, whilst manning the tiller, Gilruth fell asleep. “Maybe it was the first chance he’d had to relax, to realise he had to push ahead and forget the tragedy,” Schirra wrote. “Gilruth was carrying a tremendous load.’’ So too was Joe Shea, the man who might have been inside the command module, sitting in precisely the spot where the fire started that terrible evening. He took the fire very badly, shifting into overdrive in an impossible personal crusade to solve Apollo’s problems… and, in doing so, drove himself to the brink of a breakdown. Eventually, he was moved to NASA Headquarters, then left to work for Raytheon. Years later, Shea would wonder if he could have snuffed out the fire… and convinced himself, with 70 per cent certainty, that he could have successfully smothered it.

It was the straight-talking Frank Borman who summed up what should happen in testimony on 17 April. “Let’s stop the witch hunt,’’ he told Congress, “and get on with it.’’ Getting on, though, would involve more than a year and $75 million-worth of changes to turn Apollo into a very different machine to that in which Grissom, White and Chaffee had died. Its cabin would now be pressurised with a mixture of 60 per cent oxygen and 40 per cent nitrogen, then steadily replaced with pure oxygen at partial pressure after launch as the nitrogen leaked out. No major structural reworking of the command module would be necessary. All flammable materials were to be removed and, crucially, a new 32 kg single-piece hatch was implemented, which opened outwards and could be sprung in just five seconds. Its mechanism, assisted by a cylinder of compressed nitrogen gas, could be opened with a little finger.

Elsewhere, aluminium plumbing, which melted at 580°C, was replaced by stainless steel, and coolant pipelines which could release flammable glycol when ruptured were ‘armour-plated’ with high-strength epoxy. Wire bundles were encased in protective metal panels and nylon netting and plastic containers were replaced by fire-retardant materials such as Teflon. Intricate ‘Velcro maps’ were created to limit the presence of this useful, but highly flammable, material and identify exactly where every piece of it would be located in the command module’s cabin. Paperwork was kept to a minimum, to such an extent that the crews were barred from taking reading materials with them. ‘‘No books or magazines,’’ wrote Wally Schirra. ‘‘Nor could we take anything made of paper to play with, such as cards or puzzles. We would find boredom a serious problem as we progressed through ten days in orbit.’’

The space suits to be worn by the astronauts had their nylon outer coatings replaced by beta cloth – an advanced fibreglass material produced by Owens – Corning Fibreglass Corporation – and supported by 14 layers of fire-resistant material. ‘‘We’re paying a price for safety,’’ Apollo 7 flight director Glynn Lunney told Time magazine. ‘‘The suits are bulkier, the fibreglass itches like hell and the seat belts are difficult to cinch down because they are so stiff, but you are seeing a spacecraft several hundred per cent improved.’’ Further, an emergency venting system capable of reducing the cabin pressure in seconds provided an extra safeguard to snuff out fires. Overall, the changes increased Apollo’s weight by 1,750 kg and placed it just beneath the Saturn V’s total lifting capacity for lunar missions. As a

result, parachutes were enlarged to permit safer splashdowns at greater weights, some redundant systems were eliminated and lead ballast was removed.

By extension, of course, the disaster which had befallen the command module could also afflict Grumman’s lunar module and increased fervour was placed on reviewing its materials, too. Nylon-based items were replaced by beta cloth and ‘booties’ were installed over circuit breakers to lessen the risk of electrical shorts. This work on the lunar module – the machine which would actually set men on the Moon – refocused attention on the key question: would John Kennedy’s dream ever be realised, within the decade, or at all? At the beginning of 1967, NASA had spent $23 billion on Project Apollo and many now questioned the need for America to go there. The continuing threat of the Soviet Union provided one reason: Leonid Brezhnev’s increasingly regressive and repressive regime had, only a year before, consigned writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky to hard labour for penning satirical, anti-Soviet texts. In some minds, it harked back to far darker times under Stalin.

When physicist Edward Teller was asked by Congress what he expected men to find on the Moon, he replied: ‘‘The Russians!’’ Even now, the sense of fear was as strong as ever. For their part, the Russians, mysteriously, had been conspicuously absent from the manned spaceflight business for almost two years by the time of the Apollo 1 fire, but their ambitions in Earth orbit were ready for a new resurgence. The death of Sergei Korolev and the appearance of a successor, Vasili Mishin, had pushed the Soviet Union’s new spacecraft – Soyuz (‘Union’) – further and further behind schedule. Now, three months after the deaths of Grissom, White and Chaffee, it was ready to go. Or was it?

Although Gemini V, the first to carry and utilise fuel cells for electrical power, had long been planned to fly for seven or even eight days, the success of its predecessor and the performance of Jim McDivitt and Ed White had emboldened NASA to move up their estimates for the first lunar landing from 1970 to 1969 and, perhaps, said Joe Shea, as early as mid-1968. Both Gemini IV astronauts would remain very much part of the unfolding action: White was named within weeks to the backup command slot for Gemini VII, an assignment rapidly followed by the coveted senior pilot’s seat on the maiden Apollo voyage. McDivitt, too, would go on to great things: commanding Apollo 9, a complex engineering and rendezvous flight to pave the way for the first Moon landing. He would even be offered, but would refuse, the chance to walk on the lunar surface himself.

First, though, came the adulation. After an initial Houston reception, they headed for Chicago, where a million people greeted them and showered them in tickertape along State Street and Michigan Avenue. This was followed, in Washington, DC, by another parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, receptions in the Senate, meetings with foreign diplomats and even a free trip to Paris to upstage the appearance of Yuri Gagarin and a mockup of Vostok 1 at 1965’s Air Show. It is unknown to see such scenes as tickertape parades for astronauts today and, perhaps, the only ones in the foreseeable future may be for the men and women who return to the Moon or become the first to tread the blood-red plains of Mars.

In the Sixties, however, every mission was heroic. Moreover, despite the appalling workload and the inevitable strain the astronaut business placed on marriages and families, every man who left Earth’s atmosphere was a fully-fledged hero. Not for nothing did Gerry and Sylvia Anderson name their five Thunderbird heroes after five of the heroes of the Mercury Seven: Alan, Virgil, John, Scott and Gordon. For one of those heroes, Gordo Cooper, and his rookie pilot, Pete Conrad, the reality in the build-up to their mission was one of exhausting 16-hour workdays, plus weekends, and a tight schedule to launch on 1 August 1965, eight weeks after McDivitt and White splashed down. Cooper and Conrad and their backups, Neil Armstrong and Elliot See, had only been training since 8 February, giving them less than six months to prepare for the longest mission yet tried. “We realised they needed more time,” wrote Deke Slayton. “I went to see George Mueller to ask him for help and he delayed the launch by two weeks.”

Despite the pressure, Cooper and Conrad found time to give some thought to names for their spacecraft, even though NASA had officially barred them from doing so. Due to its pioneering nature, the two men wanted to call Gemini V ‘The Conestoga’, after one of the broad-wheeled covered wagons used during the United States’ push westwards in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their crew patch, in turn, would depict one such wagon, emblazoned with the legend ‘Eight Days or Bust’. This was quickly vetoed by senior managers, who felt it suggested a flight of less than eight days would constitute a failure, and Conrad’s alternative idea – ‘Lady Bird’ – was similarly nixed because it happened to be the nickname of the then-First Lady, wife of President Johnson. Its possible misinterpretation as an insult could provoke unwelcome controversy which NASA could ill-afford. The astronauts, however, would not be put off and Cooper pleaded successfully with Jim Webb to approve the Conestoga-wagon patch, although the administrator greatly disliked the idea. The duality of the word ‘bust’ as denoting both a lack of success and the female breasts did not help matters, either. . .

Preparations for Gemini V had already seen Conrad gain, then lose, the chance to make a spacewalk. According to a January 1964 plan, the Gemini IV pilot would depressurise the cabin, open the hatch and stand on his seat, after which an actual ‘egress’ would be performed on Gemini V (Conrad’s mission), a transfer to the back of the spacecraft and retrieval of data packages on Gemini VI and work with the Agena-D target vehicle on subsequent flights. Following the Voskhod 2 success, however, plans for a full egress were accelerated and granted to Ed White. The result: instead of ‘Eight Days or Bust’, Gemini V would come to be described by Cooper and Conrad as ‘Eight Days in a Garbage Can’; they would simply ‘exist’ for much of their time aloft, to demonstrate that human beings could survive for at least the minimum amount of time needed to get to the Moon and back. (The maximum timespan for a lunar mission, some 14 days, would be an unwelcome endurance slog earmarked for the Gemini VII crew.)

Yet the Conestoga mission did have its share of interesting gadgets: it would be the first Gemini to run on fuel cells, would carry the first production rendezvous radar and was scheduled to include exercises with a long-awaited Rendezvous Evaluation Pod (REP). Originally, it was also intended to fly the newer, longer-life OAMS thrusters, although these were ready ahead of schedule and incorporated into Gemini IV. Only weeks after Cooper, Conrad, Armstrong and See began training, on 1 April 1965 fabrication of the Gemini V capsule was completed by McDonnell,

A tired and heavily-bearded Conrad (left) and Cooper aboard the recovery ship after the flight.

tested throughout May in the altitude chamber and finally delivered to Cape Kennedy on 19 June. Elsewhere, GLV-5 – the Titan booster assigned to launch the mission – was finished in Baltimore, accepted by the Air Force and its two stages were in Florida before the end of May. Installation on Pad 19 followed on 7 June, the day of McDivitt and White’s splashdown, and Gemini V was mounted atop the Titan U on 7 July. Five days later, the last chance for an EVA on the mission and, indeed, on Geminis VI and VII, was rejected by NASA Headquarters. There seemed little point in repeating what White had already done and, further, Cooper and Conrad, not wishing to be encumbered by their space suits for eight days, had campaigned vigorously for greater comfort in orbit by asking to wear helmets, goggles and oxygen masks. The launch of Gemini V was scheduled for 19 August.

It would be a false start. Thunderstorms ominously approached the Cape, rainfall was copious and a lightning strike caused the spacecraft’s computer to quiver. The latter, provided by IBM, had caused concern on Gemini IV and, this time around, had been fitted with a manual bypass switch to ensure that the pilots would not be left helpless again. The attempt was scrubbed with barely ten minutes remaining on the countdown clock and efforts to recycle for another try on 21 August got underway. On this second attempt, no problems were encountered. Aboard Gemini V, Cooper turned to Conrad. “You ready, rookie?’’ Conrad, white as a sheet, replied that he was nervous. Surely the decorated test pilot who had flown every supersonic jet the Navy owned wasn’t scared? Conrad milked the silence in the cabin for a few seconds, then burst out laughing. “Gotcha!” he said with his trademark toothy grin. “Light this son-of-a-bitch and let’s go for a ride!’’ And ride they did. At 8:59:59 am, Cooper and Conrad were on their way.

Ascent was problematic when noticeable pogo effects in the booster jarred the men for 13 seconds, but smoothed out when the second stage ignited and were minimal for the remainder of the climb. Six minutes after launch, as office workers across America snoozed away their Saturday morning, Gemini V perfectly entered a 163-349 km orbit. Nancy Conrad wrote that her late husband compared the instant of liftoff to “a bomb going off under him, then a shake, rattle and roll like a ’55 Buick blasting down a bumpy gravel road – louder than hell’’.

Hitting orbit made Cooper the first man to chalk up two Earth-circling missions. (Gus Grissom, of course, had piloted a suborbital flight on Liberty Bell 7, before commanding the orbital Gemini 3.) However, Gemini V would shortly encounter problems. The flight plan called for the deployment of the 34.5 kg REP, nicknamed ‘The Little Rascal’, from the spacecraft’s adaptor section, after which Cooper would execute a rendezvous test, homing in on its radar beacon and flashing lights. Before the REP could even be released, as Gemini V neared the end of its first orbit, Conrad reported, matter-of-factly, that the pressure in the fuel cells was dropping rapidly from its normal 58.6-bar level. An oxygen supply heater element, it seemed, had failed. Nonetheless, as they passed over Africa on their second orbit, Cooper yawed the spacecraft 90 degrees to the right and, at 11:07 am, explosive charges ejected the REP at a velocity of some 1.5 m/sec. Next, the flight plan called for Gemini V to manoeuvre to a point 10 km below and 22.5 km behind the REP, although much of this work was subsequently abandoned. However, Chris Kraft’s ground team was becoming increasingly concerned as the fuel cell pressures continued to decline and when a pressure of 12.4 bars was reached this was insufficient to operate the radar, radio and computer. Kraft had little option but to tell the astronauts to cancel their activities with the pod.

It seemed likely that a return to Earth would be effected and Kraft ordered four Air Force aircraft to move into recovery positions in the Pacific for a possible splashdown some 800 km north-east of Hawaii. A naval destroyer and an oiler in the region were also ordered to stand by. Keenly aware of the situation, Cooper radioed that a decision needed to be made over whether to abort the mission or power down Gemini V’s systems and continue, to which Kraft told him to shut off as much as he could. All corrective instructions proved fruitless: neither the automatic or manual controls for the fuel cell’s oxygen tank heater would function. Nor could the heater itself, located in the adaptor section, be accessed by the crew. Cooper and Conrad even manoeuvred their spacecraft such that the Sun’s rays illuminated the adaptor, in the hope that it might stir the system back to life. It was all in vain.

By now, most of their on-board equipment – radar, radio, computer and even some of the environmental controls – had been shut down and, as Gemini V swept over the Atlantic on its third orbital pass, there was much speculation that a re-entry would have to be attempted before the end of the sixth circuit, since its flight track thereafter would take it away from the Pacific recovery area. Then, as the astronauts passed within range of the Tananarive tracking station in the Malagasy Republic, off the east coast of Africa, Cooper reported that pressures were holding at around 8.6 bars, suggesting, Kraft observed, that “the rate of decrease is decreasing”. As he spoke, the oxygen pressures dropped still lower, to just 6.5 bars, and fears were high that if they declined much further, Gemini V would need its backup batteries to support another one and a half orbits and provide power for re-entry and splashdown. The astronauts were asked to switch off one of the fuel cells to help the system and as they entered their sixth orbit the pressures levelled-out at 4.9 bars.

Capcom Jim McDivitt asked Cooper for his opinion on going through another day under the circumstances. “We might as well try it,’’ replied Cooper, but Kraft remained undecided. After weighing all available options, including the otherwise satisfactory performance of the cabin pressure, oxygen flow and suit temperatures, together with the prestige to be lost if the mission had to be aborted, he and his control team emerged satisfied that oxygen pressures had stabilised at 4.9 bars. If there were no more drops, Gemini V would be fine to remain in orbit for a ‘drifting flight’, staying aloft just long enough to reach the primary recovery zone in the Atlantic, sometime after its 18th orbit. Admittedly, with barely 11 amps of power, only a few of the mission’s 17 experiments could be performed, but Kraft felt ‘‘we were in reasonably good shape. . . we had the minimum we needed and there was a chance the problem might straighten itself out’’. As Cooper and Conrad hurtled over Hawaii on their fifth orbit, he issued a ‘go’ for the mission to proceed.

With the reduced power levels, the REP, which kept the spacecraft company up until its eighth orbit, was useless for any rendezvous activities. ‘‘That thing’s right with us,’’ Cooper told Mission Control during their sixth circuit of Earth. ‘‘It has been all along – right out in back of us.’’ Two orbits later, Conrad turned Gemini V a full 360 degrees, to find that the pod had re-entered the atmosphere to destruction. Nonetheless, Gemini V’s radar did successfully receive ranging data from the REP for some 43 minutes.

As the mission entered its second day, circumstances improved and oxygen pressures climbed. “The morning headline,” Kraft radioed the astronauts on 22 August, referring to a newspaper, “says your flight may splash down in the Pacific on the sixth orbit.” Having by now more than tripled that number of orbits, Conrad replied that he was “sorry” to disappoint the media. Despite the loss of the REP, on their third day aloft Cooper conducted four manoeuvres to close an imaginary ‘gap’ between his spacecraft and the orbit of a phantom Agena-D target. This ‘alternate’ rendezvous had been devised by the astronaut office’s incumbent expert, Buzz Aldrin. Cooper fired off a short burst from the aft-mounted OAMS thrusters to lower Gemini V’s apogee by about 22 km, then triggered a forward burn to raise its perigee by some 18 km and finally yawed the spacecraft to move it onto the same orbital plane as the imaginary target. One final manoeuvre to raise his apogee placed Gemini V in a co-elliptical orbit with the phantom Agena. Were it a ‘real’ target, he would then have been able to guide his spacecraft through a precise rendezvous. Such exercises would prove vital for Gemini VI, which was scheduled to hunt down a ‘real’ Agena-D in October 1965, and one of the greatest learning experiences, said Chris Kraft, ‘‘is being able to pick a point in space, seek it out and find it’’.

Notwithstanding the successes, the glitches continued. On 25 August, two of the eight small OAMS thrusters jammed, requiring Cooper to rely more heavily on their larger siblings and expend considerably more propellant than anticipated. It was at around this time that Gemini V broke Valeri Bykovsky’s five-day endurance record and Mission Control asked Cooper if he wanted to execute ‘‘a couple of rolls and a loop’’ to celebrate; the laconic command pilot, however, declined, saying he could not spare the fuel and, besides, ‘‘all we have been doing all day is rolling and rolling!’’ When the record of 119 hours and six minutes was hit, Kraft blurted out a single word: ‘‘Zap!’’ Gordo Cooper, with an additional 34 hours from Faith 7 under his belt, was now by far the world’s most flown spaceman. His response when told of the milestone, though, was hardly historic: ‘‘At last, huh?’’

The dramatic reduction of available propellant made the last few days little more than an endurance run. Kraft told the astronauts to limit their OAMS usage as much as possible and many of their remaining photographic targets – which required them to manoeuvre the spacecraft into optimum orientations – had to be curtailed. Still, a range of high-quality imagery was acquired. The hand-held 70 mm Hasselblad flew again to obtain photographs of selected land and near-shore areas and, of its 253 images, some two-thirds proved useful in post-mission terrain studies. These included panoramas of the south-western United States, the Bahamas, parts of south-western Africa, Tibet, India, China and Australia. Images of the Zagros Mountains revealed greater detail than was present in the official Geological Map of Iran. Cooper and Conrad also returned pictures of meteorological structures – including the eye of Hurricane Doreen, brewing to the east of Hawaii – together with atmospheric ‘airglow’. In addition, they took pictures of the Milky Way, the zodiacal light and selected star fields. Other targets included two precisely-timed Minuteman

missile launches and infrared imagery of volcanoes, land masses and rocket blasts.

The scientific nature of many of these experiments did not detract – particularly in the eyes of the Soviet media – from the presence of a number of military-sponsored investigations. Cooper and Conrad’s flight path carried them over North Vietnam 16 times, as well as 40 times over China and 11 times over Cuba, prompting the Soviet Defence Ministry’s Red Star newspaper to claim that they were undertaking a reconnaissance mission. The situation was not helped by President Johnson’s decision, whilst the crew was in orbit, to fund a major $1.5 billion Air Force space station effort, known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). Among the actual military experiments undertaken by Gemini V were observations of the Minuteman plume and irradiance studies of celestial and terrestrial backgrounds, together with tests of the astronauts’ visual acuity in space to follow up on reports that Cooper had made after his Faith 7 mission. Large rectangular gypsum marks had been laid in fields near Laredo, Texas, and Carnarvon, Australia, although weather conditions made only the former site visible.

Cardiovascular experiments performed during the mission would reveal that both men lost more calcium than the Gemini IV crew, although principal investigator Pauline Beery Mack expressed reluctance to predict a ‘trend’, since “a form of physiological adaptation may occur in longer spaceflight”. Medically, Chuck Berry’s main concerns were fatigue and his advice was that they get as much sleep as possible. ‘‘I try to,’’ yawned Conrad at one stage, ‘‘but you guys keep giving us something to do!’’ All in all, they managed between five and seven hours’ sleep at a time and expressed little dissatisfaction with Gemini V’s on-board fare: bite-sized, freeze-dried chunks of spaghetti and meatballs, chicken sandwiches and peanut cubes, rehydratable with a water pistol. An accident with a packet of shrimp, though, caused a minor problem when it filled the cabin with little pink blobs. Conrad even tried singing, out of key, to Jim McDivitt at one point.

Years later, Conrad would recall that the eight-day marathon was ‘‘the longest thing I ever had to do in my life’’. He and Cooper had spent the better part of six months training together, so ‘‘didn’t have any new sea stories to swap with one another… there wasn’t a whole lot of conversation going on up there’’. Nancy Conrad would recall her late husband describing how the confined cabin caused his knees to bother him – their sockets felt as if they had gone dry – and that he would have gone ‘‘bananas’’ if asked to stay aloft any longer. (Ironically, on two future missions, Conrad would stay aloft for much, much longer. . . but on those occasions, his tasks would include a couple of meandering trots around the lunar surface and floating inside a voluminous space station.) He found it hard to sleep, hard to get comfortable and the failures meant he and Cooper spent long periods simply floating with nothing to do. After the flight, he told Tom Stafford that he wished he had taken a book, and this gem of experience would be noted and taken by the crew assigned to fly the 14-day mission.

Nancy Conrad described Cooper’s irritation at losing so much of his mission. He was far from thrilled that the two main tasks for Gemini V, rendezvous and long – duration flight, were becoming little more than ‘‘learning-curve opportunities’’ and suggested throwing an on-board telescope in the Cape Kennedy dumpster when it twice refused to work. Later, when the spacecraft was on minimum power and the astronauts were still expected to keep up with a full schedule, Cooper snapped “You guys oughtta take a second look at that!” As for physical activity, he grimaced that his only exercise was chewing gum and wiping his face with a cleansing towel.

On the ground, Deke Slayton was concerned that such an attitude would not help Cooper’s reputation with NASA brass. Indeed, Gemini V would be his final spaceflight and, although he would later complain bitterly about ‘losing’ the chance to command an Apollo mission, some within the astronaut corps would feel that Cooper’s performance and strap-it-on-and-go outlook had harmed his career. Tom Stafford was one of them. ‘‘Gordo… had a fairly casual attitude towards training,’’ he wrote, ‘‘operating on the assumption that he could show up, kick the tyres and go, the way he did with aircraft and fast cars.’’

To spice matters up still further, worries about the fuel cells continued to plague Gemini V’s final days. Their process of generating electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen was producing 20 per cent too much water, Kraft told Conrad, and there were fears that the spacecraft was running out of storage space. This water excess might back up into the cells and knock them out entirely. In order to create as little additional water as possible, the astronauts powered down the capsule from 44 to just 15 amps and on 26 August Kraft even considered bringing them home 24 hours early, on their 107th orbit. However, by the following day, the water problem abated, largely due to the crew drinking more than their usual quota and urinating it into space, and a full-length mission seemed assured.

Eitherway, they had long since surpassed Bykovsky’s Vostok 5 record. In fact, by the time Cooper and Conrad splashed down, they would have exceeded the Soviets on several fronts: nine manned missions to the Reds’ eight, a total of 642 man-hours in space to their 507 and some 120 orbits on a single mission to their 81. At last, after eight years in the shadows – first Sputnik, then Gagarin, Tereshkova, Voskhod 1 and Leonov – the United States was pulling ahead into the fast lane of the space race. When it seemed that Gemini V might come home a day early and miss the scheduled Sunday 29 August return date, mission controllers in Houston even played the song ‘Never on Sunday’, together with some Dixieland jazz.

The astronauts also had the opportunity on the last day of the mission to talk to an ‘aquanaut’, Aurora 7 veteran Scott Carpenter, who was on detached duty to the Navy. Carpenter, who had broken his arm in a motorcycle accident a year before and been medically grounded by NASA, was partway through a 45-day expedition in command of Sealab II, an underwater laboratory on the ocean floor, just off the coast of La Jolla, California. The Sealab effort, conceived jointly by the Navy and the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sought to discover the capacity of men to live and work effectively at depth. In doing so, Carpenter became the first person to place ‘astronaut’ and ‘aquanaut’ on his career resume. Yet, unlike Cooper and Conrad, his chances of returning to space were non­existent. He had not impressed senior NASA managers with Aurora 7 and, indeed, the partial success of an operation to repair the injury to his arm meant he would remain grounded anyway. He resigned from NASA in early 1967.

The music, the chat with Carpenter and even Conrad’s dubious singing did little

to detract from the uncomfortable conditions aboard the capsule. As they drifted, even with coolant pipes in their suits turned off, the two men grew cold and began shivering. Stars drifting past the windows proved so disorientating that they put covers up. Sleep was difficult. Chuck Berry had wired Conrad with a pneumatic belt, a blood-pressure-like cuff, around each thigh, which automatically inflated for two minutes of every six throughout the entire mission. The idea was that, by impeding blood flow, it forced the heart to pump harder and gain its much-needed exercise. Berry felt that if Conrad came through Gemini V in better physical shape than Cooper, who did not wear the belt, a solution may have been found for ‘orthostatic hypotension’, the feelings of lightheadedness and fainting felt by some astronauts after splashdown.

For the two astronauts, that splashdown could not come soon enough. By landing day, 29 August, their capsule had become cluttered with rubbish, including the litter of freeze-dried shrimp, which had escaped earlier in the mission. The appearance of Hurricane Betsy over the prime recovery zone prompted the Weather Bureau to recommend bringing Gemini V down early and Flight Director Gene Kranz agreed to direct the Lake Champlain to a new recovery spot. At 7:27:43 am, Cooper fired the first, second, third, then fourth OAMS retrorockets, then gazed out of his window. It felt, he said later, as if he and Conrad were sitting ‘‘in the middle of a fire’’. Since it was orbital nighttime, they had no horizon and were entirely reliant upon the cabin instruments to control re-entry. In fact, Gemini V remained under instrument control until they passed into morning over Mississippi.

Cooper held the spacecraft at full lift until it reached an altitude of 120 km, then tilted it into a bank of 53 degrees; whereupon, realising that they were too high and might overshoot the splashdown point, he slewed 90 degrees to the left to create more drag and trim the error. Although experiencing a dynamic load of 7.5 G after eight days of weightlessness, the astronauts did not, as some had feared, black out. The parachute descent was smooth. No oscillations were evident and the 7:55:13 am splashdown, though 170 km short of the planning spot, was soft. As would later be determined, the computer had been incorrect in indicating that they would overshoot. A missing decimal point in a piece of uplinked data had omitted to allow for Earth’s rotation in the time between retrofire and splashdown. In fact, Cooper’s efforts to correct the false overshoot had progressively drawn them short of the recovery zone. ‘‘It’s only our second try at controlling re-entry,’’ admitted planning and analysis officer Howard Tindall. ‘‘We’ll prove yet that it can be done.’’

Gemini V had lasted seven days, 22 hours, 55 minutes and 14 seconds from its Pad 19 launch to hitting the waves of the western Atlantic and the crew was safely aboard the Lake Champlain by 9:30 am. With the exception of the failed REP rendezvous, and one experiment meant to photograph the target, all of Cooper and Conrad’s objectives had been successfully met. Yet more success came when Chuck Berry realised that, despite the days of inactivity with little exercise aboard the capsule, the astronauts were physiologically ‘back to normal’ by the end of August, clearing the way for Frank Borman and Jim Lovell to attempt a 14-day endurance run on Gemini VII in early 1966. First, though, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford would fly Gemini VI for one or two days in October and complete the first rendezvous with an

Agena-D target. The mission – or, rather, missions – that would follow would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and set aside another obstacle on the path to the Moon. But not before suffering a major setback of its own.

One saving grace of the crisis was that Scott had the presence of mind, before undocking, to switch over command of the Agena to Mission Control. The result: the Gemini VIII-Agena Target Vehicle (GATV-VIII) could – and would – be reused during a subsequent mission. Four months later, Gemini X’s John Young and Mike Collins would fly part of their own rendezvous, docking and spacewalking extravaganza with the Agena. In the days after Armstrong and Scott splashed down, the rocket’s main engine was fired ten times, its various systems were vigorously tested and it successfully received and executed more than 5,400 commands. By 26 March, its electrical power had been exhausted and it could no longer be effectively controlled, but by this stage it had been raised into a higher orbit to permit inspection by the Gemini X crew.

Before Young and Collins could complete their mission, however, came Gemini IX; stricken, it seemed, by bad luck since the dull, chill February day when its prime crew lost their lives in St Louis. Days after the deaths of Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, their backups, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, were appointed to replace them. With a launch scheduled for mid-May, Stafford would record the shortest turnaround between flights of any space traveller thus far, blasting off just five months after his Gemini VI-A splashdown. Newly-promoted to become the ‘new’ Gemini IX backups were Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin, who, by following Deke Slayton’s three-flight crew rotation system, were now in prime position to fly the Gemini XII mission in November 1966.

Gemini XII, the last flight in the series, was originally to be the preserve of Stafford and Cernan in their capacity as See and Bassett’s backups. In fact, in his autobiography, Cernan recalled trips to McDonnell’s plant in St Louis to inspect and train on the Gemini IX capsule. . . yet finding himself, in rare moments of spare time, drifting down the line of almost-complete spacecraft to take a wistful look at the skeletal form of Gemini XII, his and Stafford’s ship. Years later, Cernan would still recall his desire to know every switch, every circuit breaker, every instrument, every bolt and rivet, inside the Gemini before he and Stafford took this engineering marvel into the heavens.

The prime and backup crews for Gemini IX were announced in early November 1965 and, indeed, with Stafford still busy preparing for his mission with Wally Schirra, Cernan was forced to train alone with See and Bassett until early the following year. His role not only shadowed Bassett, but prepared himself for the possibility, however remote, of actually flying the mission and conducting a lengthy EVA wearing an Air Force contraption known as the Astronaut Manoeuvring Unit (AMU). It looked, Cernan wrote, “like a massive suitcase” that was “so big that it would be carried aloft folded up like a lawn chair and attached within the rear of the Gemini”. (In fact, the Air Force’s project officer for the AMU, Major Ed Givens, was selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in April 1966.)

Having manoeuvred himself over to the device, Bassett would “slip onto a small bicycle-type seat, strap on the silver-white box and glide off into space, manoeuvring with controls mounted on the armrests’’. Sounding very much like something from a Buck Rogers episode, the AMU had evolved through seven years of developmental work, with its focus on military tasks associated with a Pentagon-sponsored space station called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. “The possibility of using it to send someone scooting off to disable an enemy satellite,’’ wrote Cernan, “wasn’t mentioned in public because we weren’t supposed to be thinking about the militarisation of space.’’

For NASA’s purposes, however, the 75 kg AMU provided an essential tool in understanding how effectively astronauts could work and manoeuvre outside the confines of their spacecraft. When he was named to Gemini IX, Bassett was tasked with an EVA that would span at least one 90-minute circuit of the globe and would be able to control his movements and direction by means of 12 hydrogen peroxide thrusters. The AMU was also equipped with fuel tanks, lights, oxygen supplies, storage batteries and radio and telemetry systems. The device would be controlled by knobs on the end of the AMU’s twin arms – a left-hand one providing direction of motion, a right-hand one for attitude – although, for safety, Bassett would remain attached to Gemini IX by a 45 m tether throughout the spacewalk.

Undoubtedly raising Cernan’s hopes for his own mission was the possibility that, if Bassett’s excursion went without a hitch, plans were afoot for a more autonomous AMU spacewalk on Gemini XII, perhaps untethered. In the days before enormous water tanks became the norm for EVA training, Bassett and Cernan spent much of their time physically conditioning themselves. Both men recognised that vast reserves of strength and stamina would be required to handle the demands of a spacewalk encased inside a bulky pressurised suit and resorted to lengthy spells in the gym, games of handball and hundreds of press-ups. “Before long,’’ Cernan wrote, “we grew Popeye-sized forearms.’’

Their suits needed to be somewhat different from that worn by Ed White on Gemini IV, partly in recognition of the demands of the AMU, as well as to provide additional comfort and protection. The new ensembles included a white cotton long – john-type undergarment for biosensors, a nylon ‘comfort’ layer, a Dacron-Teflon link net to maintain the suit’s shape and several layers of aluminised Mylar and nylon for thermal and micrometeoroid protection. Guarding them from the searing hydrogen peroxide plumes from the AMU (one of which would jet directly between

Bassett’s legs!) were the heat-resistant ‘trousers’ of the suit. These were composed of 11 layers of aluminised H-film and fibreglass, topped by a metallic fabric woven from fibres of the alloy Chromel R. One day during training, Bassett and Cernan watched as a technician charred the material with a blowtorch for five minutes, telling them that despite the intense temperature of the AMU’s exhausts, they would remain comfortable within their suits.

As Cernan continued his training as Bassett’s understudy, the pair – indeed, the foursome, if one also counted See and Stafford – spent so much time working together than a relationship akin to family developed. Despite their intense focus on Gemini IX, Stafford and Cernan undoubtedly looked forward to their own rendezvous, docking and spacewalking adventure with their own Gemini, their own Agena and their own AMU, towards the end of 1966. All that changed on the morning of 28 February, when it became clear that Cernan’s first journey into space would come much sooner, more unexpectedly and more horrifyingly, than he could have ever imagined or wished.

On the evening that the Apollo 1 crew lost their lives, the astronaut office in Houston was unusually quiet. At one point, only Al Bean was on duty and it was he who received the first word from Cape Kennedy of the fire. Several other astronauts were at Downey, California, running through simulations and practice for their missions… and a select delegation was at the White House in Washington, DC. There, veteran astronauts Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, Jim Lovell, Neil Armstrong and Dick Gordon witnessed the signing by President Johnson of a document popularly called ‘The Outer Space Treaty’. Four decades later, the document has around a hundred signatories and a further two dozen who are partway through their ratification of it.

Officially, it is known as ‘The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including The Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’. Essentially, the document forms the basis for the earliest international space law and on the very day that Grissom, White and Chaffee died, it was opened for signing by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Its 17 articles decree that signatories will refrain from the placement of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction into Earth orbit, onto the Moon or onto any other celestial body. The treaty explicitly states that the Moon and other celestial bodies are to be used for peaceful purposes and forbids weapons-testing and military exercises or implacements on them. Moreover, it denies signatories the right to ‘claim’ a celestial resource, such as the Moon, as its own and declares all to be “province of mankind’’. It also assures the safe and cordial return of any astronauts or cosmonauts who make an unexpected landing within the borders of another nation.

The astronauts liked to call it the ‘‘non-staking-a-claim treaty’’ and as the afternoon wore into evening, they mingled with guests at the event, including ambassadors from the Soviet Union (Anatoli Dobrynin), Great Britain (Patrick Dean) and Austria (Kurt Walheim, later Secretary-General of the United Nations). In his biography of Armstrong, James Hansen noted the astronaut’s recollection that the event ended at 6:45 pm and that, with the exception of Carpenter, the NASA delegation returned to the Georgetown Inn on Wisconsin Avenue. When they got to their rooms, they were greeted by flashing red lights on their answer machines. Something terrible had happened in Florida. A difficult year lay ahead.

Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad had flown the equivalent of a minimum-duration lunar flight and, indeed, one of them would tread its dusty surface in a little over four years’ time. Apart from stiff joints, heavy beards, a tendency to itch and an aroma, like that of McDivitt and White, which seemed somehow ‘different’ from everyone else on the recovery ship, they were fine. Cooper, whose heart averaged 70 beats per minute, had come through Gemini V in better shape than Faith 7. After eight days in a half-sitting, half-lying position, both men managed to do some deep-knee bends aboard the recovery helicopter, hopped onto the deck of the Lake Champlain without assistance and walked without wobbling.

They had, NASA flight surgeons determined, come through the mission less fatigued than the Gemini IV crew. This was at least partly because Cooper and Conrad got around six hours’ sleep per night during the early portion of their flight. However, their weight loss was perplexing: Cooper had lost 3.4 kg and Conrad 3.8 kg whilst aloft. They had, admittedly, only eaten 2,000 calories per day, rather than the scheduled 2,700, and drank their quotas of water, but both regained the lost weight within days. Still, neither exhibited signs of orthostatic hypotension and Chuck Berry asserted that ‘‘we’ve qualified man to go to the Moon’’.

Those plans received an abrupt setback on 25 October 1965.

When Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were assigned to Gemini VI, they were told by Deke Slayton that their two-day mission would feature the world’s first rendezvous with a Lockheed-built Agena-D target. Their backups, Gemini 3 fliers Gus Grissom and John Young, had been picked because Slayton ‘‘wanted a veteran backup crew to help with training’’. In his autobiography, Stafford would recall that Young sat actively through simulations with them, whereas Grissom was often absent, racing cars or boats. After three years working on Gemini, Grissom now had his sights set on commanding the first Apollo mission. Following Gemini VI would come Gemini VII, sometime early in 1966, flown by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell and backed-up by Ed White and Mike Collins. The decision to fly the first rendezvous mission ahead of the long-duration 14-day flight had come about because of ongoing Agena problems; Charles Mathews wanted assurances that, if anything went wrong on Gemini VI, there would be enough time to resolve it before resuming rendezvous practice from Gemini VIII onwards.

The first Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle (GATV), numbered ‘5001’, was shipped to Cape Kennedy in May 1965, purely as a non-flying test article, and three months later its successor – ‘5002’ – was officially earmarked for Schirra and Stafford’s mission. However, doubts over its reliability lingered. Its main engine, some felt, could not be trusted to execute manoeuvres with a docked Gemini and, although Schirra lobbied for it to go ahead, opposition within NASA to firing it was strong.

Next, Schirra pushed for a firing of the Agena’s less powerful secondary propulsion system, although this was not initially incorporated into the Gemini VI flight plan. To be fair, rendezvous techniques were very much in their infancy in 1965, as demonstrated by the unsuccessful attempt of Jim McDivitt to station-keep with the second stage of his Titan II. Buzz Aldrin, however, was a rendezvous specialist, having completed a doctorate in the field before becoming an astronaut, and he joined forces with Dean Grimm of NASA’s Flight Crew Support Division to plan a so-called ‘concentric rendezvous’ technique for Gemini-Agena missions.

Their plan was for the target to be launched, atop its Convair-built Atlas rocket, into a 298 km circular orbit, after which Schirra and Stafford would be despatched into a lower, ‘faster’, elliptical orbit. ‘‘Two hundred and seventy degrees behind the Agena,’’ wrote Stafford, ‘‘you’d make a series of manoeuvres that would eventually raise the orbit of the Gemini to a circular one below the Agena. Then you’d glide up below the Agena on the fourth revolution. At that time the crew would make a series of manoeuvres to an intercept trajectory, then break to station-keeping and docking.’’ This docking would occur over the Indian Ocean, some six hours into the mission, after which Schirra and Stafford would remain linked for seven hours and return to Earth following their battery-restricted two-day flight. The astronauts wanted to relight the Agena’s engine whilst docked, but NASA managers vetoed it as too ambitious.

During their training at McDonnell’s St Louis plant during the last half of 1965, the astronauts practiced manoeuvres again and again, plotting them on boards. In total, they did more than 50 practice runs and spent many hours rehearsing the actual docking exercise with the Agena-D in a Houston trainer. ‘‘Housed in a six – story building,’’ wrote Schirra, ‘‘it consisted of a full-scale Gemini cockpit and the docking adaptor of the Agena. They were two separate vehicles in an air-drive system that moved back and forth free of friction. We exerted control in the cockpit with small thrusters, identical to those on the spacecraft. We could go up and down, left and right, back and forth. The target could be manoeuvred in those planes as well, though it was inert. It would move if we pushed against it, just as we assumed the Agena would do in space.’’

On one such training session, Schirra hosted Vice-President Hubert Humphrey in the pilot’s seat. The vice-president asked Schirra if their voices could be heard from outside the trainer. When Schirra replied that, no, it was sound-proofed, Humphrey asked if Schirra minded him having a ten-minute nap. When Humphrey awoke, he asked Schirra to tell him what had happened so that he could tell the people outside. ‘‘I was a fan of Hubert Humphrey from that day on,’’ wrote Schirra.

Although barred from naming Gemini VI, Schirra sketched a design for a patch which he and Stafford could wear. It featured the constellation of Orion, which, navigationally, was to play an important part in the rendezvous. ‘‘The patch would be six-sided,’’ Schirra wrote, ‘‘since six was the number of our mission. Orion also appears in the first six hours of right ascension in astronomical terms, a quarter of the way around the celestial sphere.’’

In anticipation of this dramatic mission, processing of Gemini VI’s flight hardware ran smoothly. In April 1965, its launch vehicle, GLV-VI, became the first Titan to be erected in the new west cell at Martin’s vertical testing facility in Baltimore, Maryland. The rocket’s two stages arrived in Florida at the beginning of August and were placed into storage. Schirra and Stafford’s spacecraft arrived at about the same time and was hoisted atop a timber tower for electronic compatibility testing with GATV-5002. Such exercises would later become standard practice in readying Gemini-Agena missions. It was the last Gemini to run on batteries, thus limiting Schirra and Stafford to no more than 48 hours in space, although, by September, NASA was pushing for just one day if all objectives were completed. Even Gemini VI’s experiments – two rendezvous tests (in orbital daytime and nighttime), one medical, three photographic and one passive – were considered secondary to the proximity operations with the Agena. Said Schirra: “On my mission, we couldn’t afford to play with experiments. Rendezvous [was] significant enough!’’

However, so much reliance was being placed on the radar, the inertial guidance platform and the computer that Grimm and Aldrin found the pilot’s role was seriously impaired; if these gadgets failed, wrote Barton Hacker and James Grimwood, so too would the whole mission. Grimm persuaded McDonnell managers to rig up a device which could allow the astronauts to simulate trajectories, orbital insertion and spacecraft-to-Agena rendezvous paths. As a result, Schirra and Stafford were able to participate in no fewer than 50 simulations, conferring with Aldrin on techniques and procedures. Stafford would also recall the admirable efforts of‘Mr Mac’ himself – James McDonnell, founder of the aerospace giant which bore his name – who, upon learning that the astronauts needed more time on the training computers, complied. ‘‘Mr Mac was always behind the programme,’’ Stafford wrote. In fact, he and Schirra invited McDonnell to dinner on the night before the Agena’s, and their own, planned liftoff.

Early on 25 October, out at the Cape’s Pad 14, a team from General Dynamics oversaw the final hours of the Atlas-Agena countdown. The Atlas booster, tipped with the slender, pencil-like Agena, was scheduled to fly at precisely 10:00 am. Meanwhile, Al Shepard, by now the chief astronaut, woke the Gemini VI crew and joined them for breakfast and suiting-up. Schirra, struggling to give up smoking, lit up a Marlborough during the ride to Pad 19. He felt, wrote Stafford, ‘‘he could survive a twenty-four-hour flight without getting the shakes’’. One and a half kilometres to the south, General Dynamics launch manager Thomas O’Malley pressed the firing button for the Atlas-Agena at 10:00 am and the first half of the GTA-VI mission was, it seemed, underway. The countdown had gone without a hitch and, with 140 flights behind it since 1959, the performance of the Agena was unquestioned. The plan was for it to separate from the Atlas high above the Atlantic, then fire its own 7,200 kg-thrust engine over Ascension Island to boost itself into orbit. The complex orchestra of synchronised countdowns would culminate at 11:41 am with Schirra and Stafford’s own liftoff to initiate the rendezvous. Then, things began to go wrong.

The Agena apparently separated from the Atlas, but seemed to wobble, despite the efforts of its attitude controls to stabilise it. Right on time, downlinked telemetry confirmed that its engine had indeed ignited. . . and then nothing more was heard. It

had reached an altitude of some 230 km and was 872 km downrange of Cape Kennedy. Fourteen minutes after launch, it should have appeared to tracking radars in Bermuda, but was nowhere to be seen; except, that is, for what appeared to be five large fragments. Aboard Gemini VI, the astronauts, fully-suited, aboard a fully – fuelled rocket and ready to go, were puzzled. “Maybe it’s the tracking station,” Schirra surmised. “Let’s wait for Ascension Island.’’ As time dragged on, their countdown was held at T-42 minutes, but no sign of the Agena was forthcoming. Ascension Island saw nothing. “No joy, no joy,’’ came an equally dismal report from the Carnarvon station in Australia and NASA’s public affairs officer Paul Haney was forced to tell listeners at 10:54 am that the target vehicle was almost certainly lost. The Gemini VI launch was scrubbed.

In fact, problems had become apparent very soon after the Atlas-Agena left its pad. At 10:06 am, just six minutes into its ascent, Jerome Hammack at the Pad 14 blockhouse was convinced that something was wrong. So too was the Air Force officer in charge of the launch. Although early analysis of the partial telemetry data gave little inkling of what had happened, an explosion seemed the most plausible explanation. “Later investigation,’’ wrote Tom Stafford, “concluded that the Agena had exploded, thanks to an oxidiser feed sequence that had been changed.’’

In Houston, Flight Director Chris Kraft, together with Bob Gilruth and George Low, surveyed the damage. It was clear that if a rendezvous mission was to take place at all, a delay of several weeks simply to identify the cause of the accident would be unavoidable. “And if it turns out to be a major design failure in the Agena,’’ Time magazine drearily told its readers, “the Gemini programme is in deep trouble.’’ Critics argued that the Agena, with a satisfactory track record as a missile, had been extensively modified for its Gemini role and many of these modifications had never been tested in space. A disappointed Schirra and Stafford were quietly extracted from their capsule, to be told by Al Shepard: “Boys, what we need is a good party.’’ It was the perfect answer, to cheer everyone up, so the three men, together with Grissom and Young, headed off into town.

“For a day of so,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, “we thought about recycling Agena 5001, the ground test bird that hadn’t ever come up to specs.’’ However, a lengthy investigation into what went wrong with the 5002 target would still need to be carried out, the results of which would not be clear for weeks. Moreover, a new Agena would not be ready until early 1966. A perfect alternative, however, was on the horizon. Immediately after the Agena’s loss, Frank Borman overheard a conversation between McDonnell officials Walter Burke and John Yardley: the former suggested launching Gemini VII as Schirra and Stafford’s ‘new’ rendezvous target. A study of sending Geminis up in quick succession had been done months earlier and seemed an ideal option, but for one detail. Burke sketched his idea onto the back of an envelope, but Borman doubted the practicality of installing an inflatable cone onto the end of Gemini VII to permit a physical docking. Moreover, George Mueller and Charles Mathews dismissed the entire idea, since it would require the launch of both Geminis within an impossibly tight two-week period.

Other managers thought it could be done. Joseph Verlander and Jack Albert proposed stacking a Titan II and placing it into storage until another had been

assembled. The Titan’s engine contractor, Aerojet-General, had stipulated that the vehicle must remain upright, but this could be achieved with a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane, after which the entire rocket could be kept on the Cape’s disused Pad 20. Immediately after the first Gemini’s launch from Pad 19, the second Titan stack could be moved into position and sent aloft, conceivably, within five to seven days. The plan, however, held little appeal and received little enthusiastic response, with most attention focused on swapping the 3,553 kg Gemini VI for the 3,670 kg Gemini VII, thereby making good of a bad situation by at least using the Titan II combination already on the pad to fly Borman and Lovell’s 14-day mission.

In the next few days, as this was discussed in the higher echelons of NASA management, it became evident that if the two spacecraft were swapped, the earliest that Borman and Lovell could be launched would be 3 December. However, if the Gemini VII spacecraft were to prove too heavy for the GLV-VI Titan, a delay until around 8 December would become necessary to erect the more powerful GLV-VII. It was then envisaged to launch Schirra and Stafford to perform their rendezvous mission with another Agena sometime in February or early March 1966.

As these plans crystallised, Burke and Yardley posed their joint-flight idea to Bob Gilruth and George Low, who could find few technical obstacles, with the exception, perhaps, that the Gemini tracking network might struggle to handle two missions simultaneously. Even Mathews, when presented with the option, could find few problems, although Chris Kraft’s initial response was that they were out of their minds and it could not be done. Then, having second thoughts, he asked his flight controllers for their opinions, and the most that they could object to was that the Gemini tracking network might struggle to handle two missions. Kraft called his deputy, Sigurd Sjoberg, to discuss the possibility further with the Flight Crew Operations Directorate, headed by Deke Slayton. News filtered down, eventually, to Schirra and Stafford, who heartily endorsed it.

The prospects for Burke and Yardley’s plan steadily brightened when it became clear that the heavy Gemini VII – which, after all, was intended to support a mission seven times longer than Gemini VI – could not be lofted into orbit by Schirra and Stafford’s Titan: it simply was not powerful enough to do the job. Yet the question of tracking two vehicles at the same time remained. Then, another possibility was aired. Could the tracking network handle the joint mission if Gemini VII were regarded as a passive target for Gemini VI? Borman and Lovell would launch first, aboard Gemini VII, and control of their flight would proceed normally as the Gemini VI vehicle was prepared to fly.

As soon as controllers were sure that Gemini VII was operating satisfactorily, they would turn their attention to sending up Gemini VI; in the meantime, Borman and Lovell’s flight would be treated like a Mercury mission, wrote Deke Slayton, “where the telemetry came to Mission Control by teletype, letting the active rendezvous craft have the real-time channels that were available’’. This mode would continue until ‘Gemini VI-A’ – so named to distinguish it from the original, Agena – rendezvousing Gemini VI mission – had completed its tasks and returned to Earth. After Schirra and Stafford’s splashdown, Borman and Lovell would again become the focus of the tracking network.

Before NASA Headquarters had even come to a decision, the rumour mill had already informed the press, some of whom reported the possibility of a dual-Gemini spectacular. On 27 October, barely two days after the Agena failure, Jim Webb, Hugh Dryden, Bob Seamans and other senior managers discussed the idea and George Mueller asked Bob Gilruth to confirm that it would work. The answer was unanimously in the affirmative and Webb issued a proposal for the joint flight to the White House. He informed President Johnson that, barring serious damage to Pad 19 after the Gemini VII launch, Schirra and Stafford’s Titan could be installed, checked out and flown within days to rendezvous with Borman and Lovell. Johnson, residing at his ranch in Austin, Texas, approved the plan on 28 October and his press secretary announced it would fly in January 1966. At NASA, however, December 1965 was considered more desirable.

As October turned to November, preparations gathered pace. Aerojet-General set to work implementing steps by which, contrary to its stipulation, the Titans could be handled in a horizontal position, whilst the Air Force destacked GLV-VI from the pad and placed it in bonded storage under plastic covers at the Satellite Checkout Facility. On 29 October, Gemini VII’s heavy-lift Titan was erected on Pad 19. Guenter Wendt’s first reaction when he saw the short, nine-day Gemini VI-A pad- preparation schedule, was “Oh, man, you are crazy!’’ The Gemini VI-A spacecraft, meanwhile, was secured in a building on Merritt Island. Although Schirra and Stafford’s mission would essentially not change, that of Borman and Lovell was slightly adjusted to circularise its orbit and mimic the Agena’s flight path as closely as possible. Elsewhere, the Goddard Space Flight Center was busy setting up and altering tracking station layouts to enable simultaneous voice communications with both capsules.

At one point, ideas were even banded around for an EVA, in which Lovell and Stafford would spacewalk to each other’s Geminis and land in a different craft. However, Borman had little interest in such capers. His target was a 14-day mission and he had no desire to do anything that would compromise it. Also, he wished to use the new ‘soft’ suits that could be doffed in flight. If a spacewalk were to be added to the flight plan, he and Lovell would have to wear conventional space suits, which would make a 14-day mission an even greater chore. In any case, for Lovell and Stafford to exchange places they would have to detach and reconnect their life – support hoses in a vacuum, leaving them with nothing but their backup oxygen supplies for a while. The bottom line for Borman was that whilst an external transfer might have made great headlines, ‘‘one little slip could have lost the farm’’. Coupled with the fact that Stafford, as one of the tallest of the New Nine, sometimes had difficulty egressing from the capsule during ground tests, the decision was taken to eliminate EVA from the joint mission.

Cernan’s grandparents emigrated to America shortly before the outbreak of the First World War; on his mother’s side, they were Czechs from a Bohemian town south of Prague, while on his father’s side were Slovak peasantry from a place close to the Polish border. Their children, Rose Cihlar and Andrew Cernan, would produce the child who would someday gaze down on Earth through the faceplate of a space suit, would see the sheer grandeur of the lunar landscape and would become one of only a handful of men to go prospecting in the mountains of the Moon.

Eugene Andrew Cernan, a self-described ‘‘second-generation American of Czech and Slovak descent’’, was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 14 March 1934. As a young boy, he learned from his father how machinery worked, how to plant tomatoes, how to hammer a nail straight into a board and how to repair a toilet; all of which instilled in him an ethos ‘‘to always do my best at whatever I put my hand to’’. In high school, that ethos led him to play basketball, baseball and football, for which he was even offered scholarships, but eventually he headed to Purdue University in 1952 to read electrical engineering.

Four years later, Cernan graduated and was commissioned a naval reservist, reporting for duty aboard the aircraft carrier Saipan. After initial flight training, he received his wings of gold as a naval aviator in November 1957 and gained his first experience of flying jets aboard the F-9F Panther. He was subsequently assigned to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego and attached to Attack Squadron VA-126, during which time he performed his first carrier landing aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger, flying the A-4 Skyhawk. Then, in November 1958, Cernan participated in his first cruise of the western Pacific, flying Skyhawks from the Shangri-La aircraft carrier, when, ‘‘armed to the teeth and ready for a fight’’, he frequently encountered Chinese MiG fighters in the Straits of Formosa.

Shortly thereafter, the Mercury Seven were introduced to the world and Cernan heard about, and for the first time wondered about, the role of these new ‘astronauts’. In his autobiography, he noted that he met just two of NASA’s requirements – age and degree relevance – and had little of their experience and no test-piloting credentials. ‘‘By the time I earned those kind of credentials,” he wrote, ‘‘the pioneering in space would be over.’’ Still, the germ of a new interest, to become a test pilot and fly rockets, implanted itself in the young aviator’s brain.

In the early summer of 1961, now married to Barbara Atchley, Cernan was approaching the end of his five-year commitment to the Navy when he was offered the opportunity to attend the service’s postgraduate school for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. It offered him a route into test pilot school. When NASA selected its second group of astronauts in September 1962 Cernan knew that, although he held the right educational credentials, becoming a test pilot was still years away. Ultimately, however, the decision was made for him when one of his superiors recommended him to NASA for its third astronaut class.

As 1963 drew to a close, and by now the father of a baby daughter, Tracy, whose initials he would one day etch into the lunar dust at the valley of Taurus-Littrow, Cernan was repeatedly summoned to an unending cycle of physical and psychological evaluations and interviews by the space agency. Like so many others before him, he checked into Houston’s Rice Hotel under the assumed name of‘Max Peck’ and sat, ‘‘like a prisoner before the parole board’’, at an interview with such famous men as Al Shepard, Wally Schirra and Deke Slayton. The questions were awkward. ‘‘Someone asked how many times I had flown over 50,000 feet,’’ Cernan wrote. ‘‘Hell, for an attack pilot like me, who had spent his life below 500 feet, that was halfway to space!’’ How to turn the question to his advantage? He flipped it around, telling them that he had flown very low and ‘‘if you’re going to land on the Moon, you gotta get close sometime’’.

He was also getting close to actual selection, as friends began calling to enquire as to why FBI agents had visited them with questions about Cernan’s character, his background, his military record, his educational record, his parking tickets and his disciplinary records. At the same time, he was close to completing his master’s thesis, focusing on the use of hydrogen as a propulsion system for high-energy rockets. Then, just a few weeks before John Kennedy’s assassination, he received the telephone call from Deke Slayton that would truly change his life. Little did he know that one of his Navy buddies, Ron Evans, rejected by NASA on this occasion, would himself be hired in 1966 and the two of them would someday travel to the Moon together.

Cernan’s first two years as an astronaut were spent mired in technical assignments… and, despite being just one of a much larger gaggle of prospective spacegoing pilots, he and his colleagues still benefitted from the Life magazine deal, which nicely supplemented their military salaries. During the early Gemini flights, he occupied the ‘Tanks’ console in Mission Control, overseeing pressurisation and other data for the Titan II’s fuel tanks. Then, one day towards the end of 1965, a technician tapped on his office door and told Cernan that Slayton wanted him to get fitted out for a space suit. The reason was inescapable: a flight assignment, surely, was just around the corner.

On 8 November, it was official: Cernan and Stafford would support Elliot See and

Charlie Bassett, with an expectation that they could then rotate into the prime crew slot for the Gemini XII mission. Four months later, just promoted to lieutenant- commander by the Navy, Cernan had a new assignment. He and Stafford were now the Gemini IX prime crew and it would be Cernan, not Bassett, who would evaluate the AMU rocket armchair during one of the trickiest and most hazardous spacewalks ever attempted.

On 27 April 1967, an unusual communique was issued by the Soviet news agency, Tass. Days earlier, Vladimir Komarov – veteran of Voskhod 1 and the first cosmonaut to make two spaceflights – had been launched into orbit aboard the new Soyuz spacecraft. Within hours, however, euphoria had vanished into tragedy. In a handful of sentences, carefully crafted by the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Dmitri Ustinov, it was revealed that Komarov’s ship had ‘‘descended with speed’’ from orbit, ‘‘the result of a shroud line twisting’’. The result: ‘‘the premature death of the outstanding cosmonaut’’. Little more would be known in the western world for nearly three decades and only recently would details begin to trickle out. They would uncover a harrowing tragedy still shrouded in myth, mystery and rumour.

Soyuz was the brainchild of Sergei Korolev, the famous ‘Chief Designer’ of early Soviet spacecraft and rockets, with the original intention that it would support a series of lunar missions to rival the United States’ Apollo effort. When it became increasingly clear that neither the Soyuz, nor an enormous booster rocket needed to reach the Moon, called the ‘N-1’, would be able to beat the Americans, the Soviet paradigm shifted to near-Earth missions: in 1971, they would establish the world’s first space station in orbit. Soyuz would provide a ferry for missions which, by the end of the Seventies, would be routinely spending many months aloft. Four decades later, its basic design remains operational and, heavily modified, continues to transport cosmonauts and astronauts from a variety of nations to and from the International Space Station.

In his 1988 book about the early Soviet space programme, Phillip Clark traced the history of its development back to a three-part ‘Soyuz complex’ – a manned craft, a dry rocket block and a propellant-carrying tanker – which Korolev envisaged in the

early Sixties could be assembled in orbit for circumlunar missions. The first part, known as ‘Soyuz-A’, was closest in appearance to the spacecraft which actually flew. Measuring 7.7 m long, it comprised three sections: a cylindrical orbital module, a bell-shaped descent module to house the crew positions and a cylindrical instrument module for manoeuvring equipment, propellant and electrical systems. According to Korolev’s early blueprints, Soyuz-A weighed around 6,450 kg, but unlike the eventual version it was not fitted with solar panels.

Supporting Soyuz-A were the ‘dry’ Soyuz-B rocket block and the propellant­carrying Soyuz-V tanker. Clark has hinted that a typical flight profile would have begun with the launch of a Soyuz-B, followed, at 24-hour intervals, by up to four Soyuz-Vs, which would dock, deliver their propellant loads, then separate. When the Soyuz-B had been fully fuelled, a manned Soyuz-A would be launched to dock onto the rocket block. ‘‘Mastering rendezvous and docking operations in Earth orbit may have been one of the primary objectives of the Soyuz complex,’’ wrote Asif Siddiqi, ‘‘but the incorporation of five consecutive dockings in Earth orbit to carry out a circumlunar mission was purely because of a lack of rocket-lifting power in the Soviet space programme.’’ Nonetheless, the sheer ‘complexity’ of the Soyuz complex seems to have foreshadowed its restructuring sometime in 1964 and effected a postponement of its maiden voyage until at least 1966. It was as a result of this setback, Clark explained, that the stopgap Voskhod effort was ultimately born.

When Voskhod began with such apparent promise – the world’s first three-man cosmonaut crew, then the first-ever spacewalk – it surprised many in the western world, among them NASA’s astronauts, when nothing more was heard from the Soviets until April 1967. “They hadn’t flown in over two years,’’ wrote Deke Slayton, “which nobody could understand… Some people were beginning to say there wasn’t really a race to the Moon, and on the evidence you had to admit that possibility.” It was Korolev’s successor, Vasili Mishin, who spearheaded the abandonment of Voskhod, which many within the Soviet space programme felt was a diversion of resources from the more versatile Soyuz. “Given what we know about Voskhod,’’ added Slayton, “it was the right decision.’’

By October 1969, seven manned Soyuz spacecraft would have rocketed into orbit. However, a key physical difference between these missions and the original Soyuz-A concept was that they employed a pair of rectangular solar panels, mounted on the instrument module, to generate electrical power. The total surface area of these wing-like appendages was 14 m2, each measuring 3.6 m long and 1.9 m wide. The remainder of the craft’s design was strikingly similar to Soyuz-A: a spheroid orbital module, 2.65 m long and 2.25 m wide, atop the beehive-shaped descent module, itself 2.2 m long and 2.3 m wide at its base. Beneath the descent module was the cylindrical instrument module, 2.3 m long and 2.3 m wide. In total, Soyuz was somewhat larger than Apollo’s command module, yet smaller than the combined command and service module.

Its propulsion system, designated ‘KTDU-35’, consisted of a pair of engines operating from the same fuel and oxidiser supply. The primary engine had a specific impulse of some 2,750 m/sec, equivalent to around 280 seconds’ burn time, and a thrust of 417 kg, with early reports speculating that the propulsion system was capable of lifting Soyuz to an altitude of 1,300 km. This led Clark to suggest that a propellant load of 755 kg would have been required. Propellants took the form of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and an oxidiser of nitric acid, loaded in tanks on the instrument module. Clark speculated that, for the first few Soyuz missions at least, a lower-than-full propellant supply of around 500 kg was probably carried.

Like Vostok and Voskhod before it, the spacecraft and its three-stage rocket – an uprated version of Korolev’s Little Seven, including four tapering boosters strapped to its central core – were typically delivered to the launch pad horizontally aboard a railcar. The Soyuz’ own propellants were fully loaded before attachment to the rocket’s third stage, after which a payload shroud was installed and, following rollout, the entire combination was tilted into an upright position. Four cradling arms, nicknamed ‘the tulip’, supported the rocket at its base and a pair of towering gantries provided pre-launch servicing access. Cosmonauts entered the spacecraft through its orbital module and dropped down into their seats in the descent module.

Yet the development of this complex spacecraft had been mired in technical and managerial problems since the death of Sergei Korolev in January 1966. Indeed, only days before Soyuz 1 was launched, engineers are said to have reported no fewer than 200 design problems to party leaders, all of which were overruled by the political pressure of getting a cosmonaut back into space. Even Vladimir Komarov, the man who would fly Soyuz 1, is reputed to have said one night in March 1967 that he would not – could not – turn down the assignment, even though he knew the spacecraft was imperfect and his chances of returning alive were slim. His reason: Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and the Soviet Union’s most treasured hero, was Komarov’s backup. When asked by Gagarin’s KGB friend Venyamin Russayev why he could not simply resign from Soyuz 1, Komarov’s response was simple. “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead,’’ he said slowly. “That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’’

Russayev was so concerned by Komarov’s admission that he spoke to one of his own superiors, Konstantin Makharov, whose department dealt with spaceflight matters relating to personnel. Makharov told him that he intended “to do something’’ and asked Russayev to pass on a letter to Ivan Fadyekin, the head of Department Three, who directed him instead to a close personal friend of Leonid Brezhnev himself, a KGB man named Georgi Tsinev. The letter consisted of a covering note from a team of the cosmonauts, led by Gagarin, together with a ten – page document detailing all 200 problems with Soyuz. “While reading the letter,’’ Russayev was quoted by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony as saying, “Tsinev looked at me, gauging my reactions to see if I’d read it or not.’’ It seemed to Russayev that Tsinev knew of Soyuz’ inadequacies, but was not interested in the details. “He was glaring at me very intently,’’ Russayev continued, “watching me like a hawk, and suddenly he asked, ‘How would you like a promotion up to my department?’ He even offered me a better office.’’’ Russayev carefully declined the offer and Tsinev kept the document. . . which was never seen again. Makharov was fired, without a pension; Fadyekin was demoted simply for reading the document; and the hapless Russayev was stripped of all space-related responsibilities. ‘‘I kept my head down like a hermit for the next ten years,’’ he said later.

Against this backdrop, Soyuz’ problems had become almost chronic, with difficulties involving its Igla docking system, its simulators, its space suits, its hatches, its parachutes and its environmental controls. At one stage, early in its development, over 2,000 defects awaited resolution. Further, a series of unmanned Soyuz test flights under the ‘Cosmos’ cover name suffered troubles of their own. Phillip Clark noted that, as the break in Soviet manned launches stretched through 1965 and 1966, it became ‘‘almost a sport’’ among analysts to find evidence that a future crewed spacecraft was undergoing trials. Certainly, the flight of Cosmos 133 on 28 November 1966 and that of Cosmos 140 in early February of the following year were strongly suggestive of bearing some link with Soyuz. The first suffered a malfunctioning attitude-control system, which caused rapid fuel consumption and unanticipated spinning. An inaccurate retrofire and the likelihood that it would land in China eventually forced flight controllers to issue a self-destruct command to Cosmos 133. It exploded early on 30 November.

Two months later, Cosmos 140 suffered similar attitude and fuel problems, but at least remained controllable. . . for a while. Its control system malfunctioned during retrofire, producing a steeper-than-intended re-entry which burned a 300 mm hole into the heat shield. The only reason its parachutes successfully deployed was because of this burn-through; otherwise, they would have failed… an ominous harbinger of what would befall Komarov in April. Clearly, a Cosmos 140-type event would have doomed a human occupant, but the descent module separated successfully, parachuted to Earth and crashed through the ice of the frozen Aral Sea. It was retrieved by divers in 10 m of water and, astonishingly, the results of its mission were deemed “good enough” for Komarov to take the helm of a future flight.

In his autobiography, Alexei Leonov remarked that the Cosmos 140 burn – through had been caused by a flawed design feature which was slightly different to that on a manned Soyuz and admitted that “there was no chance of the fault recurring”. Still, today, it seems ludicrous to have even contemplated a manned mission with such unpromising test results and unforgiving hardware. Political pressure seems to have been the overriding impetus driving Soyuz’ schedule. One Soviet heat shield engineer, Viktor Yevsikov, hinted in 1982 that “some launches were made almost exclusively for propaganda purposes. . . the management knew that the vehicle had not been completely debugged: more time was needed to make it operational, but the Communist Party ordered the launch despite the fact that preliminary launches had revealed faults in the co-ordination, thermal control and parachute systems’’. The situation was so bad, admitted Yevsikov, that Vasili Mishin himself refused to sign the endorsement papers permitting Soyuz 1 to fly. He felt it was unready.

Mishin, despite being an excellent mathematician and fast-thinking engineer, was no Korolev. He had none of his predecessor’s stature or clout and was not renowned for his diplomatic skills. “Lacking the political instincts of, say, a Wernher von Braun or a Sergei Korolev,’’ wrote Asif Siddiqi, “he suffered dearly. Some would argue that so did the Soviet space programme in the coming years.’’ Nonetheless, with little opposition, Mishin was named Chief Designer in May 1966 and, although he quickly asserted himself, his insistence on filling the cosmonaut corps with non­pilot engineers from the OKB-1 design bureau to fly the early Soyuz missions infuriated Nikolai Kamanin. In his diary, the latter fumed that Mishin placed no value in six years’ worth of experience of his command’s training of cosmonauts to fly space missions. Kamanin considered it absurd that Mishin wanted to prepare civilian engineers for Soyuz command positions, with no pilot training, no parachute experience, no medical screening and no centrifuge practice. Eventually, under pressure from Dmitri Ustinov, Mishin was forced in July 1966 to accept pilot- cosmonauts for Soyuz command positions, with OKB-1 engineers filling support roles. It was only the first of many stand-offs between he and Kamanin which would place their relationship at a very low ebb.

Mishin’s desire to fly civilians into space had been shared by Sergei Korolev and, intermittently in the early Sixties, a few OKB-1 engineers had passed preliminary screening, but were never seriously considered by the Soviet Air Force. When eight military cosmonauts began training for the first Soyuz missions in September 1965, Korolev entrusted one of his engineers to explore the possibility of forming a parallel group of civilians. Eleven candidates passed initial tests at the Institute of Biomedical Problems and several months later, on 23 May 1966, Mishin signed an official order to establish the first non-military cosmonaut group. Candidates Sergei Anokhin, Vladimir Bugrov, Gennadi Dolgopolov, Georgi Grechko, Valeri Kubasov, Oleg Makarov, Vladislav Volkov and Alexei Yeliseyev seemed to have little hope of actually flying into space and the nomenclature used to describe them – ‘cosmonaut – testers’ – seemed to support the assumption that they would be of limited use.

Despite his doubts, Kamanin was finally appeased when Grechko, Kubasov and Volkov passed tests at the Air Force’s Central Scientific-Research Aviation Hospital and arrived at the cosmonauts’ training centre, Zvezdny Gorodok, on 5 September. Within two months, another pair, Yeliseyev and Makarov, had also arrived. All five, wrote Siddiqi, ‘‘were accomplished engineers’’, Grechko having worked on fuelling Korolev’s R-7s and Makarov having been involved in Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz development. Unfortunately, Anokhin, Bugrov and Dolgopolov did not pass the Air Force’s screening and were never considered for positions on the early Soyuz missions.

For the others, however, a seat on a spaceflight seemed only months away. Military pilot Vladimir Komarov had long been pointed at Soyuz 1, owing to his expertise, but Mishin, naturally, wanted two civilian engineers on the three-man Soyuz 2 crew. Nikolai Kamanin opposed this move, feeling that the complexity of the early missions made it inadvisable. A compromise was reached, thanks to the chief of the Communist Party’s Defence Industries Department, Ivan Serbin, who suggested flying an Air Force pilot (Yevgeni Khrunov) and an OKB-1 engineer (Alexei Yeliseyev) alongside Vostok 5 veteran Valeri Bykovsky on Soyuz 2. A few days later, on 21 November 1966, Komarov told a State Commission meeting at Tyuratam that he had been picked to fly Soyuz 1 and that Bykovsky, Khrunov and Yeliseyev would follow aboard Soyuz 2. It was a triumph for the civilians. Yet had Yeliseyev flown as planned on Soyuz 2, he would not only have become the first of Mishin’s civilians to enter space, but would have also been the first of them to die during his descent to Earth…

Over the years, western observers suspected that the Soyuz 1 mission had been pushed to fly prematurely and improperly as a political stunt in advance of the May Day celebrations, since 1967 coincided with the half-century anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Additionally, Leonid Brezhnev was in Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia at the time, at a meeting of the Soviet bloc leadership; the propaganda value of a major space success, for him, would be incalculable. In a dispatch to the Washington Star newspaper, Moscow correspondent Edmund Stevens wrote that the space effort under Mishin was less able to resist political pressure than Korolev had been. (It was even suggested that Leonid Smirnov, chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission, had personally told Komarov, still sceptical about Soyuz’ readiness, that the cosmonaut might as well remove all of his military decorations if he refused to fly the mission… )

In the days preceding the manned shot, rumours hinted of a space spectacular to rival Gemini and Apollo: a joint mission involving not one Soyuz, but two, and perhaps featuring rendezvous, docking and even the spacewalking transfer of crew members from one vehicle to the other. Reuters, for example, revealed on 19 April 1967 that such stories were circulating with some excitement in Moscow. Three days later, western journalists in the Soviet capital were told that two spacecraft with five or six cosmonauts would be launched, beginning on 23 April. If all went well with the first mission, it seemed likely that Soyuz 2 would fly at 3:10 Moscow Time the next morning. Komarov would attempt a docking on Soyuz 2’s first or second orbit and the two spacecraft would remain docked for perhaps three days. “There was speculation,” Time magazine told its readers on 5 May, “that the second ship had a restartable engine that would push the joined ships as far out as 50,000 miles.” This was obviously a false assumption, but it does highlight the uncertainty of exactly what the Soviets were up to.

Actually, the joint mission, and specifically the spacewalking transfer of cosmonauts between two spacecraft, had caused concern for months. The hatch in the Soyuz orbital module, for example, was barely 66 cm in diameter, scarcely wide enough for a fully-suited man to get outside and virtually impossible for him to get back inside. (The problems of space suits ‘ballooning’ had already been experienced by Alexei Leonov.) A redesign of the hatch, Mishin realised, would add months to the schedule and the decision was instead taken to modify the suits by moving their oxygen supplies from the cosmonaut’s back to his waist. Enlarged hatches would then be implemented on later missions. Nikolai Kamanin was unimpressed. ‘‘I am personally not fully confident that the whole programme of flight will be completed successfully,’’ he wrote, ‘‘although there are no sufficiently weighty grounds to object to the launch. In all previous flights we believed in success. Today, there is not such confidence in victory. . . This can perhaps be explained by the fact that we are flying without Korolev’s strength and assurances.” It did not bode well for the four men assigned to fly the Soyuz 1/2 joint mission.

Photographs released over the years have shown Komarov training with Bykovsky, Khrunov and Yeliseyev, the latter pair clad in EVA-type suits, confirming that they would have attempted the risky Soyuz-to-Soyuz transfer. Others show Yuri Gagarin, Komarov’s backup, assisting Khrunov with his helmet. In their biography of Gagarin, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony pointed out that it was Korolev’s death in January 1966 which refocused the First Cosmonaut on somehow getting himself back into space. His renewed self-discipline and vigour in completing an engineering diploma at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy impressed Nikolai Kamanin sufficiently to assign Gagarin in October 1966 as Komarov’s backup. However, despite his confidence, Kamanin noted in his diary that Gagarin’s importance to the Soviet state made it unlikely he would ever fly again.

Years later, Soviet journalist Yaroslav Golovanov would recall Gagarin’s behaviour in the hours before the Soyuz 1 launch as quite unusual. ‘‘He demanded to be put into the protective space suit,’’ Golovanov was quoted by Doran and Bizony. ‘‘It was already clear that Komarov was perfectly fit to fly, and there were only three or four hours remaining until liftoff time, but he suddenly burst out and started demanding this and that. It was sudden caprice.’’ Venyamin Russayev expressed his belief over the years that Gagarin was trying to elbow his way onto the mission to save Komarov from almost certain death in a botched spacecraft. Others have countered that, since Komarov was not meant to wear a space suit on Soyuz 1, Gagarin’s antics were actually designed to encourage his comrade to take one as an additional safety margin. Alternatively, maybe Gagarin was simply trying to disrupt matters somehow. Whatever the reality, archived pre-launch footage of the cosmonauts from that fateful third week of April 1967 – an unhappy Komarov, a downcast Gagarin and a team of very dejected technicians – show that that the atmosphere at Tyuratam was one of tense pessimism.

Other official images of Komarov arriving at the launch site showed him quite differently: bedecked with flowers… as, indeed, were Bykovsky, Yeliseyev and Khrunov, also in attendance for their own mission a day later. Plans for the flights were still very much in flux. Disagreement flared over whether to dock automatically or manually, with Mishin favouring the former and Komarov expressing confidence that he could guide Soyuz 1 by hand to a linkup from a distance of 200 m. At length, the chair of the State Commission, Kerim Kerimov, supported an automatic approach to 50-70 m, followed by a manual docking, although his judgement was still hotly contested.

Nevertheless, at 3:35 am Moscow Time on 23 April, Soyuz 1 was launched and inserted into a satisfactory orbit of 201-224 km. Within moments of reaching space, the Soviets referred to his mission, by name, as ‘Soyuz 1’, clearly indicating that a ‘Soyuz 2’ would follow soon. Fellow cosmonaut Pavel Popovich told Komarov’s wife, Valentina, that he was in orbit, to which she responded that ‘‘he never tells me when he goes on a business trip!’’ Four and a half hours into the mission, a bulletin announced that the flight was proceeding normally; as, indeed, did another report at 10:00 am. More than 12 hours then elapsed before any more news emerged from the Soviets, and when it did finally come, it was devastating. Not only had there been no Soyuz 2 launch, but, stunningly, Komarov had lost his life during re-entry.

Little information other than the basics were forthcoming in the terse final report. It alluded to Soyuz 1’s ‘‘very difficult and responsible braking stage in the dense layers of the atmosphere’’ and concluded that the ‘‘tangling of the parachute’s cords’’ had caused the spacecraft to fall ‘‘at a high velocity, this being the cause of the death of Colonel Vladimir Komarov’’. Twenty years later, Phillip Clark wrote of ‘‘persistent reports’’ that problems had been experienced during Soyuz 1’s first few hours in orbit. Its left-hand solar array failed to deploy properly, depriving Komarov of more than half (some sources say as much as 75 per cent) of his electricity supply. Soyuz 1 would be forced to run on batteries for a shortened mission of around a day in orbit. The subsequent, unusual, lack of televised images from the cabin and no other reports of in-flight activities lent credence to notions that the flight was in deep trouble.

A backup telemetry antenna also failed, probably triggering intermittent reception, and problems with solar and ionic sensors prevented Komarov from achieving even basic control of his craft’s orientation. (It later became clear that the Sun sensor had actually been contaminated by Soyuz’ thruster exhausts.) Although the antenna failure was a minor annoyance, the solar sensor was more serious, because without it Soyuz 1 could not be properly oriented for rendezvous and docking. During his fifth orbit, the cosmonaut tried to use his periscope and Earth’s horizon to reorient the craft, but found it virtually impossible to do so. The failure of the left-hand solar panel to open had also left Soyuz 1 in an asymmetric configuration, which made attitude control far more difficult. At one point, Komarov even knocked with his boots on the side of the spacecraft, to free a stubborn deployment mechanism for the panel, but without success. By this time, the Soyuz 2 launch – already hampered by heavy rain at Tyuratam, but now exacerbated by the ongoing problems in orbit – had been called off and the focus had shifted instead to ensuring Komarov’s safe return to Earth.

Attempts to bring him home, Clark continued, were planned on the 16th, 17th and 18th orbits, with the first retrofire attempt called off, presumably because the spacecraft could not be properly stabilised. Indeed, Doran and Bizony have reported that, at one stage, Komarov complained with fury: “This devil ship! Nothing I lay my hands on works properly.’’ Unlike the spherical Vostok, the underside of Soyuz’ bell-shaped descent module was distinctly flattened and it had an offset centre of gravity to provide it with some aerodynamic ‘lift’ during re-entry. However, it also required far more precision as it began to enter the atmosphere and, with Soyuz 1’s guidance system out of action, the cosmonaut could not keep it under control. When it began to spin, he attempted to fire his attitude-control thrusters to stabilise the situation, but their close proximity to the navigation sensors meant that he could not accurately align the spacecraft. In desperation, Komarov resorted to using the Moon to work out his alignment.

The first retrofire attempt apparently began at 2:56 am on 24 April, but the problems forced the automatic control system to inhibit it. A decision was made shortly thereafter not to make another attempt on the 17th circuit, but to use that pass over Russia to prepare him for re-entry on the next orbit. Sometime between 3:30-4:00 am, a Japanese station received signals from Soyuz 1 and Tass announced that a routine communications event was being held between mission controllers and Komarov. That ‘event’, according to some, was far from routine. In August 1972, a former National Security Agency analyst, under the pseudonym Winslow Peck (real name Perry Fellwock), reported being on duty at a monitoring station near Istanbul in Turkey on the morning of Komarov’s death. According to Fellwock’s report, the cosmonaut and ground controllers knew that the situation would produce fatal consequences and Komarov even spoke personally to his wife, Valentina, and to a tearful Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin. ‘‘He told [his wife] how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids,’’ wrote Fellwock. ‘‘It was pretty awful. Towards the last few minutes, he was falling apart. . . ’’

These and other harrowing, though unverified, reports imply that Komarov knew that the problems with Soyuz 1 were insurmountable. Unconfirmed stories over the years hinted that, when he finally began re-entry, he grumbled that ‘‘the parachute is wrong’’ and ‘‘heat is rising in the capsule’’. Evidently, the actual retrofire on his 18th orbit was far from perfect, in light of the asymmetrical shape of the spacecraft and the inability of the attitude-control thrusters to maintain proper orientation. Still, retrofire began at 5:59 am and ran for long enough to ensure entrance into the atmosphere. The Yevpatoriya control station in the Crimea picked up voice communications at 6:12 am, in which Komarov apparently advised them of the results of the retrofire and his loss of attitude, before entering a period of blackout as heated plasma surrounded the spacecraft.

During re-entry, the descent module should have separated from the remainder of the Soyuz – the orbital and instrument sections – about 12 minutes after retrofire. Parachute deployment should have begun 14 minutes later and touchdown some 39 minutes and 27 seconds after retrofire. Komarov’s voice reappeared during re-entry, sometime between 6:18 and 6:20 am, and was described as calm and unhurried, in spite of the 8 G load imposed by what was effectively a steep, ‘ballistic’ descent. Notwithstanding these problems, Soyuz 1 might still have landed safely. Then its parachutes failed.

In his autobiography, fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov related being based in the control centre, participating in the recovery effort. He wrote that ‘‘the brake chute deployed as planned and so did the drag chute, but the latter failed to pull the main canopy out of its container. While the reserve chute was then triggered, it became entangled with the cords of the drag chute and also failed to open’’. Indeed, Soyuz 1’s landing point – at 51.13 degrees North latitude and 57.24 degrees East longitude, some 65 km east of the industrial city of Orsk, in the southern Urals – was considerably farther west than normal and has been seen by many analysts as ‘‘consistent with a purely ballistic re-entry. . . and no parachute deployment’’. Locals in the Orsk area, who witnessed the final stages of the descent, confirmed that Soyuz 1’s parachutes were simply turning, not filling properly with air…

Meanwhile, Soviet anti-aircraft radar installations detected the incoming descent module at 6:22 am and predicted its ‘landing’ two minutes later. Elsewhere, listening posts in Turkey are said to have intercepted Komarov’s cries of rage and frustration as he plunged to his death, cursing the engineers and technicians who had launched him in a fault-ridden spacecraft. Whether this really happened will probably never be known with certainty. Travelling at more than 640 km/h, Soyuz 1 hit the ground like a meteorite, killing the cosmonaut instantly and completely flattening the descent module. Solid-fuelled rockets in its base – meant to cushion the touchdown – detonated on impact, causing the remains to burst into flames. The whole landing site was soon engulfed in smoke and the first helicopter pilot on the scene quickly judged that it was a fatal situation. ‘‘But he also knew he was on an open loop with Yevpatoriya and the Ministry of Defence satellite control centre in Moscow,’’ wrote Deke Slayton. ‘‘All he said was ‘the cosmonaut is going to need emergency medical treatment outside the spacecraft’, at which point the lines were cut by somebody in the rescue units.’’

The misleading call for ‘urgent medical attention’ is an intriguing story in itself. Flight surgeons Oleg Bychkov and Viktor Artamoshin, members of the search and rescue group which found Soyuz 1, recounted later that their helicopter touched down 70-100 m from the point of impact. ‘‘Everybody rushed to the capsule,’’ they wrote, ‘‘but only upon reaching it, realised that the pilot would no longer need help. Fire inside the spacecraft was spreading and its bottom completely burned through with streams of molten metal dripping down.’’ The rescue team was equipped with coloured flares to signal the overflying aircraft about the situation on the ground. No code existed to denote the death of the cosmonaut, so they were forced to fire the flare which equated to Komarov needing medical aid. It was this misunderstood message which, tragically, kindled some hope that Vladimir Komarov had survived.

On the ground, the flames were so fierce that portable foam extinguishers proved insufficient and the would-be rescuers began shovelling heaps of dirt onto the capsule. The force of impact had already reduced it from its normal 2 m height to a tangled mess no more than 70 cm tall and it was during the frantic firefighting effort that Soyuz 1 literally collapsed, leaving a pile of charred wreckage and a couple of congealed pools of molten aluminium, topped by the circular entrance hatch. Nearby lay the three parachutes. Komarov’s remains were “excavated” from what was left of his ship at 9:30 am and his death was pronounced as having been caused by multiple injuries to the skull, spinal cord and bones. Later eyewitness reports revealed that his ‘body’ took the form of a ‘lump’, 30 cm wide and 80 cm long, while Venyamin Russayev recounted that a heel bone was the only recognisable fragment left…

By this time, Nikolai Kamanin himself was on the scene and it was he who telephoned Dmitri Ustinov, who in turn contacted Leonid Brezhnev. Five hours later, it was Ustinov who carefully edited Tass’ communique on the subject of Komarov’s death.

A government investigation, headed by V. V. Utkin of the Flight Research Institute of the Aviation Industry, revealed that Soyuz 1’s parachute container had opened at an altitude of 11 km and had become ‘deformed’, squeezing the main canopy and preventing it from opening correctly. Although a small drogue had come out, the main parachute simply could not exit the container, and not just because of the deformation. The drogue was supposed to impart a force of 1,500 kg to pull out the main parachute, whereas it actually required upwards of 2,800 kg, perhaps a result of air pressure in the descent module pushing against the container. Such problems had never arisen in tests, Utkin’s panel found, but attributed them to the abnormal and ‘random’ conditions surrounding the Soyuz 1 descent. Future missions, the panel decreed, would benefit from enlarged and strengthened parachute containers. The failure of the drogue to pull out the main parachute was compounded by its backup canopy. This quickly became entangled with the fluttering drogue, leaving nothing to arrest Komarov’s meteoric fall to Earth.

Unofficially, gross negligence on the part of manufacturing technicians has also been blamed for Komarov’s death. During pre-flight preparations, explained Asif Siddiqi, the Soyuz 1 and 2 spacecraft were coated with thermal protection materials and placed in a high-temperature test chamber. Both were evaluated with their parachute containers in place, but lacking covers. This resulted in the interiors of both containers becoming covered with a polymerised coating, which formed a very rough surface and directly prevented Soyuz 1’s parachute from deploying. ‘‘Clearly,’’ wrote Siddiqi, ‘‘the most chilling implication of this manufacturing oversight was that both Soyuz spacecraft were doomed to failure – that is, if Komarov had not faced any troubles in orbit and the Soyuz 2 launch had gone on as scheduled, all four cosmonauts would have died on return.’’ None of this was mentioned in the official Soyuz 1 accident report.

As the Soviets, like the Americans, dug in for a lengthy period of self-criticism and introspection to make their craft spaceworthy, not another cosmonaut would venture aloft until October 1968. That cosmonaut, Georgi Beregovoi, would establish a new record as the oldest man yet to be launched into orbit, aged 47. He was also one of Yuri Gagarin’s harshest critics – a senior Soviet Air Force officer, Second World War combat veteran and decorated test pilot, albeit unflown in space – who considered the First Cosmonaut to be “an upstart’’ and a bit-of-a-lad who was “too young to be a proper Hero of the Soviet Union’’. Their relationship in the months before Komarov’s death grew so stormy that Gagarin even shouted that Beregovoi would never fly in space.

Seven months after Gagarin’s untimely death in an aircraft crash, Beregovoi finally got his chance. It was he who would lay the ghost of Vladimir Komarov to rest and nurse Soyuz through its first successful manned mission.

Titov’s long-hidden wrist injury may not have been detected, but almost immediately after reaching orbit another condition would become readily apparent. He would secure the unenviable record of becoming the first person to suffer from Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS) – ‘space sickness’ – which is today known to affect around half of all space travellers. Research over the past five decades has generally concluded that it is a nauseous malaise, somewhat akin to motion sickness, which typically lasts no more than two or three days of a mission. In Titov’s case, it manifested itself in sensations of disorientation and discomfort, coupled with feelings of dizziness and recurrent headaches. ‘‘As soon as the [R-7’s] third stage split, I felt turned upside down,’’ he recounted years later. ‘‘I couldn’t understand why I felt this way. Then I saw the Earth begin to turn slower in my eyes. Three or four minutes later, this feeling of being in the upside-down position went away.’’ He managed ‘lunch’ at 9:30 am and supper at 2:00 pm, consuming puree, bread, pate, green peas and meat and washing it down with blackcurrant juice, but when he tried to eat again during his sixth orbit, he vomited.

Sleep brought mixed blessings. Around ten and a half hours into the mission, and roughly an hour after bidding goodnight to flight controllers, his pulse rate dropped significantly from around 88 beats per minute to as low as 53. At about the same time, he awoke and was surprised to find his arms floating in midair, due to the absence of gravity. He tucked them under a security belt. ‘‘Once you have your arms and legs arranged properly,’’ he recalled in his state-sanctioned autobiography, ‘‘space sleep is fine. I slept like a baby.’’ Actually, Titov overslept by some 35 minutes, waking at 2:37 am, still feeling unwell, but recovering towards the end of his 12th orbit to eat breakfast. He would describe the food, including sausages and cold coffee with milk, which he had also been obliged to eat on the ground as a familiarisation exercise, as ‘‘joyless’’. On Earth, however, flight controllers were sufficiently concerned to scrub future Vostok missions until an explanation for Titov’s strange reaction to weightlessness could be found.

Even today, five decades later, explanations and countermeasures for the condition remain imprecise. It appears to be aggravated by the subject’s ability to move around freely in the microgravity environment, with over 60 per cent of Space Shuttle astronauts reporting the complaint, and appears to be more prevalent in ‘larger’ spacecraft. The cramped nature of the Vostok, Voskhod, Mercury and Gemini capsules made the sickness virtually unknown in the early Sixties and Titov’s unexpected response, together with other factors, may have prompted the decision not to fly him in space again. Indeed, following his mandatory appearance at Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow after the mission, he was quietly whisked away to hospital for tests to determine if he was sick.

Modern thinking postulates that the influence of weightlessness on the vestibular apparatus – the workings of the inner ear, which control balance – could present a possible root cause. This disorientation arises, it is theorised, when sensations from the eyes and other areas of the body conflict with those from the vestibular apparatus and with information stored in the brain as a result of a lifetime spent in ‘normal’ terrestrial gravity. Over a few days, a ‘repatterning’ of the central memory network occurs, such that unfamiliar sensations from eyes and ears begin to be correctly interpreted and adjustment to the new environment can commence. Today, motion sickness medicines have been shown to help counter it, but are rarely used, with most space fliers expressing preference to adapt naturally over a few days in orbit, rather than risk starting their missions in a drowsy state.

Of course, at the time of Titov’s flight, this was unknown. A one-day mission, with little opportunity to fully adapt to weightlessness, complicated his reaction to the environment still further. In the wake of Vostok 2, Nikolai Kamanin and others would notice the cosmonaut’s increasingly hyperactive and undisciplined behaviour – his love of women, excessive drinking and fast cars got Titov into hot water with his superiors on many occasions – and led to mutterings that it could have been triggered by his exposure to weightlessness. Kamanin penned his concerns in a July 1964 diary entry, although he was later assured that other Vostok fliers, some of whom spent as many as five days in orbit, exhibited no such personality changes.

To be fair, it would appear that Titov and a few other cosmonauts – Yuri Gagarin included – had gotten themselves into trouble purely by exploiting the fame which had suddenly befallen them and which was completely at odds with their previous restricted lives under Soviet communism. Titov was reprimanded repeatedly within the first year after Vostok 2: riding a motorcycle during a parade in Romania, consorting with prostitutes, an ‘incident’ with his female chauffeur, speeding, drunkenness, leaving a satchel of highly-classified papers in his unattended car and a hit-and-run traffic accident. His arrogance, too, was a constant concern, with demands for his own jet, involvement in decision-making processes and wanting to take his wife with him on foreign tours. It would be embarrassing to publicly disgrace him, but as the Sixties wore on it became increasingly unlikely that Titov would fly again. The original plan to hire pilots in their twenties to develop them as ‘career’ cosmonauts seemed to have partially backfired. In his diary, Kamanin revealed his frustrations and admitted that the public role of the cosmonaut was far larger than had been envisaged; more academic training was needed and Titov, Gagarin and others were enrolled into university before commencing further mission preparations.

Naturally, official Tass communiques yielded no indication of any sickness whilst in orbit. Titov’s pulse rate during his second orbital pass was given as 88 beats per minute and he was quoted during his fourth and fifth circuits as feeling ‘‘fine’’, ‘‘completely comfortable” and enduring weightlessness ‘‘in an excellent manner’’. When the cosmonaut’s relaxed, smiling face was broadcast to a Soviet television audience during his fifth orbit it revealed little of the discomfort he was experiencing. By the end of his tenth orbit, having covered a distance of over 410,000 km, the communiques boasted that he had travelled ‘‘more than the distance to the Moon’’. Aside from space sickness, Titov’s mission was almost a complete success, with the exception of a malfunctioning heater, which allowed the cabin temperature to drop to a chilly 6.1 °С. During his very first orbit, he took the manual controls of his capsule and checked out its systems, relayed greetings to the United States and received a congratulatory call from Khrushchev, who promoted him from captain to major and upgraded his status in the Communist Party from that of a candidate to a full member.

Gazing Earthward through the Vzor orientation device, Titov recalled how small his home planet appeared, even though he had regularly flown MiG fighters at high altitude, and was amazed at how quickly a circuit of the globe was completed. Travelling at some 28,000 km/h, his day-long mission orbited 17 times, during which he recorded ten minutes of film with a professional-quality Konvas movie camera and took photographs with hand-held Zritel cameras. “Flying over North America, I sent my greetings… and, 80 minutes later, I sent my greetings to the people of the Soviet Union, so it takes an hour and a half to circle the Earth,” he said later. “It’s very impressive. That was the brightest impression. I had the feeling that our Earth is a sand particle in the Universe, comparable to a particle of sand on the shore of the ocean. Here we live, and used to threaten each other with nuclear bombs, and I thought that no matter to what society you belong and what your relation is, you have to understand that we are all spacemen and the Earth is our spacecraft and we have to work here like spacemen do.’’ The sentiment among many in the United States, however, was still one of fear of the capabilities of this unknown communist empire. “It makes me sick to the stomach’’, one American military officer growled to a Time magazine writer.

Although Titov’s feelings were undoubtedly sincere, the distrust of Khrushchev’s regime was not helped by its excessive secrecy. Even the appearance of Vostok itself remained unknown: not for four more years would the shape of the spacecraft be unveiled to the world and Soviet misinformation gained yet more notoriety in October 1961 when the propaganda film To The Stars Again was aired about Titov’s mission. In it, the orbital motion of Vostok 2 was illustrated by a model fitted with stubby wings! According to a Soviet source quoted in the 18 December issue of the magazine ‘Missiles and Rockets’, the wings were “connected… with manoeuvres Major Gherman Titov reportedly carried out during the last orbits of his 17-orbit flight, when he was in the denser regions of the atmosphere’’. The wings led to a plethora of rumours in the west: was Vostok being developed as a military spacecraft, observers wondered, or perhaps as a platform to manoeuvre in space and conduct orbital rendezvous exercises? Later images, published in July 1962, even showed Mercury-style heat shielding and retrorockets attached to the spacecraft.

Titov’s retrofire occurred automatically at 9:41 am on 7 August, high above south-western Africa, and he was able to observe ‘‘with great interest,’’ he told the packed auditorium at Moscow State University a few days later, ‘‘the bright illumination of the air, which enveloped the spaceship during its re-entry into the denser layers of the atmosphere”. Vostok 2’s return was not perfect, though, since its capsule and instrument section also remained attached together and were only separated by aerodynamic heating. It would also become apparent that Titov landed dangerously close to a railway line, which led to the inclusion of representatives of the Soviet rail authorities on future State Commissions before launches. Half an hour after retrofire, the cosmonaut ejected and descended, like Gagarin, by parachute. He landed at 10:18 am, in a ploughed field near Krasniy Kut in the Saratov district, not far from his predecessor’s own touchdown site. The mission had lasted 25 hours and 18 minutes and Titov had travelled more than 700,000 km. Despite his sickness in orbit, he was described as exhibiting “a fit of euphoria’’ after landing and on his return flight to Kuibishev for debriefing, he alarmed the medical staff by opening and downing a beer in complete violation of the rules.

Suspiciously, Titov would later recount that it was his choice to either ride his Vostok to the ground or parachute out when he had descended to a sufficiently low altitude. “As already reported,’’ he told the Moscow State University audience, “the structure of the cosmic ship and its systems for landing provided the following two landing methods: landing by remaining inside the spaceship or by means of ejection of the pilot’s seat from the spaceship and descent by parachute. I was permitted to select my own way of landing. Contrary to Gagarin’s method of landing the ship, I decided to try out the second method.’’ Clearly, Titov’s need to reinforce to the world that Gagarin had landed with his ship and had not ejected highlighted doubts in the west that were still prevalent over precisely how the first two cosmonauts returned to Earth. As a result of admitting not landing in his ship, which Nikolai Kamanin later confirmed when he filled in the FAI paperwork in March 1962, Titov’s one-day flight would not hold the official record for spaceflight duration. That would go instead to American astronaut John Glenn, who had completed a five-hour orbital voyage in February of that year.

For Nikita Khrushchev’s regime, which just a few days later would prove instrumental in the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Vostok 2 flight represented yet another tangible example of communist superiority over the capitalist west. Titov and his young wife, Tamara, were paraded through Moscow to Red Square, where the Second Cosmonaut saluted atop Lenin’s Tomb and helicopters rained tiny, multi-coloured pictures of him into the streets. As he embarked on the public appearances circuit, he began to divulge the first minor details that weightlessness, although it “does not interfere with man’s capacity for work’’, did leave him with uneasy sensations in his inner ear. Psychological unease posed another obstacle, through homesickness, although this would be the only ‘sickness’ to which Titov would officially admit. ‘‘I knew that there was something in the nature of homesickness called nostalgia,’’ he said, ‘‘but, up there, I found there is also homesickness for the Earth. I don’t know what it should be called, but it does exist.’’

At 1:30 am on 5 May, the prime and backup astronauts, clad in bathrobes, met again at breakfast, before parting. Glenn headed out to the pad to check Freedom 7, while Shepard underwent his pre-flight examination, conducted by physician Bill Douglas. He was instrumented with biosensors – four electrocardiograph pads, glued to his chest, then a respirometer taped to his neck and a rectal thermometer to gauge deep body temperatures – before being helped into a set of long underwear with built-in spongy pads to aid air circulation. He would confess later to “some butterflies” in anticipation of the impending flight and began the 15-minute effort to squeeze into his silver pressure suit, securing zips and connectors and ensuring that the rubber and aluminium-coated nylon garment and his portable, briefcase-like air-condition­ing unit were ready. The latter proved essential: by the time he had donned his suit, wrote Time magazine, Shepard was sweating profusely and breathing hard.

The suit had been designed and built by the B. F. Goodrich Company, under a $98,000 contract awarded by NASA in July 1959, and followed similar principles to the Mark IV pressure garments worn by Navy fighter pilots. The company already had a long history in the field. Indeed, Goodrich engineer Russell Colley, who led the Mercury suit effort, had designed the pressurised ensemble worn by the legendary Thirties aviation pioneer Wiley Post. However, unlike the military Mark IV, which was hampered by problems of weight and mobility, the Mercury suit employed elastic cording, which arrested its tendency to ‘balloon’. Moreover, at just 9.97 kg, it was the lightest military pressure suit yet built. Its other key features included a ‘closed-loop’ system, which eliminated a rubber diaphragm around the pilot’s face; oxygen instead entered the suit through a hose at its waist, circulated to provide cooling and exited either through a hose on the right-hand side of the helmet or through the visor, if it was open. A small bottle, connected by a hose next to the astronaut’s left jaw, was used to pressurise a pneumatic seal when the Plexiglas visor was closed. During flight, the suit would provide and maintain a 0.38-bar atmosphere to keep Shepard alive in the event that Freedom 7 lost cabin pressure.

Elsewhere, the dark-grey nylon outer shell of the military Mark IV was replaced with one of silvery aluminium-coated nylon for improved thermal control – additionally, black boots were substituted for white-coloured leather ones (and, later, by aluminium-coated nylon leather) for the same purpose – and straps and zips provided a snug, though uncomfortable fit. However, the gloves on Shepard’s suit were zipped onto the sleeves, which prevented him from easily rotating his wrists to use the hand controllers. Post-flight modifications, implemented in time for Gus Grissom’s suborbital mission in July 1961, would incorporate wrist bearings and ring locks for greater dexterity. The fingers of the gloves were curved to permit the astronaut to grasp controls and a ‘straight’ middle finger allowed him to better push buttons and flip toggle switches. Each member of the Mercury Seven was supplied with three individually-tailored suits: one for training, another for flight and a third as a spare, costing some $20,000 overall. Body moulds were taken by dressing the men in long underwear, covering them with brown paper tape and cutting the

resultant mould to remove it when dry. So complex was the suit, Wally Schirra told Life magazine, that it required “more alterations than a bridal gown”.

Its intense discomfort was caused by the fact that, when inflated, it took only one shape. Any change in this shape, perhaps by the astronaut trying to walk or sit, reduced the suit’s volume and forced its wearer to exert himself to overcome the increased pressure. Simply walking left Shepard rapidly out of breath and, indeed, not until the Apollo missions would suits be built with ‘constant-volume’ joints to permit movement in the legs and arms without changing the pressure.

At 3:55 am, Grissom accompanied the fully-suited Shepard in the white transport van to Pad 5, after which technician Joe Schmitt fitted his gloves and Gordo Cooper briefed him on the countdown status. Meanwhile, at the top of the gantry, clad in white overalls and cap, John Glenn had spent the last two hours checking that every switch and instrument inside Freedom 7 was ready. At around 5:15 am, Shepard ascended the elevator to a green-walled room at the 20 m level – nicknamed ‘the greenhouse’ – which surrounded the capsule’s hatch. Glenn and Schmitt helped him inside, an effort made all the more difficult by his bulky parachute. America’s first spaceman, though, had an unexpected opportunity for a chuckle when he saw a girlie pin-up and a placard, put there by Glenn, which read ‘No Handball Playing In This Area’. A grinning Glenn, normally considered a straight-arrow and no prankster, quickly pulled it down. Presumably, wrote Neal Thompson, he had second thoughts and did not want to risk the automatic cameras inside Freedom 7, soon to begin rolling, accidentally recording his joke for posterity.

For more than an hour, Shepard lay in his custom-contoured couch and was secured by straps across his shoulders, chest, lap, knees – ‘‘the only time we used knee caps,’’ remembered Joe Schmitt in a 1997 interview, ‘‘because we didn’t know what was going to happen when he went up’’ – and even caps over his toes. Meanwhile, other personnel fitted sensors and adjusted straps before Glenn reached in, shook his gloved hand and wished him luck. The hatch clanged shut at 6:10 am, at which point Shepard’s heart rate quickened. Less than half an hour later, he began a ‘denitrogenation’ procedure, breathing pure oxygen to prevent aeroembolism – ‘decompression sickness’; a pilot’s equivalent of the bends – before sitting tight for liftoff, set for 7:00 am. This, however, was repeatedly postponed, first as banks of clouds rolled over Florida’s south-eastern seaboard, then when one of the 400 hz power inverters to the Redstone experienced regulation difficulties.

The countdown was recycled to the T-35 minute mark and picked up again 86 minutes later, after the inverter had been removed and replaced. Next, an error surfaced in one of the IBM 7090 computers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, responsible for processing Freedom 7’s flight data. By the time engineers had solved this problem, in which they had to completely rerun the computers, Shepard had been on his back inside the capsule for over three hours. Adrenaline pumping, he checked and rechecked the switches and dials on his instrument panel, then peered through the periscope at the throng of spectators lining Cape Canaveral’s beaches. Then, another, more personal, issue arose.

In addition to the discomfort brought about by lying in the cramped spacecraft for three hours, he found that he needed to urinate; the consequence, obviously, of too much orange juice and coffee consumed with Glenn earlier that morning. He eventually radioed ‘‘Man, I gotta pee’’ to Gordo Cooper, stationed in the nearby control blockhouse, and asked if Freedom 7’s hatch could be opened.

Cooper, taken aback, passed Shepard’s request up the chain of command, as far as Wernher von Braun, who emphatically declared that, no, ‘‘ze astronaut shall stay in ze nosecone’’. Exasperated, and in a tirade that was ultimately removed from the official transcript, Shepard warned that he would be forced to urinate in his suit if he was not allowed outside. Immediately, mission managers panicked – could the urine short-circuit the medical wiring attached to his body and the electrical thermometer in his rectum, they wondered – until the astronaut suggested that they switch off the spacecraft’s power until he had ‘been’. Eventually, agreement was received, Cooper confirmed ‘‘Power’s off” and heard shortly thereafter a long, contented ‘‘Ahhhh’’ from Shepard over the radio. ‘‘I’m a wetback now,’’ he told Cooper, as the warm fluid worked its way around his suit and pooled in the small of his back. . .

‘‘It caused some consternation,’’ Shepard admitted in his tape-recorded debriefing of the flight an hour after landing. “My suit inlet temperature changed and it may possibly have affected the left lower chest sensor… [but] my general comfort after this point seemed to be good.” Still, the issue led to the inclusion of a proper, though hastily-engineered, urine-collection device in time for Gus Grissom’s own suborbital mission 11 weeks later.

Fortunately, the urine was absorbed by his long cotton underwear and evaporated in the 100 per cent pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule and Shepard, thankfully, received no electrical shocks. NASA was spared, wrote Neal Thompson, of the embarrassment of having to report that America’s first spaceman had been electrocuted by his own piss. Humour aside, there remained a very real chance that 5 May 1961 might have ended with a dead astronaut. In such a dire eventuality, press spokesman John ‘Shorty’ Powers had readied statements to the effect that ‘Astronaut Shepard has perished today in the service of his country’, all adjusted slightly to take into account the point at which disaster struck: during launch, whilst in space or during re-entry. President Kennedy, too, was nervous, even though he had been assured by NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden back in March that no unwarranted risks would be taken. As late as a few weeks before launch, some senators, including Republican John J. Williams of Delaware and Democrat J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, felt that it should be delayed and run in secret to avoid a much-publicised failure.

Such attempts were vetoed by most members of Congress. The Soviets, it was pointed out, had received much international criticism for staging Vostok 1 under such ridiculous secrecy – to such an extent that some observers doubted Gagarin had flown at all – and felt tradition dictated that the press should have free access to cover an event of such historic magnitude. Moreover, said Ed Welsh, secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, ‘‘why postpone a success?’’ Still, even on 5 May, Kennedy questioned the need to televise the event live, even pressing NASA Administrator Jim Webb to play down the feverish publicity. Webb’s assurance that the Redstone’s LES tower would yank Freedom 7 and Shepard to safety in the event of a malfunction had little impact and Kennedy’s fears continued throughout the mission. Only minutes before the television networks picked up the countdown, NASA public relations officer Paul Haney was forced to reassure Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger that the escape tower would indeed save Shepard in an emergency. Salinger promised to pass this information to the president.

The decision to televise the launch in front of the media would also offer a poke in the eye for Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, whose regime had insisted on cloaking Gagarin’s flight in secrecy until success could be confirmed. In many minds, America’s ‘bravery’ at accomplishing the feat in front of the world placed it on a par with, or even above, the Vostok achievement. Khrushchev would publicly ridicule Freedom 7 as a ‘‘flea hop’’ in comparison to the Soviet triumph and, in truth, he was right, but on 5 May 1961 America won the moral high ground. A few days later, the Istanbul newspaper Millyet reported that Turkish journalists had asked the Soviet consul-general why his nation had not revealed the full story of Gagarin’s mission. In response, a Tass correspondent was quoted as explaining, somewhat lamely, that Russia was ‘‘mainly interested in the people’s excitement and reaction’’.

Shortly before 9:00 am, yet another halt was called when pressures inside the Redstone’s liquid oxygen tanks climbed to unacceptable levels. Instead of resetting the pressure valves, which would have meant scrubbing the attempt for the day, it was decided to bleed off some of the pressure by remote control. After cycling the vent valves several times, pressures returned to normal. The decision to do this was aided, at least partly, by an irritable Shepard, who, after almost four hours on his back and now lying in his dried-up urine, snapped “I’m cooler than you are! Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?’’ The words, like Gagarin’s “Poyekhali!” three weeks earlier, have since achieved immortality and truly epitomise the ‘right stuff which Shepard and everyone associated with Project Mercury had in shovelfuls. With two minutes to go, as the television networks started broadcasting live, the voice of Cooper in the blockhouse was replaced by that of Deke Slayton, serving as the first ‘capsule communicator’ – ‘capcom’ – from the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. Thirty seconds before launch, an umbilical cable, supplying electricity, communications and liquid oxygen, separated from the rocket as planned.

As the final seconds ticked away, Shepard’s biosensors would testify that his pulse rose from 80 to 126 beats per minute; privately praying that he would not screw up, his hand tightened around the abort handle. Already described by the physicians as the calmest man on the Cape that morning, his pulse rate was comparable to that of a driver moving from a service road onto a freeway. In total, he had been lying supine for four hours and 14 minutes – the delays alone had cost more than three and a half hours, enough time for a dozen Freedom 7 missions – and the jolt he expected at the instant of liftoff was instead replaced by what he would describe as something ‘‘extremely smooth… a subtle, gentle, gradual rise off the ground’’.

At 9:34 am, with 45 million Americans watching or listening in person, on television, on the radio or over loudspeakers, the Redstone roared to life, prompting Shepard, who had just activated the on-board timer, to confirm ‘‘Roger… liftoff and the clock is started!’’ Slayton, with a nod to comedian Bill Dana’s astronaut character Jose Jimenez, replied ‘‘You’re on your way, Jose!’’ So significant was the next quarter of an hour that it brought much of the United States to a standstill. A Philadelphia appeals court judge interrupted proceedings to make an announcement, free champagne flowed in taverns, traffic slowed on Californian freeways and people danced and sang in Times Square. President Kennedy broke up a National Security Council meeting, walked into his secretary’s office and stood, dumbstruck, hands in his pockets, watching Freedom 7’s rise to the heavens.

‘‘I remember hearing [the] firing command,’’ Shepard recalled less than an hour later aboard the Lake Champlain recovery ship, ‘‘but it may very well be that, although Deke was giving me other sequences. . . prior to main stage and liftoff, I did not hear them. I may have been just a little bit too excited. I do remember being fairly calm at T-0 and getting my hand up to start the watch when I received the liftoff from the control centre. I must say the liftoff was a whole lot smoother than I expected. I really expected to have to use full volume control to be able to receive. . . [but] all my transmissions over UHF were immediately acknowledged, without any repeats being requested.’’

Shepard had little time to sit still and do nothing. He had already agreed with Project Mercury’s operations director, Walt Williams, that he would talk as much as possible throughout the mission, to keep everyone updated on even the tiniest details. As the Redstone speared higher and higher, his voice crackled out the data – “This is Freedom 7,’’ he exulted, “the fuel is go; 1.2 G; cabin is 14 psi; oxygen is go; all systems are go’’ – and, 16 seconds after launch, the rocket commenced a pitchover manoeuvre of two degrees per second, from 90 to 45 degrees, a procedure that was complete some 40 seconds into the flight. He had anticipated around 6 G during ascent, even though he had trained and endured more than twice as much in the centrifuge and the MASTIF. Although the liftoff was smooth, his ride turned bumpy and caught him off-guard when he reached the turbulent transition between the edge of the ‘sensible’ atmosphere and space. Eighty-eight seconds after launch, Freedom 7 began shuddering violently and Shepard’s head, wrote Neal Thompson, was “jackhammering so hard against the headrest that he could no longer see the dials and gauges clearly enough to read the data’’. As a result, he waited until the vibrations had calmed before transmitting any more status updates to Slayton.

Lack of visibility, in fact, had been one of the fundamental medical effects that physicians had most feared: could the astronauts see properly in and around their capsules? Such questions seem trivial today, but aerospace scientists had for years written quite seriously about the possible impact of weightlessness on the muscle structure around and beneath the eyes and the possibility that it might change shape over several hours, permanently ruining their vision. John Glenn was assigned to investigate this possibility on his Friendship 7 mission, the first American orbital flight, in February 1962. ‘‘On the instrument panel,’’ he told an interviewer in 1997, ‘‘is a little Snellen chart like the eye chart they use in doctors’ offices, miniaturised for the distance from my eyes to the panel, and I was to read the smallest line I could read every 20 minutes during flight and report what that was, so if my eyes were changing shape or vision was changing, I would be able to report this.’’

Uncontrollable nausea and vertigo, triggered by the random movement of fluids in the inner ear, was another possibility and, although other astronauts have since been known to suffer ‘space sickness’, the irony of Project Mercury was that the capsules were too small and cramped to give their pilots an opportunity to move around and become disorientated. There were other concerns. ‘‘They didn’t know whether you could swallow properly,’’ explained Glenn and, added Gordo Cooper, ‘‘There were a lot of these medical experts who said that the cardiovascular system would not be able to function under zero gravity’’. The simple, yet vital, work done by the Mercury astronauts and their Vostok counterparts exemplified how little was known about how human beings could function in the weightless environment, high above their home planet, at the dawn of the Sixties. They were pioneers, taking the first steps into a strange new environment.

Even before he reached space, Shepard had satisfied one of the physicians’ main worries: by proving that he could indeed survive the rigours of a rocket launch. Yet it was only after passing through ‘Max Q’ – a period of maximum aerodynamic turbulence; the phase at which Freedom 7, by now accelerating through the sound barrier and into the rarefied air of the high atmosphere, was subjected to massive loads – did he finally grunt to Slayton that the ride was “a lot smoother now”. Then, 141.8 seconds after launch, the Redstone’s engine finally burned out, followed, a second later, by the jettisoning of the LES tower. Although the latter should have been automatic, it was actually performed manually, but Shepard would not recall ever pulling the manual ‘JETT TOWER’ override ring. The Redstone burnout triggered the initiation of small explosive charges, which, 38 seconds later, severed the link with Freedom 7 and three posigrade rockets on the capsule pushed the pair apart at 4.6 m/sec. By now, Shepard’s pulse had climbed to 132 beats per minute, but calmed dramatically when he saw and reported to Slayton that the green ‘CAP SEP’ indicator light confirmed the capsule had indeed successfully separated from the rocket.

Now flying free of the Redstone, Shepard’s tasks – to prove that, unlike Gagarin, he was able to actively control his ship – got underway. Firstly, the attitude-control system moved the capsule into a heat shield-forward position for the rest of the flight, introducing momentary oscillations which were quickly damped out by a five – second firing of the automatic thrusters. He switched Freedom 7 from automatic to manual control about three minutes after launch and, using a MASTIF-like stick, tilted the capsule through pitch, yaw and roll exercises, ‘controlling’ his spacecraft for the first time, whilst travelling at 8,200 km/h – nearly eight times the speed of sound and almost three times faster than any American in history. Shepard found that he was able to exercise control crisply and Freedom 7 responded very much like the simulator, although his ability to hear the spurting hydrogen peroxide jets was virtually drowned out by the crackling of the radio. He actually operated his spacecraft by three means – fully automatic, manual and a ‘fly-by-wire’ combination of the two. He reported that the manual mode responded well, although the capsule tended to roll slightly clockwise. Post-flight inspections uncovered a piece of debris lodged in the hydrogen peroxide tubing, which probably caused their jets to leak a tiny increment of thrust.

At 9:38 am, four minutes after launch, Shepard experienced weightlessness for the first time, as his body gently floated from his couch and against his shoulder harnesses. Flecks of dust drifted past his face, together with a stray washer, which quickly vanished from view. As he neared the apex of his arc into space, he made an attempt to observe the world beneath him through Freedom 7’s periscope. Unfortunately, during the morning’s lengthy delays, to minimise the blinding sunlight, he had flicked a switch that covered the lens with a grey filter and had forgotten to remove it before launch. Now he was greeted only with a grey-coloured blob on the screen before him. When he tried to reach across the cabin to flick off the filter, his wrist hit the abort handle and he thought it best to leave well alone.

Shepard’s dramatic description of Earth – ‘‘What a beautiful view!’’ – was surely sincere, but was certainly not accompanied by glorious colour. Still, he later told NASA officials, the vista was ‘‘remarkable’’ and he was able to see Lake Okeechobee, on the northern edge of Florida’s Everglades, together with Andros Island, shoals off Bimini and some cloud cover over the Bahamas. Although he would later tell a Life journalist of the ‘‘brilliantly clear’’ colours around Bimini, he would privately admit that the grey filter ‘‘obliterated most of the colours’’. When questioned by Wally Schirra, his response was “shit, I had to say something for the people!”

At the top of the long arc over the Atlantic – rising, at apogee, to almost 188 km – the periscope automatically retracted and Shepard was obliged to strain to look for stars and planets through the two small, awkwardly-placed portholes, one to his upper-left side and the other to his lower-right. He wanted the chance to see what Yuri Gagarin had claimed to have seen, but in fact could see nothing, no matter which way he twisted or turned. Looking for stars and planets placed him slightly behind schedule. Although the entire mission would span only 15 minutes, and barely a fraction of that would be spent ‘in space’, NASA had overloaded him with tasks, lasting a minute here or two minutes there. To catch up, Shepard feverishly put Freedom 7 through its paces, before eventually radioing to Slayton that the three retrorockets had successfully fired at their prescribed five-second intervals and his spacecraft was positioned in its proper re-entry attitude.

Six minutes and 13 seconds after launch, as the tiny capsule began its plummet towards the ocean, the now-spent retrorocket package automatically separated. Even though his time in weightlessness had been so brief, he would later remark aboard the recovery ship Lake Champlain, ‘‘there is no question about it: when those retros go, your transition from zero-G to essentially 0.05 G is noticeable”. Flying with its base facing in the direction of travel, such that it could properly absorb the intense heat caused by friction with the upper atmosphere, Shepard was shoved into his couch with 11 times the force of normal terrestrial gravity. This part of the ride, he knew, was among the most physically demanding and ‘‘not one most people would want to try in an amusement park’’. In less than 30 seconds, Freedom 7 slowed from its 8,200 km/h suborbital velocity to around 800 km/h. During this time, the astronaut could scarcely speak, so high were the G forces, and could barely manage a series of grunted ‘‘okays’’ to Slayton. Then, from an altitude of 24 km down to 12 km, the frictional heating raised temperatures at the base of the capsule to a blistering 1,200°C; within, however, conditions held steady at 38°C and, inside his pressure suit, Shepard experienced a balmy, but relatively comfortable, 28°C. It was, he said, ‘‘like being in a closed van on a warm summer day’’.

As the descent continued, the automatic stabilisation and control system detected the onset of re-entry and initiated a roll of ten degrees per second to keep Freedom 7 on track. Six and a half kilometres above the Atlantic, and still barely nine minutes after launch, Shepard felt relief as the drogue parachute popped from the spacecraft’s nose, followed, seconds later, by the jettisoning of the antenna capsule and deployment of the 19.2 m-diameter orange and white main canopy. This blossomed open, arresting the capsule with ‘‘a reassuring kick in the butt’’. A snorkel valve opened to equalise cabin pressure with the outside air, after which the heat shield dropped 1.2 m and the landing bag was extended. Shepard would later describe the deployment of the main chute, not surprisingly, as the most beautiful sight of the whole mission. It slowed the capsule to a stately 30 km/h and even the splashdown itself, some 490 km east of Cape Canaveral and 160 km north of the Bahamas, felt no worse than the shove he used to experience from the catapults aboard naval aircraft carriers.

His precise landing co-ordinates were 75 degrees 53 minutes West longitude and 27 degrees 13.7 minutes North latitude. Freedom 7 initially listed over to its right side, about 60 degrees from an upright position, but righted itself within a minute or so. The parachutes cast loose to prevent dragging the capsule and a patch of fluorescent green marker dye spread across the water, although recovery forces had already been monitoring Shepard’s descent for several minutes and were closing in. America’s first manned spaceflight had lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.

Shortly thereafter, Wayne Koons, the pilot of one of the five Marine Air Group 26 rescue helicopters despatched from the Lake Champlain, was hovering overhead and his co-pilot George Cox had snagged Freedom 7 with hook and line (though not before the spacecraft’s high-frequency antenna had pronged upwards and dented the base of the chopper). Shepard, still midway through removing his helmet and releasing his restraints, asked the impatient Koons to lift the capsule slightly above the waterline. Eventually, America’s first astronaut popped open the hatch and leaned out to grab the ‘horse’s collar’ – a padded harness that Cox had lowered – then pulled it towards him and looped it over his head and under his arm. He gave a thumbs-up and was pulled to the helicopter. Koons’ crew had trained for more than a year for this moment and had established themselves as experts at hovering above Mercury capsules, hooking them and getting astronauts out. Indeed, Cox had successfully fished Ham out of the drink just a few months earlier.

Even now, it was a nervous time for Shepard. Only hours before, he had read a disturbing report of the harrowing experience of fellow naval aviators Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather. On 4 May, only hours after the Freedom 7 countdown had begun, the pair had ascended 34.6 km above the Gulf of Mexico in a balloon gondola, part of the Navy’s Stratolab high-altitude research effort. During their nine-hour ascent, the two pressure-suited men had been subjected to temperatures as low as -70°C and, since their weights were doubled by their equipment, they had found it virtually impossible to move within the gondola. Their mission to the very edge of space was successful and satisfactorily evaluated the performance of their pressure suits, but, after landing, Prather, mistakenly thinking himself to be out of danger, opened his helmet visor. As he clambered up the ladder to the rescue helicopter, he slipped, fell and drowned when his suit filled with water. Prather’s tragic death would surely have reinforced to Shepard that, even home from space, he would not be truly ‘safe’ until he was standing on the deck of the recovery ship. Indeed, his weight on the end of the winch actually caused Koons’ helicopter to drop slightly and the astronaut’s splayed legs splashed briefly back into the Atlantic, before finally being pulled clear.

The efforts to ensure his safety had been nothing short of extraordinary. Fire trucks had been stationed close to Pad 5, ready to offer support in the event of a launch accident, whilst helicopters stood by with technicians, physicians and frogmen to recover Shepard if he landed unhappily. Waiting out at sea were naval speedboats, whilst other craft were prepared to fish Freedom 7 from the Banana River, a lagoon between Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island. Meanwhile, near the prime recovery zone in the Atlantic, the Lake Champlain bristled with its recovery helicopters and a flotilla of six destroyers was strung out along the tracking range.

Elsewhere, at the Cape itself, radars and high-flying aircraft monitored the skies for virtually every second that the astronaut was aloft.

Declaring that it was truly “a beautiful day”, Shepard was flown back to the recovery ship, where 1,200 sailors covered the decks, cheering his success. Koons and Cox lowered Freedom 7 – soon to be exhibited at 1961’s Paris Air Show – onto a specially-made stack of mattresses, disconnected it and touched down in what Shepard would call “the most emotional carrier landing I ever made”. Barely 11 minutes after splashdown, he set foot on the carrier deck.

Similar emotions were being played out across the nation: Floridian crowds cheered, John Glenn jovially asked the recovery ships to remain in the Atlantic in the hope that NASA might set up another Redstone for him, New Hampshire’s governor visited East Derry, schools closed and military aircraft dropped confetti as Shepard’s proud parents and sister rode in an open-topped convertible. For the astronaut’s wife, Louise, the calm after the storm came when she received word from NASA that her husband was safely aboard the Lake Champlain. As she chatted to journalists outside her Virginia Beach home, a Navy jet spelled out the letter ‘S’ in the sky to honour the United States’ newest hero.

The hero himself, after guzzling orange juice in the quarters of the ship’s captain, was handed a tape recorder and asked to record his initial thoughts. He was then grilled by the physicians, as he relived every detail of the 15-minute flight – and the hours on the pad beforehand: no, he did not sleep, no, he did not defecate, yes, there was a noticeable odour in the cabin (urine) and so on. Midway through this debriefing, he received the first of many calls from his commander-in-chief, President Kennedy, who congratulated him. Privately, the administration could breathe a sigh of relief now that, 23 days after Gagarin’s mission and still smarting from the Bay of Pigs, the United States finally had something in which to take pride. That afternoon, the president announced that ‘‘this is an historic milestone in our own exploration of space’’. Added journalist Julian Scheer, later to become NASA’s public affairs officer: ‘‘Shepard bailed out the ego of the American people. As a nation, we desperately wanted a success and we got not only a success, but an instant hero’’.

An hour after his arrival aboard the Lake Champlain, the astronaut set off aboard a two-engined C-1 transport aircraft, which took him to Grand Bahama Island for three days of tests. He was greeted by Wally Schirra, who had watched his launch from the front seat of an F-106 aircraft that morning, together with Gus Grissom and capcom Deke Slayton. Thirty-two specialists debriefed him, with Carmault Jackson questioning his medical health, Bob Voas probing his performance as Freedom 7’s pilot and Harold Johnson and Sigurd Sjoberg focusing on the operation of the capsule’s systems. After downing a huge shrimp cocktail, a roast beef sandwich and iced tea, Shepard learned that he had lost 1.3 kg in weight since breakfast. Nonetheless, the doctors proclaimed him in good shape and jubilant spirits. His $400 million mission had cost each American taxpayer $2.25 and the astronaut himself was surely overjoyed to receive an extra $14.38 in naval flight pay.

Right from the start, Walter Marty Schirra Jr was known for his ‘gotchas’.

Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on 12 March 1923, he was once described as having aviation in his blood; his parents having both engaged in ‘barnstorming’ and ‘wing-walking’ during the Twenties. As his father Walter, a veteran First World War fighter pilot and engineer, handled the controls of a Curtiss Jenny biplane, his mother Florence danced on the lowermost wing, using the struts for support. Spectators in Oradell, New Jersey, paid up to five dollars a time to witness the Schirras’ stunts. Fortunately, wrote the astronaut, his mother ‘‘gave up wing­walking when I was in the hangar!’’ Nevertheless, he would use his mother’s experience to his advantage: unlike the celebrated, faster-than-sound test pilots Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield, Schirra was flying even before he was born…

He graduated from Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1940 and attended the Newark College of Engineering, before being appointed to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. His disappointed father had wanted him to attend West Point as an Army officer, but in his autobiography Schirra would recall seeing a naval aviator during his boyhood, clad in ‘‘green uniform, the sharp gold wings above his left pocket and his polished brown shoes shiny. From that day on, I always wanted to go to Navy’’. Schirra underwent an abbreviated class, ‘‘a five – year programme… crammed into three’’, received his degree in 1945 and served two years at sea in the Pacific. Not only was his education abbreviated, but so too was his whirlwind romance with Jo Fraser, whom he met, courted for seven days and finally married whilst on leave in February 1946.

A tour of duty in China, attached to the staff of the commander of the Seventh Fleet as a briefing officer, meant that Schirra was a witness to the communist revolution sweeping across the most populous nation on Earth. ‘‘A high crime rate in the neighbourhood in which Jo and I lived,’’ he wrote, ‘‘practically a robbery a night, was an expression of revolutionary contempt for the American ‘imperialists’ . . . I knew when we left that China would never be the same again.’’ Shortly thereafter,

Wally Schirra (right) and Wernher von Braun.

and proving that aviation was truly in his blood, Schirra became the first member of his academy to be detailed for flight training, transferring to Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida and receiving his wings in June 1948. Like Scott Carpenter, he started off by soloing in a Yellow Peril biplane and then flew naval fighters for three years. Upon the outbreak of war in Korea, Schirra volunteered for active service as an exchange aviator with an Arkansas-based Air National Guard unit. He spent eight months in south-east Asia, flew 90 combat missions in the F-84 Thunderjet fighter-bomber and shot down two MiG-15s – “a tough little adversary” – for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Following Korea, Schirra served at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California, during which time he participated in the initial development of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile and later served as chief test pilot for the F-7U Cutlass and FJ-3 Furyjet fighters at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. Although he praised the usefulness of the Cutlass in better understanding the aerodynamics of a delta-winged aircraft, Schirra would reject it on the basis that if it stalled with its leading-edge slats ‘in’, its motions became wild and random, with ejection the pilot’s sole option. The Cutlass would later be declared operational, much to the chagrin of Schirra and the other members of his flight-test group, who had seen a number of fatalities. Indeed, over a quarter of all Cutlasses built would be lost in accidents. Years later, he would refer to it darkly as a ‘‘widow-maker’’.

Schirra completed the Naval Air Safety School and a tour of the Far East aboard the Lexington, before being selected for and reporting to the Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, in January 1958. ft was at this time, he wrote, that he learned to communicate effectively with engineers, ‘‘the most valuable asset that f took from test pilot school to the space programme”. For each test, Schirra was required to report in depth on tactical manoeuvres, power settings and data points. Within the next two years, he would be applying this expertise to the development of Project Mercury. Whilst at Pax River, Schirra met three other hotshot naval aviators, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon and Jim Lovell, who would themselves later become astronauts. Graduating in late 1958, he assumed duties as a fully-fledged test pilot, transferring to the famed Edwards Air Force Base in California to help evaluate the F-4H Phantom-II long-range supersonic fighter-bomber.

Then, like more than a hundred other Navy, Air Force and Marine fliers across the United States, in the spring of 1959 Schirra received classified orders to attend a briefing in Washington, DC. Initially, he was reluctant to undergo the months of training for the much-lambasted ‘man-in-a-can’ effort to send an American into space. ‘‘I wanted to be cycled back to the fleet with the F-4H, get credit or take blame for its performance and put it through its paces as a tactical fighter,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I saw myself as the first commander of an F-4H squadron. The space programme to me was a career interruption.’’ Despite his reluctance, Schirra underwent the gruelling tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson, realising that as other hotshot pilots fell by the wayside, he was on the cusp of joining the most elite flying fraternity of all.

Undoubtedly, Schirra’s experience had placed him in mortal danger on many occasions, yet his lifetime motto remained: ‘‘Levity is the lubricant of a crisis’’. In fact, on the day the Mercury Seven were introduced to journalists in April 1959, Deke Slayton remembered Schirra telling a joke. It was not his first, nor would it be his last, and he would be in good company in the dark-humour stakes. All seven of them would dream up their own fiendish practical jokes – called ‘gotchas’ – which they inflicted on each other, on flight surgeons, on their nurse, Dee O’Hara, on Henri Landwirth and on an unfortunate Life photographer named Ralph Morse. The latter, who had succeeded in his own ‘gotcha’ by tracking them down on a desert-survival training exercise in Reno, Nevada, received his comeuppance at the hands of Schirra and Al Shepard. The pair planted a smoke flare in the exhaust pipe of Morse’s jeep and told him to move the vehicle, whereupon the unsuspecting photographer hit the starter and – boom! – was engulfed in a cloud of green smoke and dust. ‘‘The jeep had to be towed back to Reno,’’ Schirra recounted with glee, ‘‘and sold for scrap.’’

On other occasions, the Mercury Seven would coat the bottoms of each other’s metal ashtrays with thin films of gasoline, causing a flash fire whenever one of them inadvertently flicked hot ash. ‘‘Fiendish, but fun,’’ Schirra wrote. Henri Landwirth, who frequently played host to the astronauts at his Holiday Inn, once found a live alligator in his pool, cunningly secreted there by Al Shepard. Flight surgeon Stan White, who had purchased a new sports car, liked to brag about its high efficiency. ‘‘So we plotted his comeuppance,’’ wrote Schirra. ‘‘For a week, we added gasoline to his tank, a pint a day, and he raved about the great mileage he was getting. The following week, we siphoned off a pint a day and he went berserk. White never did figure it out.’’

Schirra’s humour would form an essential part of astronaut morale over the

coming years, under the respective shadows of both triumph and tragedy. Only weeks before his first spaceflight aboard Sigma 7, Dee O’Hara became his latest victim. . .