A DAY IN ORBIT

Gherman Titov’s dismay at having lost the chance to fly first in space was tempered somewhat by the realisation that his own orbital journey in August 1961 would be more than ten times longer. In fact, one of the reasons cited by Nikolai Kamanin for deferring the poetry-loving teacher’s son from the first Vostok to the second had been his greater physical endurance to handle a longer period in the peculiar state of weightlessness. Ironically, Titov’s response to this environment would earn him the unenviable record of becoming the first person to suffer space sickness.

The plans for a lengthy mission had been sketched out earlier in 1961, with Sergei Korolev wanting a cosmonaut to spend 24 hours aloft. Kamanin, together with many cosmonauts and their physicians, believed such an endeavour to be too ambitious – “too adventurist’’, he wrote in his diary – and advocated a shorter, three-orbit mission, lasting around five hours and landing in the eastern Soviet Union. Korolev rejected it. His opposition was based on sound judgement: a recovery during this period, and specifically between the second and seventh orbits, would not be possible, since retrofire would need to occur whilst in Earth’s shadow. If this happened, Vostok 2’s solar orientation sensor could not function reliably.

With typical single-minded determination, Korolev ordered his deputy, Kon­stantin Bushuyev, to lay plans for a 24-hour flight. His unwavering effort, devotion and – to a great extent – obstinacy was the result of a hard, driven, thankless life of service to the Soviet Union by a man of pure technical genius. Born in 1907 in the central Ukraine, Korolev’s interest in aviation and rocketry emerged at a young age. Under Stalin’s regime, with its ingrained fear of the power of the individual, there was little opportunity for the ‘intelligentsia’ to prosper and, as a highly respected and brilliant engineer, Korolev quickly found himself arrested and sentenced to ten years of hard labour in the Siberian gulag. The Nazi invasion of 1941, however, prompted his release to support the war effort. Subsequently, Korolev set to work developing an arsenal of rockets and missiles which he hoped could someday transport instruments into the high atmosphere and, eventually, into space. His masterpiece, the R-7, though principally intended for the Soviet military as a ballistic missile, would indeed eventually put satellites and men into orbit. By giving it this dual­purpose use, he kept his military critics quiet by satisfying their needs and his own.

Nikita Khrushchev’s regime proved generally supportive of Korolev and his projects, but for different reasons: the Presidium – later known as the Politburo – was far more interested in the glamour, political and military impact of spacegoing rocketry than purely upon scientific advancement. Indeed, on the evening of 11 April 1961, when Korolev informed Khrushchev of the final preparations to launch Vostok, the Soviet leader’s exasperated response amounted to a demand for him to “get on with it’’. Even in the wake of Gagarin’s triumph, Korolev – still officially a state secret and known only as the ‘chief designer’ to the outside world – received no congratulation, was barred from wearing his medals and even had to thumb a lift into Moscow when his antiquated Chaika limousine broke down. Later efforts by the Nobel Prize Committee to create an award for the anonymous chief designer fell on deaf ears in the Soviet leadership.

It is astonishing, therefore, that the resilience of the man – whose sufferings in Stalin’s gulag had left him physically weakened – was so high in the light of so little tangible reward. Under pressure from Korolev to fly the 24-hour mission, Kamanin reluctantly acquiesced, but imposed a condition that a manually-implemented retrofire could be conducted between the second and seventh orbits if the cosmonaut felt unwell. Opposition to the long flight, though, remained strong. As late as June 1961, Soviet Air Force officers, physicians and cosmonauts felt more comfortable with a three-orbit mission and the dispute remained unsettled until Korolev took his plan all the way to Leonid Smirnov, head of the State Committee for Defence Technology, who opted in favour of spending 24 hours in space. Later that month, the Vostok 2 State Commission convened, named Titov as the prime cosmonaut and Andrian Nikolayev as his backup.

A summertime launch was highly desirable for Korolev. Already, since Gagarin’s pioneering flight, no fewer than two American astronauts had ventured into space, albeit on 15-minute suborbital ‘hops’ from Florida into the Atlantic Ocean. Khrushchev wanted a summertime launch, too, but at a specific point and possibly for specific reasons. In mid-July, he summoned Korolev to his Crimean vacation home and hinted strongly that Vostok 2 should fly no later than 10 August; some observers have since speculated that this was deliberately engineered to provide propaganda cover for the initial steps to build the Berlin Wall just a few days later. ‘‘While it was not the first case in which Khrushchev had suggested a particular time for a specific launch,’’ wrote Asif Siddiqi in ‘Challenge to Apollo’, ‘‘it was clearly the first occasion in which the launch of a mission was timed to play a major role in the implementation of Soviet foreign policy.’’

The western world knew little of the Vostok 2 plans, of course, and persistent rumours abounded that other Soviet efforts to put men – and a woman – into space had backfired and ended disastrously. One notable example suggested that a woman had been launched on 16 May, a few weeks after Gagarin, but that her re-entry had been delayed, perhaps due to damage incurred by her Vostok capsule’s heat shield. A decision to come home on 23 May, due to dwindling oxygen supplies, was apparently taken. . . and on the 26th, the state-run Tass news agency announced the return of a large unmanned satellite, which burned up during re-entry. More notorious was a story penned by the pro-communist London newspaper The Daily Worker, which revealed, two days before Gagarin flew, that a renowned Soviet test pilot had been killed during his return from space. Such stories did not seem to go away for many years and, as late as 1979, the British Interplanetary Society suggested that the son of

Russian aircraft designer Sergei Ilyushin had flown before Gagarin, but had landed “badly shaken” and had “been in a coma ever since”.

These rumours have since been shown for what they are, but they certainly demonstrate the lack of knowledge of exactly what was going on behind the Iron Curtain at this time. Indeed, news of Titov’s impending launch did not reach even the keenest western ears until 5 August. Late that evening, the Agence-France-Presse issued a cable from Moscow, reporting that further ‘rumours’ from the Soviet capital hinted at a manned launch within 24 hours.

Early the following morning, Titov headed for Gagarin’s Start in an old eggshell – blue bus and rode the elevator to the capsule that would be his home for more than a day. Following an unfortunate incident during training, he had been reminded, only half-jokingly, by his fellow cosmonauts not to get his parachute lines entangled after ejecting from Vostok 2 or ‘‘they would be forced to expel him from the corps’’. As he was being strapped in, Titov was handed a notepad and pencil to log his experiences during the flight. Seconds after 9:00 am Moscow Time, American radar installations detected the launch of the R-7, although President Kennedy had been informed the previous night that a second Soviet manned shot was imminent.

Two hours into the flight, at 10:45 am, Radio Moscow’s famous wartime announcer Yuri Levitan boomed out the details for a listening world. Vostok 2 was in an orbit of 178-257 km, inclined 64.93 degrees to the equator. For the first time, and undoubtedly for propaganda purposes rather than in the interests of ‘true’ openness, Tass revealed the radio frequencies on which the cosmonaut was transmitting his reports. These appeared in the state-run Pravda newspaper on the morning of 7 August, together with details that the 143.625 MHz voice transmitter was frequency-modulated with a frequency deviation of plus or minus 30 kHz; obviously a clear invitation to western radio enthusiasts to listen in. Following the doubts over the authenticity of Gagarin’s mission, this would eliminate any suggestion that Titov’s flight might be a fake. In fact, listening posts in western Europe, including the Meudon Observatory, near Paris, heard the cosmonaut’s voice within two hours of liftoff, as did Reuters’ monitoring station outside London. The BBC also picked up an announcement from Titov, in which he provided details about Vostok’s cabin temperature – a pleasant 22°C, he reported – together with his personal callsign, ‘Oriel’ (‘Eagle’).

In his post-flight press conference, held a few days later, he would describe candidly the acceleration, noise and vibrations during the launch as having been endurable. Weightlessness, though, posed a different challenge. ‘‘The first impression,” he told a packed Moscow State University auditorium on 13 August, ‘‘was that I was flying with my feet up. After a few seconds, however, everything returned to normal. The Sun shone through the illuminators and there was so much light inside the cabin that I could turn off the artificial illumination. When the Sun did not shine directly into the illuminators, it was possible for me to observe, simultaneously, the Earth – which was illuminated by the Sun – and the stars above, which were sharp and bright little points on a very black sky.’’

Although he was undoubtedly impressed by his view of the heavens, Titov’s experience of the microgravity environment would be somewhat different. Shortly

after reaching orbit, he began to feel disorientated and uncomfortable and, even before beginning his sleep period at around 6:30 pm he exhibited symptoms of vertigo: dizziness, nausea, headaches. Titov, the teacher’s son from the village of Verkhnie Zhilino, in the Altai region, would be the first of many to suffer from the condition known as ‘space sickness’.