SPACE SICKNESS

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.’’