SPACE DUET

Six months after Gherman Titov’s flight, the gap in space achievement between the Soviet Union and the United States had begun to close slightly. On 20 February 1962, astronaut John Glenn embarked on a five-hour mission which not only completed three circuits of the globe, but also – since he landed inside his ship – established a new, FAI-approved record for the longest ‘confirmed-successful’ flight to date. Surprisingly, not until August would Soviet cosmonauts again journey into the heavens, mainly because Sergei Korolev’s design bureau had its hands full preparing the Zenit spy satellite, based upon Vostok technology, for launch. Nonetheless, his manned spaceflight ambitions had by no means stagnated. As early as 15 August 1961, he had proposed to Nikolai Kamanin the launch of three manned Vostoks at 24-hour intervals, with the first mission spending three days aloft, the others around two days apiece. Although Kamanin had agreed in principle, he felt that Korolev’s November 1961 target for the joint endeavour was too ambitious and refused to endorse such a schedule. Further, in the wake of Titov’s space sickness episode, he did not feel that the next flight should exceed two days.

Korolev was furious, particularly since missions limited to two days and an inability to launch more than one Vostok per day meant that only two spacecraft, rather than three, could be in orbit at the same time. However, a dual mission could be better handled by the Soviet tracking and rescue networks than a triple-Vostok flight. Plans for the dual mission thus proceeded and, in October 1961, cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, fully-suited, went through a three-day-long simulated ‘flight’ in a spacecraft mockup. Ongoing problems with Zenit, however, made a November launch impossible and Korolev began to push instead for Vostoks 3 and 4 to fly in December or January. This, too, was opposed by Kamanin, on grounds that weather conditions would be too severe to support adequate launch and recovery operations. Additionally, several technical hurdles contributed to make launches before the spring untenable: trials of a new parachute and space suit were not going well, the environmental system was still not perfected and problems with Vostok’s temperature controls needed further attention.

Meanwhile, government official Dmitri Ustinov, chairman of the Military – Industrial Commission and primary manager of all Soviet missile and space projects during this period, demanded that the joint flight be launched by 12 March 1962 in direct response to John Glenn’s mission. In his diary, Kamanin fumed at the knee – jerk reactions of the Soviet leadership, whose months of inactivity, followed by an insistence to launch in an impossibly short time span, was seriously hampering the nation’s space effort. He had reason for yet more anger on 22 February, when it was decided to allow Vostoks 3 and 4 to each spend three full days in space, although Korolev admitted that he would only push for the extra day if both cosmonauts remained healthy. Those cosmonauts were confirmed as Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev and Pavel Romanovich Popovich, both Soviet Air Force officers; the former a major, the latter a lieutenant-colonel. Their backups would be Valeri Bykovsky and Vladimir Komarov.

Even pressure from higher-ups like Ustinov was insufficient to avoid the postponement of the joint flight beyond March. Technical problems and a Zenit launch failure delayed the manned shot until at least the second week of April. An additional delay until the end of May was enforced by the launch of the Cosmos 4 spacecraft and, finally, the explosion of a Zenit rocket seconds after liftoff on 22 June pushed the Nikolayev-Popovich flight into late July.

Kamanin remained opposed to the idea of three-day missions, as did many of the cosmonauts and their training teams. In his diary, he substantiated his fears by noting the results of a recent American-West German experiment which had confined five men to a fallout shelter for five days. The results had revealed gradual physical and mental deterioration, which Kamanin and Gherman Titov felt could also apply to cosmonauts if flight durations were extended prematurely. By June 1962, as the Vostok 3 and 4 launches slipped further into the summer, some Soviet engineers predicted that the Americans would be in a position to stage an 18-orbit mission – eclipsing that of Titov – before the year’s end. Kamanin disagreed, speculating (correctly, as it turned out) that such a capability would be beyond them until mid-1963. However, none of this deviated from the fact that a new mission was needed to prove that the Soviets remained in the game.

By the time the State Commission finally convened in mid-July, Korolev had received Khrushchev’s blessing for a full three-day mission, with Kamanin representing the sole voice of dissent. Low-Earth orbit, however, was not a quiet place at the time. Only days earlier, on 9 July, the United States’ Starfish Prime test had detonated a thermonuclear warhead 400 km above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, inadvertently disabling several satellites and leading to serious concerns about increased levels of radiation in low-Earth orbit. In fact, according to a 1963 article in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Starfish Prime created a man­made radiation belt of high-energy electrons which persisted for years. Soviet scientists were convinced that Vostok missions lasting less than five days should still be safe and would not expose their cosmonauts to abnormally high doses of radiation. Still, clearly savouring the propaganda value of the event, the Kremlin politely asked the United States to refrain from further nuclear tests whilst their men were in orbit.

As August opened, the experiments and plans for the joint mission were concluded. One of them called for observations of the final stages of the Vostoks’ R – 7s to be conducted shortly after separation and demonstrate the cosmonauts’ ability to properly orient their spacecraft. This latter exercise would require both Nikolayev and Popovich to execute very slow manoeuvres of just 0.06 degrees per second, followed by ‘barbecue rolls’ of 0.5 degrees per second to maintain the correct thermal balance across all spacecraft surfaces. Late on the evening of 10 August, following a two-hour delay to check fasteners on Nikolayev’s ejection seat, the first R-7, with Vostok 3 secreted in its nose, was rolled out to Gagarin’s Start in readiness for launch the following morning. By this time, it had been confirmed that, assuming Nikolayev remained healthy, his flight would be extended to a record-breaking four days in orbit.