AN IRON MAN AND “A PUZZLE”

When he was shortlisted as a candidate for the first man in space in January 1961, Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev was described by his examiners as ‘‘the quietest’’ of the six finalists. By the time he launched into orbit on 11 August 1962 to begin the longest manned space mission to date, he had earned another nickname: ‘Iron Man’, due to his astonishing stamina and ability to sit alone in an isolation chamber, without stimulus or awareness of the passage of time, for no less than four whole days. Born on 5 September 1929 on a collective farm in the village of Sorseli in the forested Chuvash region of the Volga River valley, he was one of four children and discovered a love of aviation when, aged eight, he visited a nearby airfield. One story from his early years tells how he clambered into the branches of a tree and

announced that he intended to fly from it; fortunately, local villagers changed his mind and persuaded him to come down.

Following his father’s death in 1944, his intention was to support his family, although this was opposed by his mother, who wanted him to gain a full education. Nikolayev entered medical school, then tried his hand at forestry, serving as a lumberjack and timber camp foreman for a time, before joining the Soviet Army. He initially trained as a radio operator and machine gunner, demonstrating “composure under stress’’ when he crashed a flamed-out jet in a field rather than bailing out. Undoubtedly, this was a contributory factor in his selection as a cosmonaut trainee, along with Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and 17 others in March I960. A bachelor at the time of Vostok 3, he is famously said to have kissed his girlfriend goodbye at the foot of the launch pad. That ‘girlfriend’ – 25-year-old Valentina Tereshkova – would not only become his wife a little over a year later, but would also become the first woman to venture into space.

In stark contrast to the quiet, reserved nature of Nikolayev, that of Vostok 4 cosmonaut Pavel Romanovich Popovich has been described as considerably more extroverted. He was also the only member of the 1960 cosmonaut group to have flown a ‘high-performance’ aircraft, having piloted the MiG-19. Interestingly, although he was shortlisted among the final six candidates for the first Vostok mission, his examiners labelled him ‘‘a puzzle’’ and mysteriously attributed his behaviour to ‘‘secret family problems’’. A lieutenant-colonel at the time of the flight, he became the most senior-ranking cosmonaut yet to reach orbit. Born on 5 October 1930 in Uzyn, within the Kiev Oblast in the north of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Popovich is today revered as the first ethnic Ukrainian spacefarer.

During his early teens, Popovich apparently so loathed the Nazi occupation that he refused to learn German at school, instead stuffing cotton into his ears and being expelled as a result. He was, it is said, even dressed in old frocks and passed off as a girl by his mother to avoid being sent away to Nazi labour camps. After the Second World War, Popovich worked as a herdsman, before achieving a diploma from a technical school in the Urals and entering the Soviet Air Force. Whilst assigned as a fighter pilot in Siberia, he met his future wife, Marina, a woodcutter’s daughter who became a high-ranking officer and engineer. She was also an accomplished stunt pilot and outspoken UFO researcher, which her husband, too, later embraced. In fact, in 1984, after his retirement from the cosmonaut corps, Popovich headed the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ UFO Commission. Like Titov, he was a voracious reader, an admirer of Hemingway and Stendhal and often quoted the works of the Soviet poets Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the isolation chamber, he proved very much the opposite of steely Nikolayev: he was more light-hearted and jocular, often relieving the tedium by dancing and singing operatic arias with such gusto that scientists and engineers gathered to listen.