“ROMANOV AND JULIET”

Before February 1963, it seemed that the likely outcome of the woman-in-space project would involve two female cosmonauts, launched 24 hours apart in the March-April timeframe, with each spending two or three days aloft. Valentina Tereshkova was considered the most likely candidate for Vostok 5, with Valentina Ponomaryova following her aboard Vostok 6. Within weeks, the picture had changed considerably. A meeting of the Presidium of the Communist Party on 21 March killed off the plans and insisted instead that only one woman should fly and a male cosmonaut – a Soviet Air Force lieutenant-colonel named Valeri Fyodorovich Bykovsky, born on 2 August 1934 in Pavlovsky Posad, near Moscow – would be rushed into last-minute refresher training for the other Vostok. By inserting Bykovsky into the mix at such a late stage, the joint flight would have to be delayed; but, due to the limited shelf-life of the Vostok hardware, it would still have to fly before July 1963.

Like Gagarin, Titov, Nikolayev and Popovich before him, Bykovsky had been selected as a cosmonaut trainee in March I960 and had a similar background. He had been one of the final six candidates for the first Vostok mission and, although his examination scores were good, it was noted that he made few important or substantial contributions to group discussions. His performance on Vostok 5, though, would be nothing short of exemplary and would mark the beginning of an illustrious, three-flight cosmonaut career, as well as securing a record which still stands to this day for the longest solo space mission in history. His backup, according to the final crew selections made on 10 May 1963, was Boris Volynov.

Only days earlier, Nikolai Kamanin had written in his diary that the joint endeavour would occur within the following six-week period, but noted that both Bykovsky and Volynov needed to make a few more parachute jumps and additional training runs in the Vostok simulator before being cleared for the mission. Two support cosmonauts, Alexei Leonov and Yevgeni Khrunov, were also listed as requiring more centrifuge training, pushing the launch until no earlier than the second week of June. Then, when the State Commission convened on 4 June, concerns were raised that wind speeds for 7 June were expected to be around 15-20 m/sec, exceeding the uppermost limit at which an R-7 could be launched. The failure of a command radio line, which required three or four days to repair, enforced an additional delay. A 10 June liftoff also became untenable due to the intensity of increased solar flare activity and the Crimean Observatory warned that risks would remain high for several days.

Even on 14 June, when Bykovsky finally clambered aboard Vostok 5, circumstances were far from perfect. Firstly, controllers reported that the ultra­shortwave transmitters on the spacecraft were refusing to operate properly; it was decided that, to avoid halting the launch preparations, the mission would rely upon its shortwave transmitters instead. Then a stuck pin in the ejection hatch caused a 30- minute delay and, finally, shortly before liftoff, the indicator light on the control panel for the R-7’s third stage failed to light up as it should have done. This problem was traced to a failure in the stage’s gyroscope instrumentation unit. Korolev was furious and began a heated argument, in front of other colleagues, with Viktor Kuznetsov, the man responsible for the gyroscope systems. Indeed, it was not a minor problem: the failure could have had a devastating impact on the mission and, if not fixed quickly, Vostok 5 would have been postponed another day, the rocket drained of its propellants and returned to the assembly building. Readying it for another attempt would have pushed the spacecraft itself past its shelf-life and derailed both flights. In light of these facts, it is perhaps not surprising that the hot­headed Korolev reacted as he did.

Fortunately, one of Kuznetsov’s deputies announced that his engineers could replace the offending unit within a couple of hours and Bykovsky was kept aboard Vostok 5. At length, the cosmonaut – callsigned ‘Hawk’ – finally headed for space at 2:58:58 pm Moscow Time. Sadly, a less-than-nominal performance by the R-7 immediately reduced his mission from an expected ten-day orbital decay, which would have ensured eight days aloft, to an eight-day decay and a flight of around five or six days. The final orbit achieved was 162-209 km, inclined 65 degrees to the equator. Indeed, Bykovsky would recount in his post-mission debriefing that ‘‘the engine noise of the launch vehicle was weak’’, adding that, after separation from the rocket, he noticed a lot of frost particles which rendered it difficult for him to properly orient Vostok 5 to view the expended third stage. Nonetheless, for Khrushchev, the launch was ideal, corresponding as it did with a visit to Moscow by Harold Wilson, then-leader of Britain’s Labour opposition. When asked by Wilson how many cosmonauts were in space this time, Khrushchev could not help but gleefully reply: ‘‘Only one… so far!’’

By the early hours of 16 June, it was clear to many western radio enthusiasts that something extraordinary was about to happen at Tyuratam, and Tereshkova was duly launched aboard Vostok 6 at 12:29:52 pm Moscow Time. Her liftoff, she reported later, was ‘‘excellent’’ and her experience of weightlessness presented no problems. In fact, despite her pulse rate soaring to 140 during the elevator ride up the gantry to the capsule, she seemed to have handled the ascent into orbit better than Nikolayev or Popovich, according to her biomedical readings. Original plans had called for her to launch five days into Bykovsky’s mission, thus enabling them to both land on the same day, but the changes to the Vostok 5 duration called for a liftoff on his third orbital day instead. Both would then land on 19 June.

After insertion into space, Tereshkova’s orbital plane caused the two Vostoks to draw towards each other for a few minutes, twice daily, with the closest approach of about 5 km. Some three hours after launch, Tereshkova’s voice could be heard radioing her callsign ‘Seagull’ and she was certainly in direct voice contact with Bykovsky by 7:50 pm Moscow Time. Next day, ground controllers experienced some difficulty trying to contact her and even asked Bykovsky to help at one point. According to radio transmissions picked up by a Japanese station in Chiba, east of Tokyo, the Vostok 5 cosmonaut replied that he had attempted to contact Tereshkova without success, but did not think there was any reason to worry. Besides, the two Vostoks did not have a direct line-of-sight with one another on 17 June. All did appear to be well, in fact, and it appeared that Tereshkova was trying to contact the ground, but had been prevented from doing so, perhaps by being tuned to the wrong reception channel or, more likely, due to a problem with her receiver. At 5:58 pm Moscow Time on the 17th, the Enkoping station in Sweden picked up a message from her, expressing that she felt “fine” and that all was well aboard Vostok 6. She even tried to communicate via rudimentary Morse code, which analysts described as “inexperienced”. Fortunately, by 9:00 pm, she could be heard talking to ground controllers and asked to speak to “Number 20”, the code for Sergei Korolev himself.

In his diary, Nikolai Kamanin wrote that communications in general were good and Bykovsky even reported that “she is singing songs for me”, evidently hinting that the loss of contact did not prove a significant concern. It was speculated by the official Soviet media that she had simply fallen asleep. Indeed, she spoke to Nikita Khrushchev, her televised image was broadcast throughout the Soviet Union and she was able to undertake most of her planned scientific research programme. Although she experienced difficulty when changing camera films and could not reach her biological experiments to activate them, she was able to record images of terrestrial cloud cover and terrain. Using light filters, she observed Earth’s horizon over the poles – describing it as “a light blue, beautiful band’’ – and the Moon on several occasions. Photographs returned from her mission and Bykovsky’s flight suggested that it was possible to determine structures in the stratosphere and their data recorded two aerosol layers between 11.4 and 19.4 km above the surface.

Reports soon emerged, though, that Khrushchev’s gamble of flying an ‘ordinary’ Russian girl, albeit one with over a hundred parachute jumps to her credit, was not entirely successful. Various accounts of the mission hinted that Tereshkova was unwell during the early stages of her flight and apparently vomited during her third day aloft; she also appeared tired and weak in televised images. She reported nagging pains in her right shin, pressure points from the helmet on her shoulder and left ear and irritation caused by biomedical sensors attached to a headband. In fact, both she and Bykovsky felt that future cosmonauts would be considerably more comfortable if they were permitted to remove their suits during missions. This recommendation proved ironic on the very next Soviet spaceflight, in October 1964, when three cosmonauts would fly without any space suit protection whatsoever.

Flannels, said Tereshkova, were too small and not moist enough to clean her face, there was no provision to clean her teeth or freshen up her mouth and she reported that she did not consume 40 per cent of her food. This could not be confirmed because she apparently gave away the rest of her food to onlookers at the landing site. Indeed, she complained that the bite-sized chunks of bread were too dry and, although she enjoyed the fruit juices and cutlet pieces, she began to crave Russian black bread, potatoes and onions by the end of the flight.

Bykovsky was also experiencing discomfort. An undisclosed problem with his spacecraft’s waste management system, perhaps a spillage, had made conditions inside the Vostok 5 cabin very unpleasant and possibly contributed to the further shortening of the mission to just under five days. He also commented that the fan of his space suit’s oxygen supply tended to cut off whenever he released himself from his seat and that this posed ‘‘a real problem’’. Nonetheless, he seemed to have enjoyed his time in orbit and performed many observations of terrestrial objects and places.

“I couldn’t see Volgograd,” he reported in his post-flight debriefing, “ft was clouded over. I could make out islands easily and recognised Leningrad, the Nile and Cairo, At sea, I could see the wakes of ships and large barges; in Norway, the fjords and mountain summits. At night, through the Vzor, I could see lightning flashes and cities over South America. I saw aircraft contrails over France.’’ Tereshkova, too, reported seeing fires in South America and the twinkling of city lights at night. Today, with almost five hundred individuals having journeyed into space, such sights are commonplace. In the summer of 1963, however, they were novel, hard to comprehend and truly remarkable.