NEAR-DISASTER

The world’s first spacewalk lasted barely 15 minutes, ending over eastern Siberia, when Belyayev radioed instructions for Leonov to begin preparations to re-enter the airlock. It would only become clear years later that the seemingly effortless ‘swim’ through space had actually required every ounce of physical exertion: the Berkut had ballooned, making bending extremely difficult, and Leonov noticed that his feet had pulled away from the boots and his fingers away from the tips of the gloves. It was, he wrote, “impossible to re-enter the airlock feet first’’ and his only option was to break mission rules and ease himself back into the Volga chamber head-first.

Reports hint that returning to the airlock in this manner caused him to get stuck sideways when he turned to close the outermost hatch. To relieve some of the pressure in his ballooned suit and move more easily, Leonov began bleeding off some of its oxygen by means of a valve in its lining, which placed him at severe risk of the bends. The Berkut, he found, behaved in a totally different manner in space to its performance on Earth. “The work became impossible. I tried to grab the handles [on the airlock] and my fingers wouldn’t work – the gloves’ fingers would just bend on me … I decided I was breathing oxygen long enough to prevent boiling nitrogen in the blood. There was some risk, but I had nothing else to do, and once I did, everything started going normal.’’

However, even after bleeding off the oxygen pressure, the problem of how to turn himself around in the 1.2 m-wide airlock remained. “I literally had to fold myself to do this,’’ he said later. “I spent tremendous effort trying to do this. I had a total of 60 litres [of air] for ventilation and breathing, which was not enough for this kind of action.’’ Physicians would later discover that he almost suffered heatstroke – his core body temperature rising by 1.8°C during the 13-minute excursion – and the cosmonaut would later describe being up to his knees in sweat, to such an extent that it sloshed around in his suit as he moved. Similar problems of over-exertion were closely mirrored in the reports of American astronaut Gene Cernan following his own extravehicular outing in June 1966.

The world’s first spacewalk, hazardous though it had been, ended at 11:47 am when Leonov re-entered the airlock. A minute and a half later, the outer hatch was finally closed and at 11:51 am he began repressurising the Volga. Shortly thereafter, with both pilots safely aboard the capsule, Belyayev fired pyrotechnic bolts to discard the airlock. Unfortunately, the explosive effect of the bolts placed Voskhod 2 into a 17-degree-per-second roll – ten times stronger than predicted – and, with only enough fuel for one orientation correction, the two men realised that they would be forced to live with it for the remaining 22 hours of their mission. Exhausted, and with no other option, they felt that they could bear it. Voskhod 2’s real troubles, however, were only just beginning.

As Leonov worked his way through routine instrument checks, he noticed that the oxygen pressure in the cabin was steadily increasing from a normal level of 160 mm to 200 mm, then higher, eventually peaking at 460 mm, which – in the event of an electrical short – would be more than sufficient to cause an explosion. The cosmonauts were advised to lower Voskhod’s temperature and humidity and, although it halted the upward climb of pressure, the situation remained highly dangerous. After a few hours of sleeplessness, they noticed to their relief that pressures had dropped below the critical level. Later, thankfully, the spacecraft’s automatic landing system came into operation, stopped the rolling and, wrote Leonov, “we were able to enjoy a few delicious moments of tranquil flight’’.

Initiation of the automatic landing system, on Voskhod 2’s 16th orbit, came from the Kamchatka ground station, but a solar orientation sensor fault meant that one command was not processed properly. It has been suggested that the effect of pyrotechnic gas from the jettisoned airlock led to the sensor failure. As a result, the rolling began again and, five minutes before the scheduled retrofire, Belyayev was forced to deactivate the automatic system. It was becoming apparent that the cosmonauts would have to perform a manual retrofire as Voskhod 2 passed over Africa on its 17th circuit, with the intention to land at around 52 degrees North latitude. At 10:16 am Moscow Time on 19 March, radio listeners overheard a ground station telling the cosmonauts – using their callsign ‘Almaz’ (‘Diamond’) – to perform a manual descent. The crew was asked, with more than a hint of urgency, to respond via Morse code.

Belyayev and Leonov would employ the Vzor optical device to orient their spacecraft, but this kept them out of their seats and delayed the retrofire by 46 seconds, which, coupled with an incorrect attitude, would ultimately conspire to bring them down in the wild Siberian taiga. They would land to the north of the industrial city of Perm, more than 2,000 km from their intended site. As Voskhod 2’s navigator, Leonov felt that overshooting Perm should still bring them down in Soviet territory, but “we could not run the risk of overshooting so much that we came down in China; relations with the People’s Republic were poor at the time”. Nonetheless, in his autobiography, Leonov praised the superb skills of Belyayev, now charged with performing the Soviet Union’s first-ever manual re-entry.

“In order to use the [Vzor] he had to lean horizontally across both seats inside the spacecraft,’’ Leonov wrote, “while I held him steady in front of the orientation porthole. We then had to manoeuvre ourselves back into our correct positions in our seats very rapidly so that the spacecraft’s centre of gravity was correct and we could start the retro-engines to complete the re-entry burn. As soon as Pasha turned on the engines we heard them roar and felt a strong jerk as they slowed our craft.’’ The completion of retrofire was greeted with silence and should have been followed, ten seconds later, by the separation of Voskhod 2’s instrument module. It did not happen. Leonov would recall the sight, also beheld by his comrade Yuri Gagarin four years earlier, of the useless section being dragged in the spacecraft’s wake by the thread of a communications cable.

Not until an altitude of around 100 km, when the cable finally burned through, did the ride stabilise. In rapid succession, the cosmonauts felt a sharp jolt as, first, the drogue parachute and, next, the main canopy were automatically deployed. “Suddenly,” wrote Leonov, “everything became dark. We had entered cloud cover. Then it grew even darker. I started to worry that we had dropped into a deep gorge. There was a roaring as our landing engine ignited just above the ground to break the speed of our descent. Finally we felt our spacecraft slumping to a halt.’’ Voskhod 2 had landed in a couple of metres of snow, somewhere in the western Urals, at 59 degrees 34 minutes North latitude and 55 degrees 28 minutes East longitude. It was 12:02 pm Moscow Time and the mission had lasted a little over 26 hours, yet the cosmonauts had not even reached the halfway mark of their time aboard the capsule. A long, cold afternoon and an even colder night awaited them. Moreover, they would also have unwanted company.

For the outside world, everyone was bewildered by what might have happened to the two men. Official accounts gave away few details. Some media reports suggested that the cosmonauts were “resting” after their mission, while Radio Moscow suspended transmissions and played Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto over and over in a sombre manner which hinted that Belyayev and Leonov had been killed.

Nikolai Kamanin would later write in his diary that tracking stations at Odessa and Saransk, both directly beneath Voskhod 2’s re-entry flight path, had provided the first reports that the descent was underway, although he noted that no one knew about the cosmonauts’ fate for at least four hours. Meanwhile, the Alma-Ata station in south-eastern Kazakhstan picked up a telegraph code via the high-frequency radio channel, which repeated ‘VN’ – ‘Vsyo normalno’ (‘Everything normal’) – over and over and the capsule’s Krug radio beacon had provided a fix on its location, ‘‘but we wanted more convincing data as to the condition of the cosmonauts’’, wrote Kamanin. Voskhod 2 was eventually spotted, together with its red parachute and the two men, by the commander of one of the search-and-rescue helicopters, wedged between a pair of firs on the forest road between Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, some 30 km south-west of the town of Berezniki.

Immediately after impacting the snow, the first task for Belyayev and Leonov had been to release the spacecraft’s hatch and get outside; unfortunately, upon flicking a switch, the explosive bolts activated and the sturdy plate of metal jerked, but refused to burst open. Only when they looked through one of the portholes did it become clear that the capsule was jammed between two firs. After much rocking backwards and forwards, Belyayev finally pushed the hatch away and the two men plopped out into the snow. Above them was the main canopy of their parachute, which had snagged the upper branches of firs and birches some 40 m high. Below, the base of the capsule, still simmering from the heat of re-entry, rapidly melted the snow and it thumped down onto solid ground.

As daylight faded and fresh snow began to fall, the two cosmonauts had reason to be grateful for their extensive experience in harsh climates. Leonov himself, of course, had been brought up in Siberia, whilst his older comrade, born on 26 June 1925 in Chelizshevo, in the Vologda region, north of Moscow, had spent much of his boyhood hunting in the forests near his home. As a youth, Belyayev dreamed of someday becoming a hunter and graduated from the Soviet Air Force Academy at Sarapul in 1944 and the Military Fighter Pilot School in Yeis the following year. He subsequently served in various Air Force units for more than a decade and became a squadron commander in naval aviation shortly before being selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 1960. Although he was the oldest member of the first group, Belyayev was hired for his experience, education and 900 hours of flying time. He would, wrote Asif Siddiqi, probably have flown in space sooner, but for an injury sustained during a parachute jump in August 1961.

As one of the older members of the corps, Belyayev’s last claim to fame would occur on 10 January 1970, when he became the first flown spacefarer to die of natural causes: after several years overseeing the training of newer cosmonaut recruits, complications, including pneumonia, arose following an operation on a stomach ulcer. Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, who had so expertly piloted Voskhod 2 through the Soviet Union’s first manual re-entry, died at the age of just 44. Although fellow cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov preceded Belyayev to the grave, his state funeral honours would be somewhat less than theirs. His remains would not be interred in the Kremlin Wall, but rather in Moscow’s Novodevich Cemetery, although pensions were paid to his wife and daughter and they were granted a seven-room apartment on Moscow.

With less than five years of life ahead of him, Belyayev, for now, felt that he could withstand anything. ‘‘Pasha and I both felt we had already been tested to our limits,’’ wrote Leonov, “though we knew there was no way of telling how long we would have to fend for ourselves in this remote corner of our country.” In the first few minutes after landing, they began transmitting their ‘VN’ code to confirm that they were alive and well. Interestingly, wrote Leonov, Moscow did not receive the signal, ‘‘because the vast expanse of forest in the northern Urals… interfered with the radio waves’’, although listening posts as far afield as Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East and Bonn in West Germany did pick it up.

However, the area was so heavily wooded and so deeply coated in snow that the rescue helicopters could not hope to reach them until loggers had cleared a landing site. One civil helicopter, Leonov recalled, tried to extend a rope ladder, but in their bulky pressure suits the two cosmonauts had no chance of scaling it. As the afternoon wore on, other aircraft dropped supplies – two pairs of wolf-skin boots, thick trousers and jackets, a blunt axe and even a bottle of cognac – to keep the men alive through the night. The news of the safe landing was announced by Yuri Levitan at 4:44 pm Moscow Time, almost five hours after it had occurred, and, later that evening, a helicopter succeeded in touching down a few kilometres away, although its crew could not reach the cosmonauts.

As the last vestiges of daylight disappeared, the temperature in the taiga began to drop precipitously and the pool of sweat in Leonov’s boots started to chill him. Fearing the onset of frostbite, both men stripped naked, wrung out their suits and underwear and separated the rigid sections from the softer linings, which they donned, together with boots and gloves. Their attempts to pull the snagged parachute from the trees for extra insulation proved fruitless and, as night approached, the snow started falling and temperatures plummeted still further to -30°C. Leonov would relate a cold and lonely night in the now-hatchless capsule, but stories would persist over the years that they were harassed by wolves which prevented them from disembarking and building a fire. Still others argued that mountain bears drew near Voskhod and others that the cosmonauts heard ‘strange noises’ outside.

Leonov mentioned nothing of this in his autobiography, although he admitted that when an Ilyushin-14 aircraft flew overhead at daybreak, the pilot revved his engine to scare away wolves in the vicinity. Later that morning, another helicopter reported seeing the cosmonauts chopping wood and setting a fire. At 7:30 am Moscow Time, an Mi-4 helicopter lowered a rescue team, including two physicians, to a point 1.5 km from the capsule and the first efforts began to fell trees and provide a suitable landing spot. Visibility was too poor to risk lifting them to a hovering helicopter and, as a result, the cosmonauts spent a second night in the dense taiga, together with their rescuers. ‘‘But this second night was a great deal more comfortable than the first,’’ wrote Leonov. ‘‘The advance party chopped wood and built a small log cabin and an enormous fire. They heated water in a large tank flown in especially by helicopter from Perm… And they laid out a supper of cheese, sausage and bread. It seemed like a feast after three days with little food.’’

It was a welcome relief to be among other human beings. At length, two landing spots were cleared, one of which lay just a few kilometres from the capsule, and at 8:00 am on 21 March the cosmonauts skiied there. They were then airlifted to Perm airport for a telephone call from Leonid Brezhnev and finally returned to Tyuratam

at 2:30 pm, more than two full days after landing. Belyayev and Leonov would be rewarded and decorated for their efforts: each received a Hero of the Soviet Union award, together with 15,000 roubles, a Volga car and six weeks’ leave. By the beginning of May, they had joined the circuit of official visits, international symposia and conferences and meetings with world leaders.