Jamie Doran - Starman - The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

These were ‘Vostok’ space capsules.

There were bundles of electrical wires running from various test boxes and conduits in the factory that snaked across the floor, sprouted from the walls, dropped from the ceiling. Every last one of them plugged, like sinister roots, into the space machines, testing and probing, powering them up, shutting them down, as the white-coated engineers ran their countless tests.

Oleg Ivanovsky, who had a reputation for being long-winded, lectured the cosmonauts in mind-numbing detail about the ship’s components. ‘They dragged a few words out of me, as they say.’ All the while, he scanned the faces of the twenty would-be cosmonauts before him; twenty young men, twenty names, twenty strangers. Korolev knew them by now, of course, but Ivanovsky had not met any of them until this moment. ‘They all gazed at the vessels with great curiosity, as this was the first time they’d seen any space technology. I knew they were all pilots, familiar with aviation, but one has to say honestly: which of them could get used to this new apparatus?’

Korolev cut short Ivanovsky’s lecture and explained Vostok’s flight characteristics in terms that his audience of MiG-trained pilots could more easily understand, but he warned his listeners, ‘There’s a lot you have to learn. We can’t tell you everything in one day. We’ll prepare special classes, so that you can learn the system thoroughly. You’ll attend lectures, and then we will set you some exams.’

One of them, a handsome lad with an irresistible grin, asked Korolev a question. ‘Sergei Pavlovich, will you be marking us?’

‘Yes, and we’ll throw you out!’ Korolev barked at him. ‘Stop smiling! What are you smiling at, Yuri Alexeyevich!’

Korolev glared at the boy to see how he would react, perhaps deliberately trying to undo the mood he had created back in his office. Gagarin forced the muscles of his face into a sober expression, but he was not at all frightened. He stayed perfectly calm, and almost certainly this was the response which Korolev was looking for. Ivanovsky had discovered this from personal experience. Just a few weeks previously Korolev had thrown a fit and sacked him on the spot. He often sacked people, then reinstated them the next morning. It was his way of letting off steam. On this occasion he yelled across the assembly floor, ‘You no longer work for me, and I’m putting a de-merit in your record!’ Ivanovsky shouted back, ‘You can’t do that, because you just fired me. I don’t work for you any more!’ Korolev shouted at him again, but in a short while the incident was forgotten. The Chief Designer admired people who stood up to him – people who played straight, and did not hide important problems under the table simply in order to protect their jobs. His relationship with Ivanovsky was very trusting after that. And now, here was this cocksure farmboy from the Smolensk Region …

Suddenly Korolev invited the cosmonauts to take a closer look at one of the Vostoks, a version to be used in ground tests, but fitted just the same with most of the equipment used during an actual flight, including the ejection seat and control panels. Alexei Leonov remembers Korolev telling them to take off their boots (to preserve the ship’s cleanliness), then go up a ladder and climb through the open hatch of the ball. Without a moment’s hesitation Gagarin stepped forward. ‘With your permission, Sergei Pavlovich?’ He sloughed off his boots and clambered up.

One of the other cosmonauts, Valery Bykovsky, insists that Gagarin was not actually told to remove his boots. After all, a pilot would not expect to take off his footwear to sit in the cockpit of a new MiG, so why now? ‘That’s how they take off their shoes in Russian villages when they go into a house, as a sign of respect,’ Bykovsky thought to himself. He was sure that Gagarin became ‘the one’ from that moment. [7] Quoted in Golovanov, Our Gagarin , p. 89.

Gagarin paid no attention to his companions, all busily removing their shoes on the floor behind him. He was much too fascinated by the spacecraft cabin. It was swathed throughout in a light tan-coloured rubber foam. This cladding disguised the sphere’s real guts: the endless pipework and electrical distribution systems. It would be some weeks yet before any of the cosmonauts was introduced in more detail to these shrouded mysteries. For now, Gagarin’s quick inspection took in only the most obvious items. He would have found the interior much less cluttered than the cockpit of his MiG. Certainly there were fewer dials and instruments. The ejection seat, which he now reclined on, took up much of the space. This must have seemed reassuringly familiar, except that he had to lie on his back rather than sit upright. Mounted on the wall directly above his face was a simple panel with a few switches, some status indicator lights, a chronometer and a little globe representing the earth. To the casual observer it might have looked like a child’s educational toy, but in the months to come, Gagarin and his colleagues would learn about the hidden gyroscopes and accelerometers that fed their data into the globe, allowing it to swivel in precise lockstep with Vostok’s orbit, relaying to the pilot his position over the real planet earth. Other indicators on the panel counted off the orbits, and gave readings of the ship’s internal temperature, pressure, carbon dioxide, oxygen supply and radiation levels. The cosmonauts would discover that these displays were not necessarily intended directly for their benefit. They were supposed to scan the dials at intervals, then report various measurements to the ground by radio link. Others would decide what the readings meant, and what should be done with the ship.

To his left, Gagarin would have seen another small panel with four rows of toggle switches. Leonov says that he fiddled with some of them, understanding straight away that he could only get to these left-hand controls by reaching across with his right arm. The natural armchair-style arrangement of an aircraft cockpit obviously did not apply here, although his right hand in repose settled comfortably on a small lever, the nearest equivalent any Vostok crewman would find to the control joystick in a fighter plane. Higher up, on the right, there was a radio transceiver. The only other piece of equipment obviously accessible to him was a food locker. It did not seem to matter which hand one used to reach that.

Below and slightly forward of his feet, Gagarin would have seen a round porthole with elaborate calibrated markings. The ‘Vzor’ was an optical orientation device consisting of mirrors and lenses. Through this, the curvature of the earth’s horizon would appear greatly exaggerated. When Vostok was aligned at a particular angle relative to the ground, the pilot would see a brilliant circle of horizon all around the Vzor’s outer edge. This would indicate that the craft was properly positioned for its re-entry burn. The effect was rather akin to a distorting mirror at a fairground, adapted by ingenious but under-equipped engineers into a precision tool of space navigation.

The layout of this Vostok test cabin was not exactly the same as Gagarin would find aboard the actual flight version. In time he would encounter more equipment: for instance, an intrusive television camera that pointed directly at his face, and a bright lamp that shone uncomfortably into his eyes so that his every expression could be recorded for the doctors. And, on the left-hand switch panel, a numeric keypad – two rows of three numbers, six digits in all – whose purpose was not immediately clear to him or any of the cosmonauts who clambered into the cabin after him.

They called Gagarin out after a few minutes. The other cosmonauts took their turns in the cabin, while Korolev and Ivanovsky leaned into the hatch to show them the controls.