I had to be off to Area 2 early the next morning and didn’t dare stop by Katya’s room. The eight Soyuz cosmonauts were entering their final days of training, and one of their tasks this morning was to rehearse emergency egress from their two spacecraft, both of which were still sitting upright on the floor of the assembly building next to their Soyuz launch vehicles. As a member of the team that would recover both crews, I had to take part.
The first set of exercises involved the backup crews, with Gagarin, Kubasov, and Gorbatko showing that they could climb through the nose hatch of Soyuz Number 4, the active docking craft.
Of course, Soyuz Number 4, like Soyuz Number 5, already had its spherical orbital module in place in preparation for launch. (It would be jettisoned prior to reentry.) So the egress of the three men was very time-consuming, and not at all realistic, especially when all three cosmonauts had to be extra careful not to damage any switches or other equipment as they unstrapped and climbed out.
Nikolayev, the backup commander, completed his escape from Number 5 in almost the same amount of time it took for the three in Number 4 to do the same thing. When apprised of this, Nikolayev joked, “Yuri’s smaller than anyone,” which happened to be true and caused everyone, including the great Gagarin himself, to laugh.
Then we watched as the crewmen who would actually fly the mission went through the same rigmarole. Komarov, Yeliseyev, and Khrunov out of 4, Bykovsky out of 5. Bykovsky, who wasn’t much larger than Gagarin, was the clear champion, though the Komarov team showed it could move when needed. I was encouraged to know that they were sufficiently at home in their spacecraft to move about it with some confidence. It would certainly make things easier for them once they’d thumped down out on the steppes.
Saditsky, Kostin, and several other cosmonauts were present, as was General Kamanin, who smiled and nodded at me. Kamanin and Gagarin were called away before the egress training could be completed. “The State Commission just now realized that Gagarin is the backup commander, meaning he could command the next Soyuz mission,” Saditsky told me. “They had a shitfit.”
“What’s the problem?”
“They don’t want to risk their big hero.”
“What does Gagarin think about this?”
“He fought to get himself assigned to the crew! He says he’s too young to be a museum exhibit.”
“What do you think?”
Saditsky smiled. “I wish I was the only cosmonaut in the team, so I could be the first man in space and the first to walk on the Moon. Failing that . . . Gagarin’s a pilot: He’s been sitting on his ass for six years and he wants to fly. Let him.”
Just as the cosmonauts were packing for their next destination, the big doors at the far end of the building opened and two forklift trucks pulled in, each one dragging a pair of green bundles on a trailer. These were the Soyuz recovery parachutes, a primary and a reserve for each vehicle, packed and fresh from testing in Feodosiya and ready to be installed. Having no interest in this procedure, I was about to leave when a group of my colleagues from the bureau, led by none other than Artemov himself, arrived, with Lev Tselauri tagging along like a puppy.
Feeling a bit resentful at Lev’s iciness, or arrogant about my chances with the military cosmonaut team, I approached them. Artemov, who was busy giving unnecessary orders to the installation team, didn’t notice, but I saw a look of dread move across Lev’s face, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. But only momentarily. “How did the egress go?” he asked.
“The prime crews did a good job. Backups could use more work.”
“That’s the way it should be.”
“How have you been?” I asked.
From the way he slumped, you’d think I had just told him his family had been wiped out by Nazis. “I have something to tell you,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper.
Lev took me by the arm and marched me away from the crowd around the spacecraft, all the way into the April afternoon.
“I’ve been avoiding you.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m sorry. But you will understand.” I hoped so: This was not the cheerful, cynical, brilliant Georgian I had lived with for two years. “You see, I’m getting married.”
He seemed anything but happy. “Congratulations.”
“To Marina.”
For a moment I couldn’t see or hear anything. For an even longer moment, I couldn’t say anything. Lev waited—did he think I was going to hit him? I suppose that crossed my mind. But all I could do was say, “Oh. I hope you’ll be very happy.”
“You have a right to be angry.”
“Don’t tell me about my rights.” By then I was walking away, blind with fury. Marina and Lev! I remembered the time I had run into him in her neighborhood when I made a surprise visit to her building. I stopped, turned back. “When did it start?”
“Last summer.” Having confessed, he now seemed defiant, ready to answer any question, no matter how painful.
But I had no desire to hear any more answers. I felt exhausted and wanted only to return to the hotel.
Which did not happen for two more hours. I spent them sitting alone on the bus, trying not to hate Marina and Lev, torturing myself with the knowledge that my father had been right about her.
I don’t remember much about the preparations for the launch of the vehicles that would officially become Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2. The weather turned bad after a week, bringing cold, almost wintry rain that doused the launch center, the town of Tyuratam, and everyone’s spirits. Defense Minister Ustinov flew in for the meeting of the State Commission, and threw everyone into a tizzy by questioning plans for the Soyuz docking. He thought the commander of the active craft—Komarov—should rely more on the automatic docking systems, which had never actually been tested in orbit.
It was impossible to change the procedures this late in the training, of course, but that didn’t stop Artemov and his deputies from putting Komarov and Gagarin through a series of pointless exercises.
On April 19, a group of Air Force generals flew into Tyuratam, among them my father. He left me a note at the desk telling me that he had arrived, that he would be with Marshal Rudenko and General Kamanin and the other chiefs, but he hoped we would see each other.
There was also a letter from Katya, mailed from Moscow. It was just a few lines, saying how much she had enjoyed spending time with me, and most importantly, giving me her address and phone number. That simple letter, following the revelation of Marina’s treachery, lifted my spirits so much that I looked forward to going back to Moscow, something which, for several days, seemed unappealing, now that I knew of the approaching Lev and Marina wedding, not to mention the birth of their child!
On the evening of the twenty-first, my father asked me to join him and the other generals at a dinner in old-town Tyuratam. “It’ll be a great opportunity for you,” he said when I balked. “Buy a few rounds and make sure you thank everyone, because these are the guys who signed your appointment to active duty.”
It was a horrible evening, since I knew no one but my father. Out of boredom—or was it despair over Marina?—I got drunker than I have in years.
What makes the evening stand out in memory was the sight, at two A.M., as we all staggered out of our cars back at the hotel, of cosmonauts Khrunov and Komarov playing tennis! (The eight cosmonauts, along with their trainers and General Kamanin, were staying at another—the only other—hotel near ours. There were too many of them to spend the night in Korolev’s old cottage out at the launch site.) “What the hell are these guys doing out at this hour?” some two-star general grumbled.
“They’re sleep-shifted, General. The launches will take place before dawn, which means they have to wake up around midnight. So they’ve been going to bed and waking up earlier and earlier each night, to change their internal clocks.” That, at least, is what I tried to say . . . God only knows what the general heard.
But he nodded in approval, and gave me a bear hug. “It’s good to have one of these smart guys along to explain these things,” he said, and over the shoulder of my newfound friend, I could see my father nodding in approval, as behind him, the gentle Komarov smoothly returned the vicious serves of my friend Khrunov.
Three-fifteen A.M., the cold morning of Sunday, April 23, 1967, Area 2, Baikonur. I stood with the crowd outside the assembly building that served the Area 2 pad, and the one at Area 31. Bathed in spotlights, Soyuz spacecraft and launchers stood in both places. Here, in front of me, Colonel Vladimir Komarov, the forty-year-old Hero of the Soviet Union, the first Soviet cosmonaut to make a second flight into space, stepped up to a microphone and addressed the dignitaries about the great honor of making the first manned test flight of Soyuz. Wearing a leather flying jacket over a coverall much like a track suit, Komarov looked rested and eager, unlike the rest of us, who were not sleep-shifted, but merely awake indecently early.
The brief ceremonies concluded, Komarov waved and, accompanied by Gagarin, Artemov, Kamanin, and the crew of the second Soyuz, got into the bus that would take him to the gantry three kilometers away.
Some of the onlookers dispersed to various posts in the control center, others went searching for tea. I hung back, watching the proceedings, wondering how I would feel should I be lucky enough to be in Komarov’s place someday. I could see the brightly lit, frozen, and steaming rocket rising above me. Then the dark landscape of the cosmodrome falling away as I rode the elevator to the ingress level with my backup pilot, with my general, and with the chief designer of my spacecraft.
There was very little room at the top level of the gantry. Kamanin and Artemov would have to stay at the elevator, leaving Gagarin to hand Komarov himself over to the four technicians who would help him into Soyuz. Two of them guided him through the EVA hatch (still too small!) in the side of the orbital module. Another tech waited inside, braced on wooden blocks so as to avoid touching flight equipment, helping Komarov lower himself to a plastic slide we called the “shoehorn,” allowing him to slip feetfirst through the even smaller nose hatch down into the bell-shaped command module. There, the fourth tech, sitting in the empty flight engineer’s couch on the right side of the spacecraft, helped steady Komarov as he carefully descended into the commander’s couch, then helped him hook up his comm lines and fasten his straps. It would be up to this same technician to squeeze past Komarov back up the nose hatch, removing the blocks and shoehorn as he went. The outer hatch would be dogged shut, and the team of technicians and the backup pilot would withdraw.
Within moments Komarov would be alone on top of the rocket, the only human being within a circle six kilometers across.
I had sat in those couches in a similar Soyuz; you hooked your heels into stirrups at the base of your couch, which forced your knees up toward your chin. Of course, it would be roomier in orbit. But if all went well, Komarov would have to make room for two new companions a day into the mission, too!
At 5:30 the viewing area fell silent as flames appeared at the base of the Soyuz, lighting up the dark sky. Sheets of ice cascaded off the rocket as it built up power, then slowly rose, the gantry opening for its escape, the rumble and roar of the first-stage engines rattling the buildings around us.
Soyuz 1 wasn’t even out of sight when I found myself glancing over to the second pad, where Soyuz 2 waited for its turn, twenty-four hours from now.
Shivering with cold, and convinced we had another day of dismal weather ahead of us, I went inside the assembly building, seeing smiling faces wherever I went, including Lev Tselauri’s. Soyuz 1 had reached orbit as planned, eight minutes after launch, and Komarov had reported that all systems were working well. “The Americans better watch out now,” I told Lev.
Grateful for any words from me that weren’t reproachful, Lev smiled and nodded.
I went looking for a couch to take a nap, since there was no point in returning to the hotel, forty kilometers away, only to have to come back here later in the day for the second launch. Besides, most members of the State Commission and the dozens of journalists covering the mission were right here, filling the offices on the second floor.
I had barely stretched out under my coat on a bed of tarps when I felt someone shaking my shoulder. “Get up, Ribko.” It was Dubnin, my comrade from the Aral Sea rescue. “We’re going on standby.”
Things had started to go wrong with Soyuz 1 an hour after reaching orbit. One of the twin solar-power panels, designed to spring out from the side of the equipment module like a wing, had failed to deploy. This was a fairly serious problem, since it limited the amount of power available for necessary spacecraft systems such as life support and navigation. In fact, without the second solar panel, Soyuz 1 could probably only operate for about twenty hours of flight. Now, this was enough time to perform a docking with Soyuz 2 and the EVA. My good friend cosmonaut Saditsky, one of several carrying information to and from the commission members on the second floor, said that some bureau engineers were talking about having Khrunov and Yeliseyev physically free the stuck panel during their EVA, an idea that I thought insane. It would be difficult enough for them to perform the simple tasks they had rehearsed: To effect repair work on equipment not designed for it, on a panel that could suddenly spring free and hit them, was dangerously stupid.
The diminished power problem, though serious, was not the biggest threat to the success of the mission. Komarov was unable to orient the spacecraft with any predictability. Engineers here at Baikonur, and with the team of specialists down at the control center in Yevpatoriya, suspected that exhaust gases from steering rockets had fogged over the optical sensor designed to lock onto the sun and certain stars.
Without orientation, there was no way for Komarov to perform the engine burns that would shape his orbit for rendezvous. He was, after all, flying the active craft of the pair.
In early afternoon, on his fifth orbit, Komarov tried to orient Soyuz by sighting on Earth’s horizon. This, too, failed. Shortly after that, his Soyuz 1 sailed off into a series of orbits that took him over Africa and America, outside our tracking and communication system. Komarov was supposed to rest during this eight-hour period, but I doubt he slept any more than did the commission members boiling up and down the stairs to the second floor, hurrying into and out of cars that roared off toward Tyuratam. (One of the earlier ones carried Gagarin, off to serve as a voice link to Komarov from Yevpatoriya.) Or any better than his comrades, Bykovsky, Khrunov, and Yeliseyev, who had to go to bed about two P.M. that afternoon, just in case they still had to launch.
By seven P.M., the rescue team had moved to the Outskirts Airfield, and were standing by, which for most of us meant finding food, smoking, or catching naps.
Since I was known to have been a bureau engineer on Soyuz, I was continually asked what I thought. Would we be flying out to recover Komarov next morning? Or would it be Komarov, Yeliseyev, Khrunov the following day? I wanted to be honest about the unlikelihood of a second launch and docking, but didn’t want to encourage the others to relax. So I stuck to the Party line: Komarov was a well-trained pilot and engineer, support teams here at Baikonur, at Yevpatoriya, and in Moscow were working to fulfill the mission, and so on.
“You’re full of shit,” Dubnin said, finally.
Complicating our preparations was a rainstorm that blew through the area in the afternoon, just enough water to turn every spot of bare earth into a muddy sea. Flight controllers wouldn’t want to land Komarov in the middle of this, but then, the prime recovery zone was dozens of kilometers to the north and west. Was it raining there? Nobody seemed to know.
At midnight, contact was reestablished with Komarov. He had slept fitfully; the solar panel was still stuck; and the solar orientation system was still broken. The State Commission canceled the Soyuz 2 launch, and decided to land Komarov at the beginning of his seventeenth orbit, about 5:30 in the morning.
We were ordered to be ready to take off in three hours.