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4 Trento, Prescription for Disaster, pp. 48–9.

5 Young, Journey to Tranquillity, pp. 108–9.

6 Ibid., p. 113.

7 Harford, Korolev, p. 178.

8 Ibid. p. 151.

9 Hooper, The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Vol. II, pp. 296–9.

9: The Foros Incident

1 Kamanin’s diary entries, September 14–October 3, 1961.

2 Kamanin’s diary suggests that Gagarin went out in a motor boat and ‘experimented with sharp and dangerous turns’. Anna Rumanseyeva and others remember him going out in a rowing boat, which would explain why he could not easily get back to shore.

3 Kamanin’s diaries.

4 A wall chart at Star City commemorates the dates and destinations of all Gagarin’s trips. All countries are named, except for the US. Gagarin made a very brief visit to New York on October 16, 1963, but the wall chart refers instead to the ‘United Nations’. Gagarin was a guest speaker in the UN complex, and was not formally invited by the US itself.

5 Venyamin Russayev agreed to be interviewed when Valentina Gagarina suggested he should do so. Valentina no longer gives interviews herself.

10: Back to Work

1 Hooper, The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Vol. I, pp. 33–6.

2 Kamanin’s diaries, June 22, 1962.

3 Hooper, The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Vol. II, pp. 75–6. See also: Harford, Korolev, pp. 165–6.

4 Details of Gagarin’s diploma work are derived from extensive interviews with Sergei Belotserkovsky, his tutor at the Zhukovsky Academy.

5 A detailed account of the Voskhod II mission can be found in Harvey, The New Russian Space Programme, pp. 82–8. See also: Newkirk, Almanac of Soviet Manned Spaceflight, pp. 35–7.

6 Harford, Korolev, pp. 49–63.

7 Conversation with James Oberg.

11: Falling to Earth

1 For a valuable account of Mishin’s troubles, see Sagdeev, Roald, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994, pp. 123–4, 179–81.

2 The Apollo I fire exposed some scandalous business relationships and incompetencies associated with the NASA moon project. For an eye-opening account, see Young, Journey to Tranquillity, pp. 212–48.

3 Archives of Dr John Logsdon, Space Policy Institute, George Washington University, Washington, DC, National Intelligence Estimate Number 11-1-67, March 2, 1967, ‘The Soviet Space Programme’, p. 18.

4 Quoted in Oberg, Red Star in Orbit, pp. 90–91.

5 Yevsikov, Victor, Re-entry Technology and the Soviet Space Programme: Some Personal Observations, Reston, VA: Delphic Associates, 1982, quoted in Oberg, Uncovering Soviet Disasters, p. 171.

6 Details of Gagarin’s involvement in the Soyuz technical assessment are confirmed by ex-KGB officer Venyamin Russayev, at the specific request of Valentina Gagarina.

7 Detailed technical accounts of the possible sequence of failures during Komarov’s flight can be found in Newkirk, Dennis, Almanac of Soviet Manned Spaceflight, pp. 58–64. See also: Hooper, The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Vol. II, pp. 133–6; Harvey, The New Russian Space Programme, pp. 107–10;Gatland, Kenneth, ‘The Soviet Space Programme After Soyuz 1’, Spaceflight magazine, Vol. 9, No. 9, 1967, pp. 298–9; Shepard & Slayton, Moonshot, pp. 250–53.

8 The interview, under the headline ‘US Electronic Espionage: a Memoir’, was published in the left-leaning American journal Ramparts, which went out of business in 1980. According to a senior source in the US State Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) considered prosecuting Fellwock. He could have been imprisoned, but the case was dropped because the NSA did not want to admit in open court to their radio monitoring of Soviet space communications.

12: Wreckage

1 Hooper, The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Vol. I, p. 144.

2 Quoted in Golovanov, Our Gagarin, p. 214.

3 Ibid., p. 270. Incidentally, this is the only paragraph in a 300-page book to suggest that Gagarin’s professional circumstances were sometimes painful for him.

4 Leskov, Sergei, ‘The Mystery of Gagarin’s Death’, Izvestia, March 28, 1996.

5 Ibid.

6 Transcripted quotes from original commission reports from the papers of Sergei