Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [18]
He was not so self-confident in the whirling centrifuge, a small capsule spun on the end of a long boom to simulate the g-loads of acceleration and deceleration: the traditional fairground ride for all pilots and astronauts the world over, loved to death by each and every one of them. For a pilot as proud as Titov, it was unnerving to be so much at the mercy of others. ‘In an aircraft you can fly a high-g loop, and you control when you come out of it. The centrifuge was disgusting. The g-force is pressing you and pressing you, but you have no control. You just sit there like a guinea-pig.’
Gagarin did not like it either, despite his much-heralded talent for taking g-forces. His earlier qualification runs in an Air Force centrifuge had peaked at around seven g’s. His MiG fighter had pulled nine, maybe ten on a vicious high-speed turn. Now the space-training centrifuge took him briefly up to twelve. ‘My eyes wouldn’t shut, breathing was a great effort, my face muscles were twisted, my heart rate speeded up and the blood in my veins felt as heavy as mercury.’7
Perhaps the most unpleasant training procedure was the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment. The cosmonauts were locked in the isolation chamber while the air supply was pumped out, slowly but remorselessly. Gagarin had to endure this test without complaint if he was to be pronounced fit for a space mission. The doctors sealed him up, then watched his face on a television monitor while he wrote his name on a paper pad, over and over again. Journalist Lydia Obukhova watched this procedure, and archive footage taken by the technicians still survives. As the oxygen level in the chamber was reduced, Gagarin’s writing became erratic, until eventually he was scribbling gibberish. Down went the air level. Gagarin dropped his pencil, dropped the pad, stared at nothing and suddenly blacked out. His threshold of consciousness must have been high enough for him to pass the test, or else he would have lost his place in the cosmonaut squad, but it is reasonable to assume that he shared the other cosmonauts’ intense dislike of the procedure, because it made them look so foolish in front of the doctors. Senior space engineers shared this distaste and wondered what the doctors thought they could achieve by suffocating their test subjects. The only way a cosmonaut could lose his air supply in orbit was if his capsule sprang a leak, in which case he would close the visor on his space helmet and switch to a separate emergency air supply. If both the cabin and the spacesuit sprang leaks, then the cosmonaut was as good as dead anyway, but the chances of this double failure occurring were negligible. In space, either you had air to breathe or you did not. There were no half measures. The senior rocket engineers thought the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment was pointless, but the doctors did not, and that was that.
For the rattled cosmonauts, it was almost a relief to move on to the parachuting exercises, where they could tease the doctors because most of them lacked the courage to follow the pilots out of the aircraft’s doorway. Their instructor was Nikolai Konstantovich, an expert parachutist with a record-breaking freefall jump from a height of fifteen kilometres to his credit. Future space crewmen might have to eject and parachute to earth at similar altitudes, and Konstantovich’s job was to demonstrate all the things that could go wrong up there – and how to get out of them. For example, there was the ‘corkscrew’ problem, when a misfiring ejection seat throws the pilot into a sickening spin, or the seat fires cleanly, but the craft it’s coming out of is tumbling. Either way the pilot cannot pull his parachute safely, because the lines will twist around each other like the strands of a rope, and the silk canopy will not unfurl. The pilot must stabilize his fall and give his ’chute