Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [19]
At least the parachuting felt more like proper space training. Once Gagarin and his comrades were in a plane and doing something useful, they felt better. More in control. For another group of victims, however, there was no such easy escape from the doctors’ needles, gas tanks and isolation chambers.
Quite apart from the cosmonauts, another group of ‘testers’ was put through a similar series of medical procedures – similar but worse. These young men were selected from a slightly lower rung of the aviation-academic ladder. They were not necessarily fighter pilots or first-rate theoreticians. They were just averagely bright, fit young military men. During recruitment they were never asked outright if they would like to fly in space. They were offered a chance to ‘participate’, which was a subtle but important shift of emphasis.
The testers’ job was to find out just how much a human body could take. Then the cosmonauts, who were somewhat less expendable, could be pushed to those limits but no further. Unlike the cosmonauts, testers were not professionally acknowledged, and were paid only according to their previous military occupations as soldiers, technicians or mechanics. They were seduced with great care by their recruiters into a feeling of privilege and self-worth, but in truth their status was barely better than that of disposable laboratory rats. When they received injuries – and they did receive injuries – there were no special arrangements to compensate them or their families, because the authorities were unwilling to acknowledge any of their work in public. Even today, long after glasnost, the Russian space authorities do not like to discuss the testers’ contributions to the early space effort, nor to the development of high-performance jet fighters, parachutes, ejection systems and flight suits for the Air Force. In all, approximately 1,200 testers were involved in various programmes over three decades.
They were all military volunteers, good soldiers, who did not like to surrender, to fail in front of their comrades. They were ‘free’ to abort any test-run halfway through if the discomfort became too great, but very few wanted to quit. Like the cosmonauts, who all dreamed of getting the first flight into space – of going higher, flying faster – the testers had their own strange pinnacle of glory to climb. Who could take the highest air pressures? The lowest? Who could survive the catapult sled’s most rapid accelerations? The bone-jarring crash-stops? Who spent the longest time aboard the centrifuge, and how many g’s could they take? Who among them was the toughest, the strongest, the bravest?
Sergei Nefyodov, a veteran from those days, recalls with a bitter smile, ‘At first we didn’t know what kind of tests we were in for, but it soon became seriously clear. They said they’d try us out in a “soft” landing experiment. That made us laugh! The tester had to throw himself out of a seat at some height – not great, but high enough. It was the level that might actually occur from a real landing of a spacecraft. There were some traumas as a result. The most serious was when something broke, or the system didn’t work properly. Some lads couldn’t get up again after the test.’
Nefyodov still boasts today that the testers took turns in a centrifuge that would have wiped out the delicate little cosmonauts. ‘I achieved seven minutes at ten g’s. The cosmonauts only had to endure two or three minutes at seven g’s, and twenty seconds at twelve g’s. My colleague Viktor Kostin often took twenty-seven g’s for a very short time, by taking severe shocks in the catapult sled. Those were very brief, measured in microseconds, but