Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [20]
This was the great frustration – the testers could not tell anyone how tough they were, because their jobs were extremely secret. They knew perfectly well that they were being given a much harder time than the cosmonauts. Sometimes they would look across at the physicians, with their dials and monitoring equipment, and they could only wonder. Nefyodov says, ‘On the one hand, they [the doctors] were representatives of very humane professions, but on the other hand, the g-forces would climb, and the technicians would ask: should they stop the tests? It seems the subject can’t take any more, he’s going red, his heart is galloping, his sweat is flowing, but the doctors don’t stop the test...
‘It was dangerous for the testers. One of the senior academics for the test programme, Sergei Molydin, he said – and I can quote him – “we experimented on dogs, and fifty per cent of them survived. As you know, a person is stronger than a dog.” Well, that’s a joke! The consequences of our tests couldn’t be predicted. Even if a person survived, he might become an invalid in later life, with damage to the lungs, the heart or other internal organs. Of course we could refuse a test at any time, but the unwritten rule was not to refuse. If you turned down a test, this would only happen once, because after that you weren’t in the team any more.’
Nefyodov says that half of all the testers he worked with in the 1960s have not survived into the 1990s, but he isn’t bitter about his career. Far from it. He takes great pride in his contribution to the space effort. ‘The only tragic side is that our profession never existed. It was a close secret, so we had no social protection from the State, and no one ever investigated the long-term health of the testers. Today our old friends, our colleagues, are beginning to die.’ He remembers a particularly nasty experiment to simulate the failure of a spacecraft’s air-cleansing system. ‘If carbon dioxide builds up in the air to three per cent in a submarine, for instance, that’s enough to declare an emergency condition. With a colleague in a test chamber [at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems] I went over to three and a half, four, five per cent. Honestly, you have nothing to breathe, your face turns an unpleasant colour, the lips turn blue, your brain won’t work, you have a hideous headache and your strength fails. My partner and I had nosebleeds, but we worked for the set time. I always remember saying to him, “Just a half-hour more, and it will pass.” Then half an hour later, “Just one more half-hour.” I had to pep him up in some way.’
Yevgeny Kiryushin vividly remembers the altered state of consciousness he experienced in a centrifuge, with his body pushed beyond any normal definition of stress. ‘Suddenly there was a light, it was very interesting, dark at first, then yellow, lilac, crossing some sort of emptiness, and then you just forget any sensation in yourself. You just have the impression that you’re a brain, a hand, an eye. The oppressive weight is all in the seat, and suddenly, above your body is you. You’re completely weightless, as if having a look at yourself from above. That’s the transforming moment. All of your real achievements happen in those few minutes. But the experiments are frightening, without exception.’
Nefyodov remembers meeting Yuri Gagarin personally for the first time on January 2, 1968, when the First Cosmonaut came to visit the medical experimental facility and share a New Year’s celebration with the testers. ‘At that time I had just started working on explosive decompression, which interested me greatly. He kept asking me, “What’s it like? Aren’t you frightened? Have you simulated an atmospheric drop to fifty kilometres’ pressure?” It was great to talk to him about all this.