Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [25]
According to Leonov, Yuri Gagarin made a good impression in Korolev’s office that day, listening intently and asking pertinent questions about space and rockets. In this formal semi-military context – young recruits being introduced to a superior for the first time – Gagarin’s curiosity might easily have been misread for impertinence, but the Chief Designer was pleased that any of the cosmonauts should ask direct questions. Leonov remembers, ‘He told Yuri to stand up, and he said, “Tell me, my little eagle, about your life and your family.” For ten or twenty minutes it was as if Korolev forgot about the rest of us, and I think he liked Yuri immediately.’
Gherman Titov, a somewhat prideful man, was not cowed by the Chief Designer’s reputation and authoritarian demeanour. ‘What did I know, a young lieutenant with eyes full of courage and scarcely a single sensible thought in my head,’ he admits ruefully. Over the coming months and years his relationship with Korolev never really developed into genuine warmth. ‘Probably, two lions couldn’t exist in the same cage. I don’t want to say I was ever the same calibre of lion as Korolev, but we did have quite a difficult relationship.’
It was Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov who emerged as firm favourites to be taken under the Chief Designer’s wing, although he would prove fiercely loyal and protective towards all the cosmonauts who flew for him and put their trust in his rockets and capsules.
After this first introduction Korolev escorted the cosmonauts into the heart of OKB-1. They went into the main construction area, while Korolev and one of his senior spacecraft designers, Oleg Ivanovsky, started to explain what they were seeing, but it was hard to take things in. There were a dozen spacecraft, lined up neatly, their positions in the rank depending on their current state of construction, from bare shell at one end to near-completion at the other. Archive footage still conveys the extraordinary scene. Each ship consisted of a silvery sphere mounted on top of a conical base covered in wires and pipes, with another reversed cone beneath it, clad in delicately grooved metal vanes. The double-cone section was a detachable equipment module, and the vanes on the lower cone were radiators. The big spheres (everybody called them ‘balls’) were cabins for the crew.6 The machines had no aerodynamics, no control surfaces or any obvious means of propulsion; no proper landing gear, even. They could not stand on the floor properly, but had to be supported inside metal frames to keep them upright, like unstable buildings propped up with scaffolding. ‘It was something we couldn’t grasp at all,’ says Titov, ‘It was completely incomprehensible to us – a ball without wings, without anything. It wasn’t easy for a pilot to understand. Of course, as pilots, we’d never come across anything to compare it with.’
These were ‘Vostok’ space capsules.
There were bundles of electrical wires running from various test boxes and conduits in the factory that snaked across the floor, sprouted from the walls, dropped from the ceiling. Every last one of them plugged, like sinister roots, into the space machines, testing and probing, powering them up, shutting them down, as the white-coated engineers ran their countless tests.
Oleg Ivanovsky, who had a reputation for being long-winded, lectured the cosmonauts in mind-numbing detail about the ship’s components. ‘They dragged a few words out of me, as they say.’ All the while, he scanned the faces of the twenty would-be cosmonauts before him; twenty young men, twenty names, twenty strangers. Korolev knew them by now, of course, but Ivanovsky had not met any of them until this moment. ‘They all gazed at the vessels with great curiosity, as this was the first time they’d seen any space technology. I knew they were all pilots, familiar with aviation, but one has to say honestly: which of them could get used to this