Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [26]
Korolev cut short Ivanovsky’s lecture and explained Vostok’s flight characteristics in terms that his audience of MiG-trained pilots could more easily understand, but he warned his listeners, ‘There’s a lot you have to learn. We can’t tell you everything in one day. We’ll prepare special classes, so that you can learn the system thoroughly. You’ll attend lectures, and then we will set you some exams.’
One of them, a handsome lad with an irresistible grin, asked Korolev a question. ‘Sergei Pavlovich, will you be marking us?’
‘Yes, and we’ll throw you out!’ Korolev barked at him. ‘Stop smiling! What are you smiling at, Yuri Alexeyevich!’
Korolev glared at the boy to see how he would react, perhaps deliberately trying to undo the mood he had created back in his office. Gagarin forced the muscles of his face into a sober expression, but he was not at all frightened. He stayed perfectly calm, and almost certainly this was the response which Korolev was looking for. Ivanovsky had discovered this from personal experience. Just a few weeks previously Korolev had thrown a fit and sacked him on the spot. He often sacked people, then reinstated them the next morning. It was his way of letting off steam. On this occasion he yelled across the assembly floor, ‘You no longer work for me, and I’m putting a de-merit in your record!’ Ivanovsky shouted back, ‘You can’t do that, because you just fired me. I don’t work for you any more!’ Korolev shouted at him again, but in a short while the incident was forgotten. The Chief Designer admired people who stood up to him – people who played straight, and did not hide important problems under the table simply in order to protect their jobs. His relationship with Ivanovsky was very trusting after that. And now, here was this cocksure farmboy from the Smolensk Region . . .
Suddenly Korolev invited the cosmonauts to take a closer look at one of the Vostoks, a version to be used in ground tests, but fitted just the same with most of the equipment used during an actual flight, including the ejection seat and control panels. Alexei Leonov remembers Korolev telling them to take off their boots (to preserve the ship’s cleanliness), then go up a ladder and climb through the open hatch of the ball. Without a moment’s hesitation Gagarin stepped forward. ‘With your permission, Sergei Pavlovich?’ He sloughed off his boots and clambered up.
One of the other cosmonauts, Valery Bykovsky, insists that Gagarin was not actually told to remove his boots. After all, a pilot would not expect to take off his footwear to sit in the cockpit of a new MiG, so why now? ‘That’s how they take off their shoes in Russian villages when they go into a house, as a sign of respect,’ Bykovsky thought to himself. He was sure that Gagarin became ‘the one’ from that moment.7
Gagarin paid no attention to his companions, all busily removing their shoes on the floor behind him. He was much too fascinated by the spacecraft cabin. It was swathed throughout in a light tan-coloured rubber foam. This cladding disguised the sphere’s real guts: the endless pipework and electrical distribution systems. It would be some weeks yet before any of the cosmonauts was introduced in more detail to these shrouded mysteries. For now, Gagarin’s quick inspection took in only the most obvious items. He would have found the interior much less cluttered than the cockpit of his MiG. Certainly there were fewer dials and instruments. The ejection seat, which he now reclined on, took up much of the space. This must have seemed reassuringly familiar, except that he had to lie on his back rather than sit upright. Mounted on the wall directly above his face was a simple panel with a few switches, some status indicator lights, a chronometer and a little globe representing the earth. To the casual observer it might have looked like a child’s educational toy, but in the months to come, Gagarin and his colleagues would learn about the hidden gyroscopes and accelerometers that fed their data into the globe, allowing it to swivel in precise lockstep