Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [31]
Then, less than three weeks before the first manned flight, one of the cosmonauts was killed. Valentin Bondarenko was the baby of the group, a fresh-faced lad of twenty-four years. When his turn came to go into the isolation chamber, he handled his assignment very well. His was a fairly long session (fifteen days), to see how he made out. On March 23 he prepared to exit the chamber. They were running a ‘high-altitude’ regime, and the chamber had to be brought up to normal pressure very slowly, or Bondarenko would suffer from the ‘bends’. There was another half-hour to go before the supervising technicians could equalize the pressures and open the hatch. Bondarenko stretched, climbed out of his itchy woollen outer garment and peeled the medical sensor pads from his torso and upper arms with evident relief. He cleaned his irritated skin with pads of cotton daubed in alcohol. Perhaps he tossed the pads aside a little carelessly. One of them landed on the hotplate of the little cooking stove and caught alight. In the confined, oxygen-rich environment of the chamber, the fire spread with terrifying rapidity.
They pulled him out, covered in burns and in great pain. ‘It’s my fault! I’m so sorry!’ he cried. The doctors struggled for eight hours to save him, but his injuries were too extreme. The circumstances of his death were not made public until 1986.5
There was one aspect of space flight for which the cosmonauts at Star City had no practical means of preparing themselves in advance: weightlessness. Korolev and his advisors were not keen to allow their first manned spacecraft to drift in space for longer than a single orbit, because no one was sure that its passenger could survive an entire day without the normal sensation of gravity.
Weightlessness presented a tremendous psychological barrier for the early Soviet space programme. The only earth-bound opportunity to taste the sensation was in the 28-storey lift shaft at Moscow State University, one of the city’s tallest buildings. There was a special cage that fell freely down the shaft and slammed into compressed-air buffers at the bottom of its drop. The cosmonauts might float freely of the cage’s floor for two or three seconds at best. Korolev’s guidance specialist Yuri Mazzhorin explains, ‘It was our first dive into an ocean of uncertainty. We were afraid of everything. That’s why Sergei Pavlovich was in favour of a gradual approach. For the first human space mission, one circle. The next flight, twenty-four hours. The next, three days, to see how a person would survive.’
American astronauts at NASA flew long parabolic arcs aboard Boeing 707 jet planes. These craft were essentially cargo-carrying airliners, but with all the seats and storage crates stripped out, so that the interior cabin was a capacious free space. The astronauts could float free of the walls for perhaps two minutes at a time – more than enough to eliminate the sinister mystique of weightlessness. The Russians never thought to use their cargo planes in this way, at least not in the early 1960s. Trainee cosmonauts experienced thirty seconds or so of near-weightlessness while jerking about in the back seat of a MiG-15 fighter aircraft flying a similar parabolic arc, but it was barely more useful than plunging down the lift shaft at Moscow State University. Titov recalls the MiG experience being uncomfortable and unsatisfactory, and so short that it was not much more than he was used to on ordinary combat training missions. ‘When you’re performing an advanced manoeuvre and not doing it well, you might get something similar, and all the dirt and dust on the cockpit’s floor flies into your face. These short bursts aren’t weightlessness as such. It’s very