Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [33]
But even this ‘success’ envelope was not easy to compile. ‘When the capsule, suspended on parachutes, reached seven thousand metres, the cosmonaut was supposed to eject and come down under his own parachute. We weren’t sure whether to include this part.’
The problem was simple. In the event of a good flight, the Soviets intended to claim the World Aviation Altitude Record, according to rules established by international agreement. Korolev read these rules with care, and noticed to his alarm that any pilot claiming such a record had to remain inside his vehicle all the way to touchdown. If a pilot bailed out before landing, the rules assumed that something must have gone wrong with the flight. In which case, no record. The alternative was not to eject Vostok’s crewman, but Korolev was not sure that anyone could survive the re-entry ball’s abrupt landing without injury. Gai Severin, the foremost Soviet designer of fighter-pilot equipment, had already designed an emergency ejection seat for the cabin, just in case the R-7 launched badly and the cosmonaut had to get clear of some terrible explosion. If the same system was used to remove him at the end of his flight, there would be no need to worry if the ball came down rather too hard on the ground. Future re-entry modules would incorporate larger parachutes and a cluster of rockets in the base to soften the final impact. In later years, more powerful upper stages for the R-7 would allow larger and better-equipped ships to be hauled aloft. For now, the power-to-mass calculations for the system allowed Vostok no margin for luxuries. Soft-landing rockets for the ball were not an option, and its crewman had no choice but to eject.
Nikolai Kamanin instructed a sports official, Ivan Borisenko, to research the altitude-record regulations more deeply. By February 1961 the problem still had not been resolved. At this point, very late in the day, a strategic untruth seemed much more appealing than a major re-design of Vostok. Mazzhorin’s first envelope for TASS, containing the ‘successful’ announcement, falsely implied that the cosmonaut landed in his ship. ‘For a long time this legend was supported in all the official documents,’ says Mazzhorin. ‘Only in the glasnost era was the truth revealed to our people, and to the world.’ The other envelopes must have told a different story. For instance, if Vostok had landed over non-Soviet territory, the use of an ejection seat would have been blatantly obvious to foreigners. Mazzhorin cannot remember the precise wording he used, and he regrets the subsequent loss of his envelopes. ‘It’s a pity we destroyed them. They’d have a historic value today.’
Even the simplest details in the documents for TASS presented a challenge. In the lead-up to the first manned flight it seemed natural to call the capsule ‘Vostok-1’, in the expectation that others would follow in its wake; but the capsule’s principal designer, Oleg Ivanovsky, recalls, ‘If we’d given it a number, then it would have suggested that a series was beginning. We didn’t want anyone to know we were preparing other flights, so Vostok wasn’t given a number.’
A fourth and very different kind of document was prepared for stowage in the Vostok capsule itself. The cosmonauts were not to know it, but even in the last few weeks before the first manned flight, arguments were raging about the extent of command and control that a space pilot should be allowed during his mission. Everything centred around the mysterious six-digit keypad on Vostok’s left-side control panel.
So far, all space vehicles had been operated by on-board electronic systems linked by radio to control stations on the ground, which represented a difficult challenge