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in itself. What new problems might arise when a human pilot was included in the ship? The doctors worried that a solo cosmonaut might go mad up there, overcome by the spiritual and psychological separation from his companions on earth, while the security services worried that he might defect to the West, deliberately re-entering his craft over foreign territory at the end of his flight. By the autumn of 1960 the discussions about control underwent a bizarre shift of emphasis. The aim was no longer to give the pilot some dignified authority over his own vehicle, but to take it all away from him. Guidance of Vostok would be purely automatic, just as with all the unmanned ships. In an emergency, the crewman might be allowed to operate the controls for a while, but only if he could prove his sanity beforehand.

The engineers devised a six-digit keypad that would unlock the navigation systems from the computers and let the pilot steer his own ship, if manual control became necessary. He would be told the keypad combination only if the mission directors on the ground decided he was mentally fit for the job. With his accustomed logic, Sergei Korolev broke this plan down into its component parts and questioned the basic assumptions. Why would a pilot be given control of the ship? Presumably because the automatic systems had failed and he needed to take over. But if the ship started to tumble out of control, the radio link with earth might be interrupted just at the point when the pilot really needed to hear the secret code that would release his manual controls. The keypad idea seemed more dangerous than just leaving things be.

The doctors came up with a face-saving solution whereby the pilot could find out the code even if his radio went dead, as Vostok’s co-designer Oleg Ivanovsky explains: ‘They decided that if he reached for an envelope placed inside the cabin, ripped it open, took out the paper and read the number printed on it, then pressed the keypad, this careful sequence of actions would prove he hadn’t lost his mind and was still answerable for his actions. It was a dangerous comedy, part of the silly secrecy we had in those days.’ The whole procedure was self-defeating. Obviously the envelope had to be placed somewhere within reach in the cabin, and could not be hidden anywhere too hard to find, just in case the need for it was genuine and urgent. An unstable cosmonaut could have opened it at any time without permission and taken control of his ship. Mark Gallai, the Soviet Union’s Chief Test Pilot, was recruited into the space programme to help train the Vostok cosmonauts. In a recent interview with historian James Harford, he said:

All the test pilots believed these concerns were stupid. Many pilots had flown in the stratosphere at night, or in heavy cloud conditions . . . We made a great noise about the key panel. It was our feeling that the chance of a pilot going crazy was much smaller than the possibility of a failure in the radio communication . . . Korolev didn’t like the keypad either, but he decided to accept it to quiet the physicians . . . Suppose a cosmonaut made a mistake punching the buttons? Who would punish him?6

Curiously enough, the American space pilots fought this battle in precise mirror-image. NASA’s cautious rocket engineers wanted fully automatic systems at first, but the astronauts insisted on a wide-ranging freedom of control. They took advantage of their high-profile appearances in Life magazine and on television to lobby for command over their own flights, or at least to obtain an equal partnership with their mission managers on the ground. Strong-willed, individualistic astronauts spent long hours throwing their weight around at the various aerospace factories, essentially designing many aspects of the emerging spacecraft to their own convenience.

There was no requirement to prepare any keypad codes or TASS envelopes for unmanned test flights of Vostok, nor to worry about rescue arrangements. If they descended over a foreign country, they could be destroyed by remote control with