Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [38]
5
PRE-FLIGHT
By the end of 1960 six men from the cosmonaut squad of twenty had been selected as potential candidates for the first Vostok flight. The list was based on the cosmonauts’ abilities and their training record over the previous year; however, there was a more arbitrary factor at work – height, or rather, the lack of it. Vostok’s ejector seat could only accommodate a crewman of modest stature. Gagarin’s short frame made him ideal, as did Gherman Titov’s. Alexei Leonov was a highly proficient candidate, but he was too tall for Vostok in its current configuration.
On March 7, 1961 Valentina Gagarina delivered a second child, Galya. Three weeks after this happy event, Gagarin had to leave for Baikonur, where he and Titov were scheduled to rehearse their final pre-flight checks. By now, they were the only serious candidates in the running for the first flight, the list of six having been whittled down yet further. Both men were aware that a final selection for the first flight would not be made until the very eve of launch, scheduled for April 12. Competition was fierce, albeit understated. ‘Of course I wanted to be chosen,’ Titov explains today. ‘I wanted to be the first into space. Why shouldn’t I? Not just for the sake of being first – simply because we were all interested to see what was out there.’
Titov and Gagarin tried to outdo each other in their cooperation towards each other, knowing that a spirit of professionalism and teamwork would mark them out as suitable choices. A third potential candidate, Grigory Grigoryevich Nelyubov, miscalculated badly, deliberately trying to push himself forward as the only suitable man for the historic first flight. By the end of March, he was no longer in the running.
On arriving at Baikonur, the cosmonauts’ first task was to learn how to dress in their spacesuits. The decision to make the suits had only been taken in mid-1960, after a series of difficult discussions. Many designers thought that Vostok’s pressure-shell should be enough to protect its pilot, and Korolev was worried about the extra weight penalty imposed by the suit and its separate life-support system. However, he was swayed by the safety arguments. He turned to Gai Severin, Russia’s most experienced maker of pilot garments and ejection systems, and said bluntly, ‘You can have the weight allocation [in Vostok] but we need the suits in nine months’ time.’1
Severin based his suits on the high-pressure aircraft garments he had designed in the wake of the Korean War. The pro-communist pilots in Soviet-built MiGs often lost consciousness if they turned their planes too suddenly during combat, while their American enemies managed to stay awake. Severin realized that a tight pressure-suit could help against the g-forces. After he had dressed the pilots more suitably, the Americans became less keen on chasing MiGs round sharp corners. Using a similar design, his spacesuits would help to brace a cosmonaut against the acceleration of the R-7 rocket. The tight fit, especially round his legs, would prevent blood from pooling in his lower torso and starving the supply to his brain. The strong, airtight layers of the space outfit were made from a tough, blue-tinted rubberized compound, while the outer orange material – familiar to Western observers from publicity photographs – was not particularly important for survival. It was just a coverall to smooth out the various bumps and seals, made from a brightly coloured fabric so that a cosmonaut could easily be located if he came down in a snow-covered region. The Soviet Union in April had many snow-covered regions.
Severin was on hand now to teach the cosmonauts how