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his spacesuit worked, while the Chief of Cosmonaut Training, Nikolai Kamanin, watched carefully. This lesson was also for the benefit of the attending technicians, who had to be able to handle every component with flawless efficiency, so that nothing would be forgotten on launch day. Two spare outfits were allocated so that the ‘real’ suits would remain unblemished until they were needed. Then, fully suited up, the cosmonauts took turns clambering through the hatchway of a duplicate Vostok ball, while the pad crews practised strapping them down. Kamanin supervised mind-numbingly repetitive run-throughs of the emergency ejection routine: setting all the right control switches in the cabin, ensuring the suit and helmet were sealed, and above all preparing the body, tensing the muscles, for the violent shock to come. In a real emergency Gagarin and Titov would have to be able to do all these things without a moment’s thought.

On April 3 the two rival cosmonauts dressed up in the reserve spacesuits for one last time so that they could be filmed climbing into Vostok. They took it in turns to make a moving farewell speech at the foot of the launch gantry. No clear details of the R-7’s appearance were revealed in these shots, because the rocket was still sitting horizontally in the assembly hangar – and its design details were highly secret. The launch technicians mimed the procedures for sealing the cosmonauts up in the ball, these sequences being staged in another area of the main spacecraft preparation hangar, not at the launch pad itself. In the months to come, several faked scenes would be spliced into brief but genuine shots of the launch preparations, taken under much less favourable conditions by cameraman Vladimir Suvorov. On the big day, gantry staff would not be able to give him such full access as he could fake in the hangar.2

On April 7 Titov and Gagarin accompanied Kamanin to the launch pad. They inspected the gantry equipment in detail and rehearsed how to get off the pad if a fire broke out. If a cosmonaut was sealed into the ball and something went wrong before the R-7 rocket had even left the ground, the ejection seat would hurl him away from trouble, but at this low altitude he would never get high enough into the sky to open his parachute to its fullest extent. So the engineers had worked out the ‘catapulting distance’ of the seat and built a huge array of netting on the ground 1,500 metres away from the pad. The cosmonaut would fall into this, just so long as all the calculations were right. A mannequin had made this trip a few times, but now it was for real.

Kamanin reminded the cosmonauts about the manual option. If they were sitting on the pad awaiting lift-off and the blockhouse computers decided that something was wrong with the rocket, then the cosmonaut’s seat would automatically eject. Failing that, Sergei Korolev in the control bunker had a special key to activate the seat by remote control, according to his own judgement. Typically he would not trust himself alone. He ordered that two other level-headed people in the bunker should also be assigned such keys. But what if none of these safety options worked properly in a crisis? Then the cosmonaut would have to fire the seat on his own initiative, just like a pilot consciously deciding to bail out of a stricken MiG.

At this point in the lecture, Titov made a casual but most unfortunate remark, as recounted in Kamanin’s diary for April 7. ‘Worrying about this is probably a waste of time. The automatic ejection system will work without a hitch.’

Kamanin then turned to his other candidate. ‘Yuri, what do you think?’

Gagarin considered carefully before answering. Reading his answer, one can assume that he did not want to embarrass Titov or insult the skills of all those engineers who had built the automatic systems, although Kamanin obviously wanted to hear a different opinion. ‘I agree, the automatic systems won’t let us down,’ Gagarin replied, giving Titov some covering fire and expressing proper confidence in the ship’s design. ‘But if I know that