Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [44]
Gagarin had his own shock of realization to deal with. In his official account of the flight, The Road to the Stars, he wrote, ‘The people helping me into my spacesuit held out pieces of paper. One even held out his workpass, asking for an autograph. I couldn’t refuse, and signed several times.’ Yevgeny Karpov watched Gagarin right up to the last moment. He noticed the First Cosmonaut’s anxiety about all these autographs. ‘For the first time since his arrival at Baikonur he was at a loss, unable to give his usual instant replies to people. He asked, “Is this really necessary?” I said, “You’d better get used to it, Yura. After your flight you’ll be signing a million of these things.”’ With many months of technical and physical training behind him, Gagarin had not had much time to consider what might happen when he came back to earth after today’s mission. Now, almost too late, he caught a glimpse of the enormous social burden that would be placed on his shoulders.
Dressed in the twentieth century’s most distinctive suits of armour, Gagarin and Titov took their seats in the bus: a matching pair of cosmonauts, the same sort of age, at the same peak of physical fitness, with the same hard slog of medical endurance and procedural training behind them. Their spacesuits and helmets were identical. It could be either one of them going up today, but by some ridiculous anomaly of fate it was going to be Gagarin. When the bus drew up alongside the base of the launch gantry, Titov wished him good luck, and meant it. Cameraman Vladimir Suvorov recalled the scene in his diary:
According to our old Russian tradition, on these occasions one should kiss the person going away three times on alternate cheeks. It is completely impossible to do this while wearing bulky space suits with helmets attached, so they simply clanged against each other with their helmets, and it looked very funny . . . Then Gagarin got off the bus and paced awkwardly towards the Chief Designer. Obviously it wasn’t easy for him to walk in his clumsy suit.11
Titov remained in his seat in the bus, staring listlessly through the windows at the reinforced concrete control bunker – at the ‘hedgehogs’. That’s what everybody called them: the array of jagged spars sticking out of the roof at crazy angles. The theory was that if a misfiring rocket fell on top of the bunker and exploded, the hedgehogs would break it up before it could actually smash into the roof. The worst of the blast would be deflected, and the people in the bunker might live to launch another day. At least the hedgehogs made more sense than this business of sitting in the bus as Gagarin’s back-up. Titov recalls his thoughts that day with painful clarity. ‘We’d trained together a long time. We were both fighter pilots, so we understood each other. He was commanding the flight, and I was his back-up, just in case. But we both knew “just in case” wasn’t going to happen. What could happen at this late stage? Was he going to catch flu between the bus and the launch gantry? Break his leg? It was all nonsense. We shouldn’t have gone out to the launch pad together. Only one of us should have gone.’
Even so, Titov admits that one simple, tantalizing thought went round and round in his head. ‘Probably nothing will happen, but what if? No, nothing can happen now, but what if . . .?’
Director of Medical Preparations Vladimir Yazdovsky remembers Titov’s palpable tension in the bus. ‘Of course he was hoping that when Gagarin went up to the capsule, a small tear would appear in his spacesuit or something, and immediately the Number Two would be in command of the flight, but Gagarin went into the launch-tower lift-cage very carefully, ascended to the capsule and sat down in the cabin, and when he reported to me that he was safely strapped into place, I gave the order to Titov to remove his spacesuit.