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Korolev, Academician Keldysh and several other dignitaries were at the gantry’s base to greet Gagarin and wish him a good flight. ‘Well, it’s time to go. I’ve already been inside the ball, to see how it feels,’ said Korolev. He took from his pocket a tiny hexagon of metal, a duplicate of a commemorative plaque sent to the moon on a simple automated ‘Lunik’ probe in 1959. Its deliberate crash-landing had scattered a dozen of the little plaques in all directions. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll be able to pick up an original, Yuri Alexeyevich.’12

In his diary Nikolai Kamanin observed drily:

When Gagarin left the bus, everybody let themselves release their emotions and started to hug and kiss one another. Instead of wishing him a nice journey, some of them were shedding tears and saying goodbye as if for ever. We had to apply force to pull the cosmonaut out of their embraces.

Then Korolev strode towards the bunker and disappeared under the hedgehogs. Gagarin went on up and Titov stayed down.

After he had ascended to the top of the pad in the lift, the technicians supported Gagarin’s shoulders as he raised his legs over the rim of Vostok’s hatch and wriggled himself into the ejection seat. Once he had settled, Oleg Ivanovsky and Chief Test Pilot Mark Gallai leaned into the cabin as far as they could and hauled at the loose ends of his straps to tighten him against the seat. Then they plugged his suit hoses into Vostok’s life-support system. Gagarin was now an integral component of his ship – or, rather, an integral part of his ejection system. The couch’s cylindrical lower section incorporated a pair of solid-charge rocket nozzles, but it also contained a small separate oxygen supply in case the ball sprang a leak in orbit, or Gagarin had to bale out somewhere between the earth and true space, maybe at ten or fifteen kilometres’ altitude, where the air is still present but much too cold and thin to breathe.

Down in the blockhouse, Korolev and his technicians saw the life-support monitors flashing their positive signals as the hoses locked into place. Gagarin’s air supply was working and his suit showed no signs of leakage. At the foot of the launch gantry, fretting in the bus, Titov received his last orders for the day, standing him down from the mission once and for all.

Fifty metres above the bus and its disappointed cargo, Ivanovsky rapped on Gagarin’s helmet with his fist for a final goodbye, but one last detail still troubled him: the keypad codes. ‘It didn’t feel right to send Yura into space without any real control over his own craft,’ he recalls. ‘No matter what the psychologists said, he was still a properly trained military pilot.’ Surely the whole point of all Gagarin’s training was to get him out of lethal emergencies in dangerous craft travelling at colossal speeds? Ivanovsky remembers feeling resentful on Gagarin’s behalf. ‘The doctors could not judge if his sanity might crack under pressure, because they were not familiar with any kind of flying.’ If something went wrong with Vostok’s automatic-guidance systems, then surely Gagarin was entitled to flick his own switches and solve the problem his own way, just as he would be expected to pull a spiralling MiG out of trouble without asking permission from a committee of doctors? Vostok was a strange apparatus, but still a flying machine for all that. Just like a plane, it might blow up on take-off, in flight or on landing – Ivanovsky uses the word ‘unpleasantness’ to cover all these hazards. ‘There was always the possibility of unpleasantness to do with flying machines of all kinds,’ he says. The only new twist was that Vostok might do none of these things and just quietly carry on in orbit, with the retro-rockets refusing to fire and Gagarin slowly suffocating, with no hope of rescue, no possibility of getting out of the cabin and parachuting gently to earth, his Vostok an eternal tomb . . . Ivanovsky sums up the fundamental risk of a cosmonaut’s life: