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Ivanovsky worried about all these possibilities, although he acknowledges that nobody in the space community ever spoke openly about such things, least of all the cosmonauts themselves. Of his decision on the launch gantry that day, his small rebellion of conscience, he says, ‘How should I know why I did it? I must have been undisciplined for a moment.’ He leaned through the hatch one last time, signalling for Gagarin to open his faceplate, so that they could talk without using the radio link. Conversations on the wire were not private, and this one certainly had to be. Ivanovsky was about to reveal the Big Secret – the three numbers from the six-digit keypad that Gagarin needed to punch in before he could unlock the spacecraft’s manual controls.

‘I said, “Yura, the numbers are three, two, five.” and he smiled. “Kamanin’s already told me.” he said.’

Even the hard-hearted Stalinist had been overcome with a dose of humanity at the last moment. As it turned out, so had Gallai and Korolev, although their contempt for the keypad was never in much doubt. Anyway, no more Big Secret. It must have been comforting to know that three other people, including the Chief Designer himself, had broken the rules. In theory Ivanovsky was betraying an official State secret and could have been sent to a prison camp for his crime.

Ivanovsky felt a little happier as he squeezed Gagarin’s gloved hand one last time. He and Gallai prepared to seal the capsule, assisted by military Chief of Rocket Troops Vladimir Shapovalov and two junior pad-staffers. First they checked the electrical contacts on the hatchway’s rim to make sure that they registered a clear and unambiguous signal. Once the hatch itself was locked down, the contacts would confirm that everything was airtight. They would also prime a series of miniature explosive charges set into the attachment ring, which could blow the hatch at a millisecond’s notice, just in case Gagarin needed to eject during a launch failure. The contacts seemed to deliver the right signal, so they manhandled the hatch into position and began to secure the first of thirty screw-down bolts along its circumference. They tightened the bolts in opposing pairs in order to mate the seals evenly.

The instant they had secured the final bolt, the gantry telephone rang. ‘We thought this would be Korolev from the blockhouse, ordering us to climb down from the launch platform,’ Ivanovsky remembers.

Not quite. It was Korolev, but he sounded far from happy. ‘Why aren’t you reporting what’s going on up there?’ he demanded. ‘Have you sealed the hatch properly?’

Ivanovsky assured him that they had, just seconds ago.

‘We don’t have KP-3,’ Korolev barked. (KP-3 was the required electrical signal from the contacts on the attachment ring.) ‘Can you remove and reseal the hatch?’

Ivanovsky warned Korolev that re-securing the hatch could delay subsequent launch preparations by at least thirty minutes. ‘There is no KP-3,’ Korolev insisted with his habitual logic. So the hatch had to come off. Ivanovsky thought for a terrible moment how Gagarin might feel when he saw the dawn’s early light invading his cabin from a suddenly wide circular hole above his head. ‘I said to Korolev, “Can I just tell Yuri? He’ll be distressed, and he’ll think the hatch is coming off because the flight is cancelled, and we’re going to pull him out of the capsule.” Korolev said, “Don’t worry. Get on with your work in peace. We’ll tell Yura.”’ But Ivanovsky remained agitated. ‘In peace? In peace! You can imagine the state we were in. We dedicated our six hands, three pairs, to these thirty little screws, and we had to undo them all with a special key. The hatch panel weighed about a hundred kilos, and it was a metre wide, a massive piece. It wasn’t a shameful incident at all, but it was certainly embarrassing.’

Embarrassing and exhausting. Ivanovsky and his colleagues had worked non-stop on Vostok’s pre-launch checks, ever since the rocket had reached the pad on the morning of April 11. They had