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checked the life-support system, the propulsion systems, the navigation gyros: the awesome combinations of electrical energy and explosive chemicals that could miscombine in some small way at any moment and blow Gagarin into pieces (and possibly topple the rocket on its pad, spilling death and destruction across half of Baikonur). They had checked and re-checked, and now this failure of a couple of simple switches on the hatch threatened to ruin everything in the very last minutes before launch. As they pulled off the hatch, Ivanovsky hardly dared look into the cabin. What might Yuri be thinking? ‘In fact it was impossible to see his face at that moment. You could only see the top of his white space helmet. Sewn into the fabric of the left sleeve of the spacesuit there was a little mirror, which enabled the cosmonaut to look up at the hatch area, or other areas [of the upper cabin] normally blocked from view [by the rim of his bulky helmet]. He tilted his sleeve so that I could catch a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He was smiling and everything was fine.’ Gagarin was whistling quietly to himself as Ivanovsky and his colleagues replaced the hatch.

Those thirty bolts again. Tightening the opposite pairs, and Korolev’s voice on the phone, more forgiving now: ‘KP-3 is in order.’ Ivanovsky does not want to apportion blame, but as far as he can remember, the hatch had looked perfectly good to him right from the start, and he decided that someone in the blockhouse must have made an error reading the data. He would not have minded, except that the KP-3 business gave him a very nasty moment. Now it was the 40-minute mark, and the people in the blockhouse had sent the signal exactly on time to make a partial retraction of the gantries and walkways around the rocket. The platform that Ivanovsky and his four companions were standing on started to move away from Vostok. Any second now it would rotate down to forty-five degrees and they would fall off. There was an awkward moment when they had to use the gantry telephone to request a brief delay in the retraction. They quickly patted Vostok’s ball for luck, then climbed down from the gantry as fast as they could. Their feet were barely on the ground when the hydraulic motors started up again to pull the platforms away.

Ivanovsky headed for the nearest control bunker, while cameraman Vladimir Suvorov opted to stay out in the open, anxious not to miss the most important photographic opportunity of his life. He and his assistants prepared various cameras – manual and automatic – around the pad, only to find themselves being manhandled by soldiers with strict orders to clear the entire area prior to launch. The officer in charge was furious that Suvorov could be so stupid as to stay outside. ‘No film crews are allowed. I’m in charge here, and I’m ordering you into the shelters now!’ The cameraman’s righteous rage turned out to be the stronger. ‘We’re on official assignment! Here, I’ll write you a note,’ he sneered. ‘I am staying outside by my own wishes. In case of my death you are not responsible, all right?’

‘Okay, okay. No hard feelings.’ The guards retreated and Suvorov got his historic shots.13

The crew bus pulled back from the pad, and Titov was escorted to an observation bunker so that he could strip off his suit. Gai Severin’s technicians came at him again like predators, stripping off his gloves, his air hoses and restraint harness, taking him to pieces. He was all flapping arms and crumpled legs, a tangle of stiff fabric, with the neckpiece halfway over his head, when the technicians suddenly rushed away towards the bunker’s exit. The launch had started, and they wanted to go outside to see it. ‘They forgot about me,’ Titov recalls mournfully. ‘I was all alone.’ He waddled to the exit behind everybody else, clumped up the stairs and emerged onto the observation platform on the bunker’s roof.

To this day Titov vividly remembers everything he saw and felt in the next few moments. ‘I could hear the high-pitched wine of the fuel pumps pushing fuel into the combustion chambers,