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By Root 401 0

like a very loud whistle. When the engines fire up, there’s a whole spectrum of sound frequencies, from high-pitched screams to low rumblings.’ He knew the R-7 was hanging over the gulch of the flame trench, suspended on the gantry’s four slender support arms. The engines were going through their paces for a few seconds, adjusting to their unimaginable stresses in the last moments before the deliberate inferno of main thrust. ‘I saw the base of the rocket belching fire when the engines were igniting, and there were stones and pebbles [from the surrounding scrubland] flying through the air because of the blast.’ He watched the claw-like hold-down clamps around the rocket falling away; heard later, much later, the noise too loud to be heard, as the belated soundwave arrived. ‘It hammers your ribcage, shaking the breath out of you. You can feel the solid concrete bunker shaking with the noise . . . The light of the rocket’s exhaust is very bright . . . I saw the rocket rise and sway from side to side slightly, and I knew from this that the secondary steering nozzles were doing their job properly . . . It’s no good describing a rocket launch. Every one is different, and I’ve seen many. To describe a rocket launch in words is a hopeless task. You have to see it. Every time, it’s as if for the first time.’

Titov watched the brilliant fire climb high and dwindle to a spark, a fading impression on the retina, until all that was left was a pungent smoke trail and a silence suddenly much more deafening than the original blast, and all the other people on the platform with their backs turned against him.

Then, back down in the bunker, Gagarin coming through on the radio link, reporting from space. ‘It was strange to hear Yuri’s voice . . . We were sitting together here just half an hour ago, and now he was up there somewhere. It was hard to understand. Time somehow lost its dimensions for me. That’s how I felt.’

Titov on the ground, forgotten. Gagarin up there: the first man in space, his name surviving for as long as human memory survives. And Titov a white-haired businessman and Duma politician in Moscow today, turning up sometimes at Baikonur to watch the paintwork crumble on an old summerhouse, where they took his day away from him.

And if any cosmonaut was more disappointed than Titov, it must have been Grigory Nelyubov, who came within a whisker of making the flight himself. Almost exactly the same age as Gagarin, he had flown advanced MiG-19 fighters as a Navy pilot on assignment to the Black Sea Fleet, before joining the cosmonaut squad in the first group of twenty. A brilliant and intelligent man, his principal fault was his need to be the centre of attention at all times. Although heavily favoured in some quarters to make the first flight, Nelyubov’s eventual assignment to third place, behind Titov, came as a great disappointment to him.

Nelyubov’s space career did not last – in fact he never went into orbit. On May 4, 1963, Nikolai Kamanin dismissed him from the cosmonaut squad after his drunken skirmish with a military patrol on a railway platform. The patrol arrested him for disorderly behaviour, and (according to Oleg Ivanovsky) he shouted, ‘You can’t do this. I’m an important cosmonaut!’ The military officers agreed to release Nelyubov if he apologized for his rudeness, but he refused. Two other cosmonauts, Anikeyev and Filateyev, were merely bystanders in this drama, but Kamanin sacked them too.

Nelyubov went back to flying MiGs at a remote air station, where he tried to convince his fellow pilots in the squadron that he had once been a cosmonaut and had even served as back-up to the great Yuri Gagarin himself, but nobody believed him. On February 18, 1966, profoundly depressed, he threw himself under a train.

Nelyubov’s likeness was airbrushed out of most of the photographs of cosmonaut groups associated with the Vostok programme. In 1973 keen-eyed Western historians discovered a snapshot that had escaped the airbrushing. Star City’s political information officers had accidentally released the photo without