Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [71]
For the time being, NASA was also relying on converted weapon launchers rather than custom-made space boosters. On July 21, 1961 astronaut Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom flew another sub-orbital curve in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone ballistic missile, reaching an altitude of 190 kilometres. His mission nearly ended in disaster when the small hatchway on the capsule blew off shortly after he splashed down. He clambered out of the waterlogged craft without his helmet, and water poured down his neck ring and into his spacesuit. He tried to signal the approaching rescue helicopters for help and was amazed to see them flying over the capsule, instead of coming directly to his aid. The helicopter pilots thought Grissom was waving, not drowning. Ignoring him completely, they concentrated on trying to hoist the capsule out of the water before it sank, but it was now so heavy with water that it threatened to pull the helicopter down. Eventually Grissom was rescued, while his capsule sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, beyond all hope of recovery. NASA downplayed the fact that their astronaut was almost lost at sea and hailed Grissom’s mission as a near-perfect success.
On August 6, Gherman Titov took off from Baikonur and flew seventeen orbits aboard the second manned Vostok, staying aloft for twenty-four hours and flying the ship manually for a short period. ‘When I was launched, my wife [Tamara] went into the forest to pick some mushrooms. It was a Sunday, and she disappeared on purpose, to get away from all the journalists asking her annoying questions.’ Titov was extremely nauseous during his flight, the heating in the cabin broke down so that he nearly froze, and his retro-pack did not separate cleanly before re-entry, which gave him some cause for concern: ‘Whether you need this, eh?’ His ejection and landing in the Saratov region were also hazardous, as he recalls today. ‘Under my parachute I passed about fifty metres from a railway line, and I thought I was going to hit the train that was passing. Then, about five metres from the ground, a gust of wind turned me around so that I was moving backwards when I hit the ground, and I rolled over three times. The wind was brisk and it caught the parachute again, so I was dragged along the ground. When I opened my helmet, the rim of the faceplate was scooping up soil. You know, the farmers in Saratov had done their ploughing quite well that season, otherwise my landing would have been even harder.’
The train screeched to a stop, and a small crowd of people jumped out and ran towards Titov, who recalls that he was not in the best of moods by then. ‘I said to them, “What are you staring at? Help me take off my spacesuit. I’m very tired.” There was supposed to be a clean lightweight overall for me to get into, but as usual somebody forgot to pack it in my emergency kit.’
A civilian woman arrived by car, who she had been in such a hurry to drive into the field that she drove over a pothole and banged her head on the steering wheel. To his bemusement, Titov found himself applying the bandages from his emergency space medical kit to her wound.
Sick, exhausted, bruised, befuddled but alive, Titov was the first man to spend an entire day in space, and the first to make multiple orbits around the earth. Perhaps he can take additional satisfaction from beating Gagarin at his own game. Saratov is 1,500 kilometres away from Baikonur, which means that Gagarin’s historic but incomplete first orbit on April 12 fell short by that distance; so Titov was actually the first man to complete a whole orbit. With all the fuss in the aerospace history books about Gagarin’s ‘altitude record’, this detail seems to