• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Titov is philosophical about the hazards that he and Gagarin endured aboard the temperamental Vostoks. ‘I can’t say I was ready for any of it, but we couldn’t train for these malfunctions, because with so few flights behind us, nobody knew what kind of things could go wrong. Yuri and I came up with our own emergency manual [for Vostok] and we tried to anticipate all the things that could create difficulties. I can tell you, that manual was a pretty thin document. When you drive a car, you have to expect a puncture at some point. Machines in motion have a right to go wrong.’

One week after Titov’s landing, construction of the Berlin Wall began. According to Korolev’s biographer James Harford, Khrushchev ordered the timing of Titov’s flight deliberately to encourage the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in its loyalty to Moscow.7 However, there was more to the relationship between Khrushchev and Kennedy than simple-minded East–West aggression. It is now becoming clear that the two men considered the possibility of collaboration in space. John Logsdon, who has researched this issue, says, ‘Kennedy was ambivalent about space even after he’d announced Apollo. In his Inaugural Address he suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union should explore space together, and that wasn’t simply rhetoric. He created a group of advisors to look for ways of increasing cooperation . . . He sent feelers through his brother Bobby into back channels at the Kremlin . . . We’re learning now that Khrushchev was ready to say, “Yes, let’s explore, let’s do it together.” If those two men had survived, history might have been different, but Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, a very strong nationalist, and Khrushchev was ousted by Brezhnev, who was far more militaristic . . . The contingency of history is that you end up with things as they happened, not as they might have been.’

NASA considered a third sub-orbital mission to qualify Mercury for more demanding missions, but the puny Redstone rocket’s more powerful replacement, the Atlas (a fully fledged ICBM), was now ready to take a capsule into a full orbit, and the sub-orbital ‘hop’ schedule was cancelled. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn completed three full orbits and was applauded by US citizens, just as Gagarin had been in Russia. NASA also began testing unmanned prototypes for their giant Saturn lunar rockets. Admittedly they were only half the size of the superboosters that would eventually carry Apollo to the moon, but already they were close to outstripping the power of Korolev’s R-7.

Korolev urgently needed to develop a successor for Vostok, which was limited in its capabilities, but Khrushchev wanted further triumphs within weeks and months, not years. Andrian Nikolayev was launched on August 11, 1962 for a four-day mission, and Pavel Popovich went up the very next day for a three-day stint. For the first time two people were in space simultaneously. Korolev timed the launches so that the second Vostok would briefly come within seven kilometres of the first: a cosmic clay-pigeon shoot, which enabled the Soviets to claim a ‘space rendezvous’. In fact, the two craft quickly drifted apart and could never have regained their initial close formation. Their small rocket motors lay dormant throughout the flight, conserving fuel for re-entry braking at the end of the mission. However, appearances counted for a great deal. A number of aerospace professionals in the West were fooled into thinking that the Soviets had developed genuine rendezvous skills. In a 1995 interview with space historian James Harford, Vasily Mishin (who succeeded Korolev as chief of the OKB-1 Design Bureau in 1966) said, ‘With all the secrecy we had in those days, we didn’t tell the whole truth . . . As they say, a sleight of hand isn’t exactly a fraud. It was more like, our competitors [in the West] deceived themselves all on their own. Of course we didn’t want to shatter their illusions.’

The double Vostok mission seemed far in advance of American achievements. NASA launched