Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [75]
By 1963 the Gemini capsules were under construction at the McDonnell Douglas plant in California, but none of them had actually flown yet. Korolev was anxious to start work on a successor to Vostok, a larger capsule to match or even surpass NASA’s new design. If he could launch what appeared to be a multi-man craft before the first Gemini was launched, then he would gain political support for building a genuinely more powerful competitor. Certainly Khrushchev wanted him to conjure up a three-man mission as soon as possible, to trump Gemini and embarrass the Apollo effort, although the extent to which he supported the taking of risks with cosmonauts’ lives to achieve this goal cannot be judged today. Khrushchev is often blamed for pushing Korolev into hazardous decisions, but he could not possibly have decided all the technical details. He must have trusted the Chief Designer’s judgement as to whether or not a particular space project was safe.
Korolev took a risk. He decided to adapt the current Vostok hardware to carry two cosmonauts in the same ball – and even three, if they gave up their spacesuits. This new seating arrangement was purely cosmetic; it did not make the Vostok any better, just more cramped and significantly more dangerous. The bulky ejection seats had to be sacrificed in order to make room for the extra men, and if anything went wrong on the launch pad, there was no chance of escape. The new scheme was called ‘Voskhod’ (‘Sunrise’).
Despite its dangers, Voskhod would eventually prove capable of maintaining the Soviet lead, thereby adding impetus to Apollo, and also to Korolev’s ambitious plans for his own moon shot. Vasily Mishin, his eventual successor at OKB-1, insists that the Chief Designer made a man-to-man deal with Khrushchev. Korolev would develop a multi-crew programme at very short notice in return for Khrushchev’s approval for a giant new rocket, the N-1, a superbooster almost the equivalent of NASA’s Saturn V.
By 1964 the space effort was securely established on both sides of the superpower divide. In August the Politburo approved development of the N-1, as well as two competing projects generated by Korolev’s rivals in other sectors of the Soviet space industry. Ultimately this confusion, and Korolev’s early death in 1966, would doom the Soviet moon programme to failure, but in the summer of 1964 almost all the cosmonauts were gearing up for ever more elaborate flights, with real hopes of planting their feet in lunar soil. To his dismay, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin found that he was no longer qualified to join in the fun.
It was not merely that his public duties were taking him away from his real work at Star City. Back in 1961 he had done something very foolish, only a few months after his historic flight, when he took a holiday and fell from grace.
9
THE FOROS INCIDENT
Crimea is almost an island. It juts out into the Black Sea, connected to the Ukraine by two peninsulas as delicate as veins. The northernmost territories of the island are pleasant but dull. The south is a different matter. There are beautiful mountains, sun-dappled forests, sheltered beaches speckled with palms. The weather is still fine in October, and the almond trees are back in bloom by February.
The surrounding Black Sea has never been quite so private a lake as Moscow might have liked. The southern half belongs to an old enemy, Turkey. Russia bears a grudge: at Balaclava in the Crimea, Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade charged into the Valley of Death, cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right of them . . . but Russia eventually lost that war, in part because of the Turkish contribution. From Sevastopol, the Black Sea Fleet’s rusting hulks still maintain a wary watch on Turkey and its NATO allies.
At the Crimean port of Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt made their uneasy wartime accommodation with good old ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin; and