Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [83]
As far back as June 1962 the Chief Designer had lost patience with the endless foreign trips and had complained, ‘We’re losing Gagarin and Titov as far as space is concerned.’ He criticized Kamanin for failing to look after them properly. As so often, Kamanin deflected his own faults onto others, noting in his diary, ‘Looking into his complaints, one can see Korolev’s bitterness at having to keep his name under cover.’2
Korolev was already thinking beyond Voskhod, with plans for an ambitious new spacecraft capable of extraordinary feats: changing its orbit on command, adjusting its pitch and yaw attitude with millimetre accuracy and, most startling of all, making a rendezvous with another craft and docking with it to form a larger aggregate assembly. The new spacecraft was to be called ‘Soyuz’, meaning ‘Union’. Of course this was a direct response to America’s Apollo ship. In fact, Soyuz’s general layout, with a rear equipment section, a re-entry capsule in the middle, and a dropaway docking compartment at the front, seemed suspiciously similar to an early proposal for Apollo drawn up by the General Electric Company in a failed bid to win a NASA contract.
Soyuz was a key element in future lunar plans, but it would not be ready for another two years at least. In the meantime, Konstantin Feoktistov, one of Korolev’s most trusted engineers and a close colleague of Oleg Ivanovsky, was developing Voskhod as fast as was humanly possible, so that Korolev could fulfil his private ‘deal’ with Khrushchev. Feoktistov was also training to fly in Voskhod as the first specialist engineer-cosmonaut, along with the nine other engineers from OKB-1 who had passed the (by now much simpler) medical qualifications. Either this was Feoktistov’s way of showing faith in his own work or it was Korolev’s gesture of thanks for developing Voskhod so quickly. Feoktistov was the only person within OKB-1 who never gave ground to the Chief Designer on technical matters. In their stubborn fearlessness, the two men were remarkably alike – the world having already done its worst to them. While Korolev came come close to death in a Siberian prison camp, Feoktistov fought for the Red Army and was captured by the Nazis. After a brutal interrogation, they lined him up against a ditch and opened fire. He fell onto a pile of dead bodies and hid under them until nightfall, until he could limp away. The Voskhod capsule cannot have held many terrors for him.3
As Feoktistov and other highly skilled and experienced men like him began to rise in the cosmonaut hierarchy, so the chances were lessened for Gagarin to catch up with his studies and earn another flight into space.
In between his foreign trips, Gagarin had attended cosmonaut lectures as often as possible, but on many occasions he took his seat in the classroom only to be called away at short notice for some diplomatic function or other. When Khrushchev’s administration ran into trouble from 1963, Gagarin managed to extend his academic work because he was not required to be quite so much in the limelight. In March 1964 he came to the Zhukovsky Academy in Moscow, a renowned school covering all aspects of aviation and aerodynamics, housed in the elegant Petrovsky Palace on Leningradsky Prospekt. Catherine the Great built Petrovsky Palace as a rest-stop for royal travellers, and Napoleon sheltered within its crenellated walls during the fire of Moscow in 1812. Now it was a necessary stop for cosmonauts on their way up into space. A special course had been established for the new science of space flight: the ‘Pilot-Engineer-Cosmonaut Diploma’. Candidates would have to study all aspects of space and contribute a thesis in a chosen field of specialization, which they would then defend before their tutors in written and oral sessions at the end of the course. The cosmonauts were becoming more like their American counterparts, who also undertook diploma work to