Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [89]
But there was one notable occasion when Gagarin refused point-blank to help. A mother wrote to him saying that her son was in trouble for cutting down a fir tree in a forbidden area at Christmas time. Gagarin looked into the business, found out that it had probably been more than one tree and that the young man was selling them off for profit. He recommended the man be sacked from his job. According to his driver, Gagarin became pretty angry and said, ‘What happens if everyone goes and cuts down “just one” fir tree? Where are we going to live then? Any day now, we won’t have anything left.’
Leonov puts this (and other similar incidents) down to Gagarin’s perceptions of the earth from space. ‘After his flight he was always saying how special the world is, and how we had to be very careful not to break it.’ This is a common enough truism by modern standards, taught to all of us in school, but what must it have been like for the very first man in space to discover it for himself? In April 1961 Gagarin was the only human being among three billion who had actually seen the world as a tiny blue ball drifting through the infinite cosmic darkness.
So the tree-cutter lost his job at Gagarin’s specific request, but more often he was inclined to help his petitioners by appealing to higher authorities. ‘You could hardly find a single man who wouldn’t assist him if he asked for it. Who could refuse him?’ says Yegupov.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev could.
In his first months in office, Brezhnev was preoccupied with achieving dominance over his co-conspirator Alexei Kosygin. Brezhnev’s attitude towards Korolev was similar to Khruschev’s: an insistence on orbital ‘firsts’, accompanied by a hazy lack of interest in the exact technical details. However, the scheduled mission of Voskhod II did interest Brezhnev, because it promised a major new triumph: the first spacewalk, enabled by a flexible airlock attached to the re-entry ball’s flank. Korolev was just as keen to try out this new concept. In 1962 he prepared Leonov, who was one of the prime candidates for the first walk, with a suitable pep-talk. ‘He told me that any sailor has to learn to swim, and each cosmonaut has to know how to swim and do construction work outside his vehicle.’
On February 23, 1965, Korolev launched an unmanned test vehicle with the new airlock attached. The mission ended badly when the capsule broke up during re-entry, as a result of poor command signalling from the ground. A few days later, an air-drop of the capsule from a plane also failed because the parachute did not open. Oleg Ivanovsky remembers Korolev saying in disgust, ‘I’m sick of flying under rags.’ He hated parachutes and always wished that he could design a rigid rotor system, or some other aerodynamic device to replace them. Perhaps it was a mercy that he never lived to see a much more terrible parachute failure in April 1967: a failure that might easily have claimed the life of Yuri Gagarin . . .
The Voskhod II mission took off on March 18, 1965 with wonderful timing, ahead of NASA’s first Gemini mission by just six days. This time there were only two crewmen in the cabin, to make room for their bulky spacesuits. Pavel Belyayev remained inside, while his co-pilot Alexei Leonov squeezed into the flexible airlock and pushed himself out of the capsule. For ten minutes he enjoyed the exhilarating sensation of spacewalking, and then began to pull himself back into the ship – only to discover that his suit, at full pressure, had ballooned outwards, so that he could no longer fit into the airlock. Extremely exhausted by his efforts, Leonov had to let some of the air out of his suit to collapse it, so that he could squeeze