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There seems to have been some fault on both sides. Beregovoi was not automatically entitled to a Soyuz mission, despite what he may have thought. His training on the very different Voskhod hardware was completely inappropriate for the new ship, and he had no right to take out his run of bad luck on Gagarin, just because the Voskhod series had been brought to a close before he could fly. Judging from the fact that he rose to become Head of Star City in 1972, Beregovoi was an ambitious man.

After this row Dyemchuk reported fearfully to his master that some other cosmonauts and senior staff in the Star City compound had asked to use Gagarin’s official car, and Dyemchuk, as a humble driver, had not been able to refuse them. ‘He hit the car with his fist and said, “We have one commander here, and he’s the only person who can order the car!” Apart from him, no one could reserve it. He showed his emotions and a small dent was left in the bonnet.’ Dyemchuk is convinced that this outburst was entirely out of character for Gagarin, the result of stress rather than vanity.

Yaroslav Golovanov says, ‘Around this time you heard other cosmonauts saying, “So what, about Gagarin? He flew once around the earth, and all he had to do was watch over Vostok’s automatic systems.” Well, that’s not right, because when he flew, the whole business [of space flight] was starting from scratch, and everything he did was extremely important and brave, because nobody knew what might happen. They didn’t even know if a man could swallow properly in space, or endure the lack of gravity. It’s completely wrong to reproach Gagarin.’

Almost certainly these critics, muttering under their breath, were not from the first group of twenty, but from the new intake training for Soyuz. Not only had Korolev’s death deprived Gagarin of a dear friend and mentor, it had also taken away his most important political protector in the space community, just as Khrushchev’s fall from power had left him defenceless against jealous generals in the Kremlin. The First Cosmonaut had to fight unusually hard to maintain his position in the cosmonaut hierarchy, and the strain was wearing away at his old easy-going nature. Meanwhile OKB-1 was becoming a weaker bureau under the leadership of Vasily Mishin, who could not defend himself as effectively as Korolev against interference from the Kremlin, or from the vicious competition of rival aerospace bureaux anxious to increase their own profile in space.

Suddenly NASA’s gigantic moon programme came to a halt. On January 27, 1967 Gus Grissom and his crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, clambered into the first flight-ready Apollo, atop a half-sized version of the Saturn rocket. This was supposedly a routine check-out procedure, during which they would run a simulated countdown with all systems running and bring the ship to the very last second before take-off, without actually igniting Saturn’s engines. Morale around the pad was poor, even before the test began, because the new capsule had not come up to expectations. The detail work on the electrical and communications systems was inadequate, prompting the astronauts to stick a mouldy lemon on top of the capsule’s duplicate simulator to show their contempt for the overall design. When Chaffee climbed through the hatch of the flight vehicle to start the test, he complained that the interior smelled of sour milk. The consensus was that the balky environmental control hardware was generating fumes. Then the radio system glitched. Furious, Grissom shouted, ‘How the hell are we supposed to communicate with mission control from space when we can’t even talk to them on the ground!’ The mood around the Kennedy launch complex was distinctly strained as the technicians locked Apollo’s heavy hatch into place, sealing the crew inside.

Five hours into the test, Grissom’s garbled voice on the crackling radio link said, ‘We’ve got a fire in the capsule.’ A few seconds later, another voice (possibly White’s) was more urgent. ‘Hey, we’re burning up in here!’ There was a scream of