As I had with my father. He had shed his cast in time for my graduation, and seemed more fit and happier than I had seen him in many years — certainly since the death of my mother. I realize it was because he had lost weight and added some color during his forced rehabilitation. But when we saw each other during that summer — not often — he was not drinking. He didn’t speak about his work, even to the extent he had, so I had no idea of what was going to become of him. Retirement still loomed.
Then there was Uncle Vladimir. I never expected to see him again, after my pathetic career as an investigator for State Security had obviously fingered the wrong man — Filin — as Korolev’s murderer.
But I underestimated Uncle Vladimir’s compassion, and tenacity. Shortly after my graduation, on one of the most beautiful summer days I can ever remember seeing in Moscow, he asked me to meet him in Izmailov Park, where half of the population of the city was busy shopping at the flea market.
Picture this: a bulky man in an expensive suit picking his way among the stalls, bartering with farmers offering cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries, stuffing his prizes into his bag. Meanwhile, two obvious agents of State Security follow at an indiscreet distance. What were the farmers thinking? That Uncle Vladimir was some provocateur from the Central Committee, testing the limits of “free market”? Or perhaps some important un-person, like former Premier Khrushchev, being let out for some air?
I immediately apologized for sending his investigation down the wrong road. He shrugged it off. “In the old days there would have been a rush to judgment. Someone would have been punished instantly — whether he was guilty or not. This way takes longer, but it’s better.”
There was a conversational detour while he engaged a farmer from Davidovo about some kind of peppercorn, I believe. “Aren’t you going to buy anything?” he said suddenly. Before I could explain why not — I had not known we were coming here; was spending all my time out in Kaliningrad, eating at the bureau canteen — he went on: “You’ve piled up a tidy sum of money working for us, you know. Sasha!” He turned to one of his assistants.
I had not known I was getting paid as an informant for State Security. It only made me feel worse, especially when Uncle Vladimir pressed fifty rubles into my hand. “Get yourself some decent vegetables.” So I shopped, too, under Uncle Vladimir’s supervision. “I hope you’ll have the chance to spend more time with Artemov. He has many powerful friends, and it’s made him arrogant. Possibly even dangerous.”
That had become quite obvious, after his coup against Filin, the Hammer, and poor Chelomei. “But he’s head of the whole bureau!”
“Oh, Yuri,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re now a member of his pet department. You’ll see a lot of Artemov as time goes by.”
There was something in the casual way he said this that triggered a small epiphany for me: Uncle Vladimir’s reach into the bureau or the ministry had not only gotten me hired, he had gotten me tested at the medical institute and thus qualified for Artemov’s little cosmonaut team! I was even more impressed with his power that day, and more in doubt of my own skills than ever before: Had Uncle Vladimir arranged for me to pass the medical exams? Maybe I was really unhealthy, unqualified, in over my head?
I had come to Baikonur this time as a crew equipment specialist for Soyuz, in spite of the fact that there would be no crew aboard this mission. There should have been. Back in the spring, once the succession wars had ended, the ministry had forced Artemov to agree to dock a pair of unmanned Soyuz vehicles in October, and to fly two manned missions together in December.
Well, ministers can order, but machines will do what they want. The first Soyuz was not launched until November, and quickly demonstrated that there was room for improvement in its design. Within a few hours of launch, as the team at Baikonur was getting ready to roll out the second Soyuz to its pad, it became clear that a thruster on the orbiting vehicle had become stuck — just like the American Gemini 8!—and had not only used up all its fuel, but had left the spacecraft tumbling end-over-end.
Obviously there could be no docking. Not only that, but there was no easy way to return Soyuz safely to Earth — an important milestone in the testing of any manned spacecraft. Projections showed that Soyuz would dive into the atmosphere on its own around the 39th orbit, destroying itself somewhere over a foreign land, or over the ocean.
Some genius in the guidance area came up with the idea of firing the Soyuz’s main retro-rocket in short bursts, which allowed the orientation system for reentry — not the same system that had spent all its fuel — to operate for brief periods, too. In this way the spacecraft could be gradually brought under some control, and commanded to reentry over the USSR.
Forty-eight hours after launch, on the 32nd orbit, a final burn was made. That, alas, was the last anyone saw of the first Soyuz. It was tracked as far as the city of Orsk, on the standard reentry path, then disappeared, very likely to automatic self-destruction.
It was a pretty thorough disaster of a test flight, but Artemov rallied the troops and convinced the State Commission — headed by none other than Tyulin — that the problems with the attitude-control system could be corrected, and that a single Soyuz could be launched in December to test the fixes, and prove out the landing system before the twin manned flights in late January.
After helping with the final checkout of crew equipment inside the vehicle, I became a spectator, watching the proceedings from the roof of the assembly building perhaps seven hundred meters from the pad itself. It was a cold afternoon, December 14, the sun already setting behind us.
The little group included some of the military cosmonauts training to fly Soyuz, including Saditsky. As the countdown reached zero, the twenty main engines of the Soyuz launcher roared to life, superhot steam spewing around the base of the vehicle.
Then stopped, as if someone had shut off a garden hose.
We all looked at each other. “That’s not right,” Saditsky said. We waited longer, stamping our feet nervously, but there was still no launch, no further activity out on Pad 31 except for whisps of steam blowing around the base of the gantry.
Liquid-fueled rockets like Soyuz could be shut down safely, of course, though it was hardly routine. An American Gemini launch had suffered the same fate almost exactly a year prior to this.
But the memory of the Nedelin disaster was still strong in the minds of the Baikonur launch teams, so their approach to the loaded rocket was cautious. It took almost half an hour before any cars and trucks headed toward the pad. The group included Artemov, bundled up in a black coat, wearing a black hat, as he hurried out of the building that housed the control center.
Once we saw the trucks, we knew there would be no further launch attempt that day, so we all went back inside. I glanced at Saditsky and his friends, who seemed very calm: Maybe they were telling themselves that this proved the reliability of the Soyuz safety systems.
Then we heard a muffled thump behind us, from the direction of the launchpad. As one, we turned and saw the escape rocket hauling the Soyuz into the air and downrange!
You must picture the entire Soyuz vehicle, the huge conical base (the four strap-on boosters clustered around the core) tapering to a narrow cylinder, which was the two upper stages. Atop them was a wider cylinder, the Soyuz itself — propulsion module, bell-shaped crew module and spherical orbital module, the latter two encased in a protective shroud. At the very tip was a long, mushroom-headed escape rocket intended to rescue a crew from disaster at zero altitude on up to an altitude of twenty thousand meters, where the first stage burned out.