“By December 1967, both of us, the USSR and the U.S.A., had picked ourselves up, like runners who had stumbled in a race, and taken one or two tentative steps.…”
Scorpion 3
Enemy Agents In The Vicinity
30
The Fourth Enrollment
On the cold morning of Monday, December 25, 1967, when all of North and South America and much of Europe were celebrating Christmas Day, I trudged across a snowy field at the Chkalov air base toward an actual An-2 biplane, reciting aloud several lines from a poem by Pushkin.
There were thirteen of us in a ragged line, I and my colleagues from the Fourth Enrollment, as our group of student-cosmonauts was known. All of us wore leather jackets, tall boots, and old-fashioned soft aviators’ caps. Oh, yes, on our chests and backs were parachutes. As part of our “operational” education, we were to begin jumping.
The thirteen of us ranged in age from twenty-four (at twenty-five, I was the second-youngest) to thirty-five years old. Our backgrounds were quite different; six of us were pilots (four from fighters, two from transports), three were aircraft navigators, another three were research scientists from the Academy of Air Defense, while I was the lone engineer.
We had been brought together by our orders in early May of that year, those orders having been signed by Marshal Vershinin the day of Komarov’s death, which transferred us to Military Unit 26266, the cosmonaut training center, located at the military village known as Star Town.
We were the fourth such group of students to be assigned to Military Unit 26266, the first having been the famous group of twenty pilots chosen with Yuri Gagarin in March 1960. The Second Enrollment was a group of fifteen pilots and engineers chosen in January 1963, while the Third was a collection of twenty-two younger pilots and engineers recruited in October 1965, who were nearing the end of the last phase of their “student” training and, in fact, were commencing their final examinations this very morning. (Think of them as college seniors, while we thirteen were sophomores.)
There had also been a group of five women, chosen in March 1962, but with the exception of Valentina Tereshkova, who in June 1963 had become the first woman to make a spaceflight, they were not considered full-fledged members of the team.
For the first seven months our training had largely consisted of classroom study, learning the basics of aerospace navigation, astronomy, orbital mechanics, aerospace physiology, in addition to courses in Marxism-Leninism.
My education at Bauman, not to mention my year at the Korolev bureau, helped me tremendously in the classroom, and I ranked consistently at the top of the list, ahead of even our very talented military researchers. I found myself tutoring Sergei Shiborin, a young transport pilot. He, in turn, guided me in the ways of the Air Force of the USSR, though not without a bit of hazing: He convinced me to buy expensive presents for each member of the Fourth Enrollment to celebrate my appointment to active duty, and it wasn’t until months later that he confessed he had made up the “tradition.”
Our other main activity during these first months was mandatory physical training. Six mornings a week we were expected to report to the gym for running and calisthenics, for occasional hockey and — when the weather was warm — basketball games. A special pool was being built, too, since the doctors had decided that high-diving would be good training for weightlessness.
Some mornings I enjoyed it; some mornings I had to drag myself out of bed by any means possible. I was helped in this by the miserable condition of my bed and personal surroundings. Upon being enrolled in the cosmonaut unit, my former colleagues at the Korolev bureau took vengeful and illegal steps to have me evicted from my Kaliningrad flat, claiming falsely that it belonged to employees of that organization. Had I chosen to fight their action, I would have won.
But I had been officially assigned a flat at Star Town, and disliking the early morning commute by bus, which put me back in contact with surly bureau types, I let go of the Kaliningrad place and moved into the “temporary” barracks at Star Town with the rest of the Fourth Enrollment, where we waited for our official housing to be built.
As the only unmarried officer, I was given a flat of my own while the others shared larger, but equally decrepit, quarters, which had been built seven years ago as “temporary” housing for those who carved Star Town and the training center out of the woods here.
It hadn’t been so bad during the summer months, but when autumn came, what had been a pleasantly cool darkness became freezing dampness. I bought a portable heater, which, based on its performance, was as likely to asphyxiate me or burn down the whole building as it was to provide heat.
So I spent as little time in my Star Town flat as possible, rising for breakfast at the canteen, followed by the workouts, then class, lunch, more class. I did my evening studies in our lecture room, or in the library of the Star Town elementary school, newly named for the late Vladimir Komarov.
On this December morning we were to enter the second, operational phase of our training, qualifying as parachutists and aircraft crew members so that we would be something more than useless baggage on future flights of Soyuz, Almaz, Program L, or 7K-VI spacecraft.
I had informal experience with radio protocols, for example, from the bureau, and I believe this put me ahead of my scientific colleagues, who had spent their careers learning how to shoot down American missiles. But my experience was nothing compared to the pilots and navigators in our group, who rode the bus to Chkalov in high spirits, returning to what was, for them, familiar ground, while the scientists and I — wrenched out of our cozy classrooms — sat lost in thought, wondering what had possessed us to volunteer for a job that involved being hurled out of a thirty-year-old airplane at three thousand meters.
I tried to remind myself that part of the cosmonaut’s job was being blasted to an altitude of 250 kilometers atop a missile, surely more dangerous than parachuting. But in my mind I kept picturing the charred wreckage of Soyuz 1.
I paid strict attention during two hours of briefings on parachuting basics: “When the static line yanks your ’chute open, look up and make sure it’s round, and that there are no holes in it. If it’s okay, pull the red cord on your harness. That will disable your emergency ’chute.”
“What happens if the canopy is not round, or if it has holes in it?” one of the scientists asked.
Our instructor, an army major with a reported two thousand such jumps to his credit, smiled and pulled a knife out of his boot sheath. “Cut here and here,” he said, indicating the place above the right and left shoulders where the parachute shrouds would be attached to the harness. “The lines will be taut and the knife will be sharp. You won’t have any trouble.”
“But then I’m falling,” the scientist said, persisting.
“That’s when you pull the blue cord.” This was supposed to activate the emergency parachute. “It will come out in front of you, not off your back, so watch your nose.” He laughed, and was joined by some of our pilot colleagues as well as our team of instructors from the training center.
There was more information, much more, such as how to hook up the static line, which would automatically deploy our primary ’chute; the proper posture for landing; and the need to collapse the ’chute once on the ground, so you didn’t get dragged across the snow.
So far, this was all as expected. Shiborin, a veteran often such jumps, confirmed this. But the special needs of cosmonaut training required that we also demonstrate our ability to observe and cope with a new situation.