The crew wasn’t satisfied yet. They wanted footage from another angle, something about better lighting allowing them to see into the cockpit itself with a long lens. Katya asked me to explain this to Gagarin, so I hobbled over to the plane, its engines idling.
Gagarin opened the canopy. “What now?”
“They want you to make one more pass, down to the end of the taxiway and turn onto the runway,” I shouted.
“And then we’ll be done?”
No one had said anything, but from the look of frustration on Gagarin’s face, I knew this would be the end of his part in the filming. “Yes!”
He waved acknowledgment, then closed the canopy again. He fired up the engines and rolled past the hangar toward the crew, which by now was at the far end, near the turn onto the runway.
I had just reached Katya, Seregin, and the others when I heard Seregin say, insistently, and to no one in particular, “Slow down!”
As we watched, the MiG reached the end of the taxiway going a lot faster than it had the first time. So fast, in fact, that as Gagarin turned it toward the runway, it began to fishtail.
“Oh, shit,” Seregin said. He began to run.
“What’s going on?” Katya said.
The film crew scattered as the big silver jet slid sideways off the icy concrete into the mountain range of old snow piled where they stood.
The heat from the engines and their exhaust raised an immediate cloud of steam. The engines shut off, whether by Gagarin himself or because they choked on snow being sucked through the inlets. And there, tilted crazily, sat the plane, the right wheel of its landing gear still turning, in front of Colonel Seregin, a dozen State Security agents, and half a dozen Americans, who had gotten the whole pathetic spectacle on film.
Poor Gagarin. He was out of the cockpit by the time I reached him, several minutes after the others. He didn’t need a ladder, of course, since he was able to crawl out onto the mounds of snow into which he had driven the MiG.
In contrast to the day he had had his flight canceled, throwing his helmet, Gagarin was subdued, shaking his head and showing with his hands where and how he had lost control on the turn. Seregin was talking to him. Everyone else was keeping his or her distance.
“The Americans say they’ll give us that footage,” Katya told me.
“Nice of them.” As if there were even a possibility of their escaping from Chkalov with it.
“How were we supposed to know the big hero couldn’t fly?” she snapped.
“Nobody lets him,” I said, though I doubt she heard me.
In truth, it was a minor accident. There would be some damage to the plane, all easily repairable. Gagarin could probably make a case that the runway had not been properly cleared.
As the many State Security watchers conferred with the American film crew, Gagarin and Seregin passed me. “That’s it!” Gagarin said. “I’m tired of being everybody’s tool. I’m calling Kamanin and Kuznetsov and putting an end to all this bullshit.” Off they went, Seregin trying to calm the first man in space even though, I suspect, he agreed with everything Gagarin was saying.
This was exactly the kind of incident that Uncle Vladimir wanted me to tell him about, but I, in my first act of overt rebellion against him, would not.
The problem was, someone else was sure to report it.
35
The Moonstone
Six weeks after my accident, on the morning of Monday, January 29, 1968, I returned to the hospital in Shchelkovo to have my cast removed. It had become such an inconvenience that I would gladly have walked the seven kilometers.
My ankle was a sorry sight, shrunken and pale, but losing the added weight of that industrial-strength plaster made me feel like the lead in the Bolshoi.
Clutching the certificates that authorized my return to active training, including parachuting, I raced for the train back to Star Town. At noon General Kamanin was scheduled to meet with the entire cosmonaut team, something that had never occurred in my nine months at the center.
I had had no further contact with Marina and relatively little with Katya since the awful incident with Gagarin at the air base. I was scrupulously following my father’s advice to keep my head down while the clans waged war above me.
Not that I had any idea of how that war was going. I would have welcomed insights from my father, but he spent most of January in Czechoslovakia. So I was eagerly looking forward to Kamanin’s briefing, hoping it would bring some order to my life.
Eager or not, the train ran late, and I barely reached it in time.
The location was the main classroom in which we student-cosmonauts studied. Ideally suited for a group of thirty, it was stuffed with at least twice that many — fifty cosmonauts and student-cosmonauts, and perhaps ten senior officers, including General Kamanin and his deputies, and General Kuznetsov, head of Military Unit 26266,
Kamanin wasted no time. “Last Monday the United States tested its lunar landing module for the first time.” Apollo 5, as it was called, had been put into space by the Saturn launcher — the Saturn I-B, much smaller than the Saturn V-5. The payload was the buglike Apollo lunar module, both its descent and ascent stages, flying without a crew onboard. “The test was only a partial success. The engines on both stages worked to perfection, but there were numerous computer problems which will probably require another test flight this summer.
“Nevertheless, the Americans are completing their recovery from the Apollo 1 fire.” I realized that the tragedy had occurred almost exactly a year ago. “They have another Saturn 5 test scheduled for April. By late summer they will put astronauts Schirra, Cunningham, and Eisele into space aboard the redesigned Apollo. We expect them to fly a manned Apollo into lunar orbit by the summer of 1969. If all goes well, they will be able to attempt a lunar landing by the end of that year.”
I certainly knew most of this information, since I was able to read the American news magazines that arrived at the Star Town library. To judge from the murmurs around the room, most of my fellow cosmonauts were surprised to hear it laid out so cleanly. Americans on the Moon by the end of 1969!
“That’s if all goes well,” one of the senior cosmonauts said, to nervous laughter.
“Unfortunately, our schedules depend on things not going well for the Americans,” Kamanin said. “As for our program, we will launch the sixth L-1 to the Moon the week of March one, followed by two more unmanned Soyuz the last week of March.” Someone applauded at this. “The State Commission will require two successful L-1 missions before a manned flight around the Moon can be attempted. Assuming a success with Number 6, Number 7 would fly unmanned in May, with a manned attempt possible in July 1968.”
“A year ahead of the Americans,” Colonel Belyayev said with great satisfaction.
“Assuming all goes well for us, and not so well for them.” That came from Gagarin, prompting more laughter. Fortunately, Kamanin was in an indulgent mood.
“The first manned Soyuz flights are scheduled now for June. Obviously Soyuz will have to fly manned before L-1 can be flown with a crew. We have been trying to get the various State Commissions and Minister Afanasyev to understand this.
“With those launch dates in mind, we are resuming active training.” He then began to read off names of crew commanders in the Soyuz group and the L-1 group. Most of them were senior people like Bykovsky and Leonov, who had finally graduated from Zhukovsky, freeing them to be cosmonauts rather than college students. I was pleased to hear my friend Ivan Saditsky named as a Soyuz commander. “Of course, all of these commanders will be joined by engineers from the Korolev bureau.” There was some booing at this.