The doctors disapproved when Titov wanted to read in the chamber, but he got the better of them. He asked whether they could find a copy of Yevgeny Onegin for him to take inside with him. The answer was no, absolutely not. Such a form of entertainment was not allowed. Titov assured them he only wanted the book as a physical talisman, a foolish good-luck charm. ‘I said I already knew it by heart. I wooed them. I persuaded them, and eventually they gave it to me. Of course I didn’t know it!’ So Titov contentedly frittered away his time in the chamber reading his book.
Film footage still survives of other sessions in the chamber, with Titov happily quoting Pushkin poems straight from memory, while the doctors observe him through a thick plate-glass window. He appears supremely confident, beaming with pride at his clever memory, his wide knowledge of literature. Unfortunately he was thinking too much like a bourgeois, assuming that his higher-than-average standard of education must be an advantage. In time, and to his great disappointment, Titov would discover that he had got it all wrong.
He was not so self-confident in the whirling centrifuge, a small capsule spun on the end of a long boom to simulate the g-loads of acceleration and deceleration: the traditional fairground ride for all pilots and astronauts the world over, loved to death by each and every one of them. For a pilot as proud as Titov, it was unnerving to be so much at the mercy of others. ‘In an aircraft you can fly a high-g loop, and you control when you come out of it. The centrifuge was disgusting. The g-force is pressing you and pressing you, but you have no control. You just sit there like a guinea-pig.’
Gagarin did not like it either, despite his much-heralded talent for taking g-forces. His earlier qualification runs in an Air Force centrifuge had peaked at around seven g’s. His MiG fighter had pulled nine, maybe ten on a vicious high-speed turn. Now the space-training centrifuge took him briefly up to twelve. ‘My eyes wouldn’t shut, breathing was a great effort, my face muscles were twisted, my heart rate speeded up and the blood in my veins felt as heavy as mercury.’[7]
Perhaps the most unpleasant training procedure was the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment. The cosmonauts were locked in the isolation chamber while the air supply was pumped out, slowly but remorselessly. Gagarin had to endure this test without complaint if he was to be pronounced fit for a space mission. The doctors sealed him up, then watched his face on a television monitor while he wrote his name on a paper pad, over and over again. Journalist Lydia Obukhova watched this procedure, and archive footage taken by the technicians still survives. As the oxygen level in the chamber was reduced, Gagarin’s writing became erratic, until eventually he was scribbling gibberish. Down went the air level. Gagarin dropped his pencil, dropped the pad, stared at nothing and suddenly blacked out. His threshold of consciousness must have been high enough for him to pass the test, or else he would have lost his place in the cosmonaut squad, but it is reasonable to assume that he shared the other cosmonauts’ intense dislike of the procedure, because it made them look so foolish in front of the doctors. Senior space engineers shared this distaste and wondered what the doctors thought they could achieve by suffocating their test subjects. The only way a cosmonaut could lose his air supply in orbit was if his capsule sprang a leak, in which case he would close the visor on his space helmet and switch to a separate emergency air supply. If both the cabin and the spacesuit sprang leaks, then the cosmonaut was as good as dead anyway, but the chances of this double failure occurring were negligible. In space, either you had air to breathe or you did not. There were no half measures. The senior rocket engineers thought the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment was pointless, but the doctors did not, and that was that.
For the rattled cosmonauts, it was almost a relief to move on to the parachuting exercises, where they could tease the doctors because most of them lacked the courage to follow the pilots out of the aircraft’s doorway. Their instructor was Nikolai Konstantovich, an expert parachutist with a record-breaking freefall jump from a height of fifteen kilometres to his credit. Future space crewmen might have to eject and parachute to earth at similar altitudes, and Konstantovich’s job was to demonstrate all the things that could go wrong up there – and how to get out of them. For example, there was the ‘corkscrew’ problem, when a misfiring ejection seat throws the pilot into a sickening spin, or the seat fires cleanly, but the craft it’s coming out of is tumbling. Either way the pilot cannot pull his parachute safely, because the lines will twist around each other like the strands of a rope, and the silk canopy will not unfurl. The pilot must stabilize his fall and give his ’chute a chance to open normally. Konstantovich taught his pupils deliberately to sabotage their own jumps, then to regain control, preferably some time before they hit the ground. ‘That’s very unpleasant,’ Gagarin recalled. ‘Your body starts spinning at great speed. Your head feels like lead, and there’s a sharp, cutting pain in your eyes. Your body is drained of strength and you lose all sense of direction.’[8]
At least the parachuting felt more like proper space training. Once Gagarin and his comrades were in a plane and doing something useful, they felt better. More in control. For another group of victims, however, there was no such easy escape from the doctors’ needles, gas tanks and isolation chambers.
Quite apart from the cosmonauts, another group of ‘testers’ was put through a similar series of medical procedures – similar but worse. These young men were selected from a slightly lower rung of the aviation-academic ladder. They were not necessarily fighter pilots or first-rate theoreticians. They were just averagely bright, fit young military men. During recruitment they were never asked outright if they would like to fly in space. They were offered a chance to ‘participate’, which was a subtle but important shift of emphasis.
The testers’ job was to find out just how much a human body could take. Then the cosmonauts, who were somewhat less expendable, could be pushed to those limits but no further. Unlike the cosmonauts, testers were not professionally acknowledged, and were paid only according to their previous military occupations as soldiers, technicians or mechanics. They were seduced with great care by their recruiters into a feeling of privilege and self-worth, but in truth their status was barely better than that of disposable laboratory rats. When they received injuries – and they did receive injuries – there were no special arrangements to compensate them or their families, because the authorities were unwilling to acknowledge any of their work in public. Even today, long after glasnost, the Russian space authorities do not like to discuss the testers’ contributions to the early space effort, nor to the development of high-performance jet fighters, parachutes, ejection systems and flight suits for the Air Force. In all, approximately 1,200 testers were involved in various programmes over three decades.
They were all military volunteers, good soldiers, who did not like to surrender, to fail in front of their comrades. They were ‘free’ to abort any test-run halfway through if the discomfort became too great, but very few wanted to quit. Like the cosmonauts, who all dreamed of getting the first flight into space – of going higher, flying faster – the testers had their own strange pinnacle of glory to climb. Who could take the highest air pressures? The lowest? Who could survive the catapult sled’s most rapid accelerations? The bone-jarring crash-stops? Who spent the longest time aboard the centrifuge, and how many g’s could they take? Who among them was the toughest, the strongest, the bravest?