Sergei Nefyodov, a veteran from those days, recalls with a bitter smile, ‘At first we didn’t know what kind of tests we were in for, but it soon became seriously clear. They said they’d try us out in a “soft” landing experiment. That made us laugh! The tester had to throw himself out of a seat at some height – not great, but high enough. It was the level that might actually occur from a real landing of a spacecraft. There were some traumas as a result. The most serious was when something broke, or the system didn’t work properly. Some lads couldn’t get up again after the test.’
Nefyodov still boasts today that the testers took turns in a centrifuge that would have wiped out the delicate little cosmonauts. ‘I achieved seven minutes at ten g’s. The cosmonauts only had to endure two or three minutes at seven g’s, and twenty seconds at twelve g’s. My colleague Viktor Kostin often took twenty-seven g’s for a very short time, by taking severe shocks in the catapult sled. Those were very brief, measured in microseconds, but once he went up to forty g’s for a fraction of a second. I’d like to make it clear that we weren’t chasing record g’s just for the sake of it. We wanted to see how long a person could endure. Though we didn’t use the word “record”, because we couldn’t claim any sporting achievements.’
This was the great frustration – the testers could not tell anyone how tough they were, because their jobs were extremely secret. They knew perfectly well that they were being given a much harder time than the cosmonauts. Sometimes they would look across at the physicians, with their dials and monitoring equipment, and they could only wonder. Nefyodov says, ‘On the one hand, they [the doctors] were representatives of very humane professions, but on the other hand, the g-forces would climb, and the technicians would ask: should they stop the tests? It seems the subject can’t take any more, he’s going red, his heart is galloping, his sweat is flowing, but the doctors don’t stop the test...
‘It was dangerous for the testers. One of the senior academics for the test programme, Sergei Molydin, he said – and I can quote him – “we experimented on dogs, and fifty per cent of them survived. As you know, a person is stronger than a dog.” Well, that’s a joke! The consequences of our tests couldn’t be predicted. Even if a person survived, he might become an invalid in later life, with damage to the lungs, the heart or other internal organs. Of course we could refuse a test at any time, but the unwritten rule was not to refuse. If you turned down a test, this would only happen once, because after that you weren’t in the team any more.’
Nefyodov says that half of all the testers he worked with in the 1960s have not survived into the 1990s, but he isn’t bitter about his career. Far from it. He takes great pride in his contribution to the space effort. ‘The only tragic side is that our profession never existed. It was a close secret, so we had no social protection from the State, and no one ever investigated the long-term health of the testers. Today our old friends, our colleagues, are beginning to die.’ He remembers a particularly nasty experiment to simulate the failure of a spacecraft’s air-cleansing system. ‘If carbon dioxide builds up in the air to three per cent in a submarine, for instance, that’s enough to declare an emergency condition. With a colleague in a test chamber [at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems] I went over to three and a half, four, five per cent. Honestly, you have nothing to breathe, your face turns an unpleasant colour, the lips turn blue, your brain won’t work, you have a hideous headache and your strength fails. My partner and I had nosebleeds, but we worked for the set time. I always remember saying to him, “Just a half-hour more, and it will pass.” Then half an hour later, “Just one more half-hour.” I had to pep him up in some way.’
Yevgeny Kiryushin vividly remembers the altered state of consciousness he experienced in a centrifuge, with his body pushed beyond any normal definition of stress. ‘Suddenly there was a light, it was very interesting, dark at first, then yellow, lilac, crossing some sort of emptiness, and then you just forget any sensation in yourself. You just have the impression that you’re a brain, a hand, an eye. The oppressive weight is all in the seat, and suddenly, above your body is you. You’re completely weightless, as if having a look at yourself from above. That’s the transforming moment. All of your real achievements happen in those few minutes. But the experiments are frightening, without exception.’
Nefyodov remembers meeting Yuri Gagarin personally for the first time on January 2, 1968, when the First Cosmonaut came to visit the medical experimental facility and share a New Year’s celebration with the testers. ‘At that time I had just started working on explosive decompression, which interested me greatly. He kept asking me, “What’s it like? Aren’t you frightened? Have you simulated an atmospheric drop to fifty kilometres’ pressure?” It was great to talk to him about all this. But suddenly he asked me why I was looking so sad. I felt calm, but to him it appeared as if I was sad. He gave me a warm hug and said to me, “Sergei, everything is in your hands. You must have an unsurpassable desire.”’
An unsurpassable desire. The cosmonauts had it, and the world sang their praises. The testers had it, but they could not speak of it – except to Gagarin, who took the time to understand when a young lad volunteering for an insanely dangerous run of explosive decompressions tried, for a few moments, inarticulately, to share the reasons why he was doing it.
In fact, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to volunteer for the most dangerous kind of work. Vladimir Yazdovsky, a senior manager closely involved with all aspects of the early Soviet space effort, recalls, ‘After the dog Laika’s flight in the second Sputnik, there were nearly 3,500 applications to the Academy of Sciences from people in prison, from abroad and from many organizations, saying, “You don’t have to save me, just send me into space.” Of course we couldn’t reply to everyone, and as long as we didn’t know how to bring someone back at the end of a flight, we weren’t going to send anyone up.’
3
THE CHIEF DESIGNER
There was one man who, more than any other, dominated Gagarin’s life from now on, at first behind the scenes, and later as a friend and powerful protector. This man was not a cosmonaut, though he had learned to fly long ago in his youth. He was a shadowy figure somewhere in the very highest echelons of space management. Most people within the Soviet aerospace industry called him ‘The King’ or the ‘Boss of Bosses’, or affectionately used his first two initials, ‘S. P.’ His full name was never spoken in public because the authorities had declared his identity an absolute State secret. In the many press and radio reports of Soviet rocket achievements broadcast over the years, he was referred to only as the ‘Chief Designer’.
Born in 1907 in the Ukraine and educated in Moscow, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev began his career as an aircraft designer in 1930, before developing a fascination with rockets. At first he saw them as a useful power source for his aircraft, but by the late 1930s he recognized that rockets had a special potential as vehicles in their own right.[1]
Pre-war military strategists showed a keen interest in the work performed by the early rocket pioneers. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky sponsored a new research centre, the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, hidden away behind the heavy ramparts of the Petropavlovskaya Fortress in St Petersburg (scorchmarks in the masonry can still be seen), while another laboratory in central Moscow, the Reaction Propulsion Laboratory, worked on similar problems. From these parallel efforts Korolev’s rival, Valentin Glushko, emerged as the most promising designer of rocket thrust chambers and fuel pumps, while Korolev himself thought in broader terms about how to combine the engines with fuel tanks, guidance equipment and a payload, to create rocket vehicles that could perform some kind of useful work – delivering bombs, making weather measurements in the upper atmosphere and, one day, exploring space.
1
For an excellent account of the Chief Designer’s life and work, see Harford, James,