He laughed when I told him I was here to work with the search-and-rescue team. “First you have to find them! The Air Force hates spaceflight so much that they starve us for money. I think they allow us a dozen helicopters to search the recovery zones, that’s it. No wonder Leonov and Belyayev had to sit there fighting off the wolves.”
I was startled to hear this, but learned that it was true. The Soviet Air Force had been given the authority to train cosmonauts because they were selected from the ranks of single-seat fighter pilots. But most of the military money and power had gone to the Strategic Rocket Force, which grew out of the regular army and artillery units. The rocketeers controlled the launch sites and tracking stations, and operated the military satellites. Kamanin had to fight his own Air Force leadership to get any kind of support at all. “Come on, meet Kamanin.”
Having grown up in a military family, I was amazed at Saditsky’s casual manner with his three-star general, a slim, short man in his late fifties. Saditsky actually patted Kamanin on the shoulder to get his attention.
Kamanin seemed not to mind. When we were introduced, he said, “Any relation to General Nikolai Ribko?”
“My father.”
“We fought together during the war. The Voronezh and Second Ukrainian Fronts. I used to see him at headquarters. How is your mother?”
My mother was six years dead at this point. Obviously Kamanin didn’t know. I chose to lie rather than embarrass him. “Last time I saw her, she was fine.” This, of course, wasn’t true at alclass="underline" The last time I saw my mother, she was gray, emaciated, a travesty of herself.
“Say hello for me, please.”
Why had I lied? Perhaps, having alienated Artemov, I wanted to avoid adding the head of the Air Force’s space program to my list of enemies.
As Kamanin and his hangers-on departed, Saditsky said to me, “You were lucky. You saw his grandpa side. He can also be a Stalinist bastard, so be careful.”
I was glad for the warning, and, though I’m ashamed to admit it, glad for my own dishonesty, because I was going to be spending a lot of time around General Kamanin.
The various delays caused the launch of Soyuz Number 3 to take place at 6:20 A.M. on February 7, 1967. The weather had warmed considerably, but the wind was blowing at eight meters a second, a good clip, though not enough to force another postponement.
The launcher rose quickly, brightly, into the gray morning sky, as, not wishing to be trapped behind a third-floor window in case of another accident, we watched from the grounds outside the assembly building. Within minutes Kamanin and the head of the State Commission had arrived from the blockhouse and comandeered their cars. They were all headed for the Crimea.
Not me, however. I was to “stand by” with the primary recovery aircraft at Outskirts Airport. However, since Soyuz Number 3 was not scheduled for reentry until the tenth, three days hence, I was free to remain at Baikonur itself.
Which I did, joining some of the other recovery pilots and engineers at the tracking station at Area 18. I felt conspicuous as one of very few civilians in a group of men in green uniforms, and more than once caught them glancing at me with cautious curiosity.
Upon reaching its planned orbit successfully, Soyuz Number 3 had been given the official name of Cosmos 140. There was a worrisome communications failure early on, but it cleared itself up.
All went well until the fifth orbit, about eight hours after launch, when the guidance system (remember the gyroscope problem?) refused to lock onto the sun as planned, to allow the winglike solar panels to provide power. While rolling around, Soyuz proceeded to burn up a lot of fuel unnecessarily.
Once the spacecraft was put in the proper attitude, the main engine on the Soyuz — essential for any rendezvous — was fired. That event, on the twenty-second orbit, was a success. But it was clear that the spacecraft wasn’t going to orient itself, so Artemov, Kamanin, Tyulin, and the other commissioners down at the flight control center in the Crimea, reluctantly decided to bring her down early, on orbit 33, when the trajectory would intersect the main recovery zone fifty kilometers northwest of Baikonur itself.
Once that decision had been made, I grabbed my bag and joined the group rushing back to Area 17. Early the next morning I boarded an An-12 transport and waited for a signal from the tracking radars of the Air Defense Force.
A weak signal from Cosmos 140 was received at 7:49 local time, indicating that the spacecraft had fired its retros and survived reentry into the atmosphere. The weakness of the signal meant that the spacecraft was going to land short of its aiming point.
Nevertheless, we took off into the winter sky and headed west.
For three hours the planes from Baikonur, and others from Air Force fields in Aralsk and Novokazalinsk, crisscrossed the recovery zone, working toward the west in search of the site of the last transmission from the spacecraft.
Finally our plane had to put into Aralsk to be refueled. While we were still on the ground, our pilot learned that the crew of another An-12 had sighted a parachute on the ice of the Aral Sea. They were low on fuel, too, so were heading back to Aralsk.
But this report gave me and the three-man military recovery team time to climb into one of the helicopters waiting there. This little squadron headed southwest, quickly crossing a strip of frozen desert, over Cape Shevchenko, then onto the ice of the Aral.
Dubnin, a young para-rescue officer, asked me if the Soyuz could float. “Haven’t you trained for a water rescue?” I asked, amazed at such a basic question.
“Are you kidding? This squad only got assigned to this jump two weeks ago. So help me out.” I assured him that the Soyuz was designed to float. “And you’re absolutely sure about this?”
“We even train the cosmonauts to egress while they are in the water. Why?”
“Because the report said ‘parachute,’ not spacecraft.”
“Maybe they got separated somehow.” Dubnin didn’t seem encouraged by this. “Hey, it’s on the ice, isn’t it?”
He pointed out the window. “How thick do you think it is down there?”
When I looked, I saw patches of open water. Obviously the ice couldn’t be very thick at all.
It took our squadron of helicopters less than twenty minutes to reach the site. The parachute was easy to spot, its red stripes standing out clearly against the snow-covered ice. As we got closer, I also saw a smear of soot, like a giant’s footprint, spreading out from the spot.
But I couldn’t see the spacecraft. As we circled, all we saw was a spacecraft-sized hole in the ice.
“Shit,” Dubnin said, seeing the same thing.
As the lead helicopter, we descended first, hovering two meters off the ice close to the parachute canopy, which billowed in the wash from our rotor. Dubnin attached a line to himself and dropped out of the door — safely. “Come out,” he signaled. The other two guys on his team, disdaining the safety lines, jumped down. After putting on my gloves, and saying a prayer, I followed them.
The ice seemed solid, but Dubnin signaled the helicopter to stand off. The second helicopter, a Mi-8, designed for heavy lifting, moved in, the heavy cable and tow hook dangling from it.
The three of us approached the spacecraft — rather, the hole in the ice where the spacecraft should have been — cautiously. Dubnin stopped about three meters from the jagged edge and got down on his belly and began to push himself along like a crawling baby. “You, too,” he said. “Distribute your weight.”
I was soon glad we did: The ice had been shattered by the impact of the spacecraft and the heat of its soft-landing rocket. The edge of the hole showed that the thickness of the ice was five or six centimeters — enough to support the weight of a man, if he were careful. But we could see cracks in the snow beneath us. “Can we land the chopper?”