By seven P.M., the rescue team had moved to the Outskirts Airfield, and were standing by, which for most of us meant finding food, smoking, or catching naps.
Since I was known to have been a bureau engineer on Soyuz, I was continually asked what I thought. Would we be flying out to recover Komarov next morning? Or would it be Komarov, Yeliseyev, Khrunov the following day? I wanted to be honest about the unlikelihood of a second launch and docking, but didn’t want to encourage the others to relax. So I stuck to the Party line: Komarov was a well-trained pilot and engineer, support teams here at Baikonur, at Yevpatoriya, and in Moscow were working to fulfill the mission, and so on.
“You’re full of shit,” Dubnin said, finally.
Complicating our preparations was a rainstorm that blew through the area in the afternoon, just enough water to turn every spot of bare earth into a muddy sea. Flight controllers wouldn’t want to land Komarov in the middle of this, but then, the prime recovery zone was dozens of kilometers to the north and west. Was it raining there? Nobody seemed to know.
At midnight, contact was reestablished with Komarov. He had slept fitfully; the solar panel was still stuck; and the solar orientation system was still broken. The State Commission canceled the Soyuz 2 launch, and decided to land Komarov at the beginning of his seventeenth orbit, about 5:30 in the morning.
We were ordered to be ready to take off in three hours.
28
Orsk
An hour before we climbed into the Ilyushin-18 that was to carry us to Aralsk — site of my “hospitalization” following my adventure on the ice — the word came to “stand by.”
“What’s gone wrong now?” Dubnin asked.
Since I had at least a theoretical chance of understanding what was causing the delay, I got on the telephone to the tower dispatcher who had waved us off, and learned that as Komarov and Soyuz 1 flew around Earth on their fifteenth orbit, instructions for his reentry burn were radioed up to him. But communications were spotty, and no one on the ground was certain he would be able to execute them with the failed orientation system.
Sure enough, ninety minutes later, as Komarov flew over Africa at the end of his sixteenth orbit, the stations tracking Soyuz 1 saw no change in its trajectory. Once in voice contact, Komarov confirmed that the ion sensor had lost its fix as the spacecraft moved into darkness, and the Soyuz autopilot had prevented the retro-rockets from firing.
This was a problem, but not a disaster, and not even unprecedented: The Voskhod 2 cosmonauts, Belyayev and Leonov, had had to postpone a reentry burn. What complicated matters was the lack of power aboard Soyuz 1. Komarov couldn’t just go round and round Earth waiting for the perfect daylight opportunity. He only had two more chances, the seventeenth and eighteenth orbits. And there was no time to recalculate the complex maneuvers for a manual reentry in time to get them to Komarov for a landing on the seventeenth.
So it was to be the eighteenth orbit, with a projected touchdown time of 8:30 Baikonur time.
This information allowed us to file a new flight plan, because the prime landing zone shifted farther to the west, toward the city of Orenburg, a two-hour flight.
We couldn’t take off as quickly as we wanted; we had to wait for General Kamanin and several of his staff, who came racing up in a single car, right onto the pavement of the runway apron, where one of the local generals met them.
Finally we took off, at 6:45, hours after we should have, knowing that Komarov’s Soyuz was probably going to have landed by the time we reached the area. The local Air Defense Force units, not officially part of the recovery team, were put on alert and told to have helicopters ready.
Kamanin brought us the latest information, that Komarov had made a good reentry burn, though he would now follow a ballistic trajectory. The bell-shaped Soyuz, like Gemini and Apollo, had a slightly offset center of gravity, allowing it to generate a small amount of lift in order to adjust its landing point. But the orientation had to be perfect, which was not the case for Soyuz 1. Using the ballistic method, the spacecraft would spin slowly about its long axis, negating the lift, making the trajectory steeper and increasing the G forces felt by the pilot. Knowing this, however, flight controllers projected Komarov’s landing site to be east of the city of Orsk, which was itself almost two hundred kilometers east of Orenburg, shortening our trip by half an hour.
Like most of those on the plane, I dozed as we droned west. Only Kamanin, carefully writing in a small notebook, stayed awake.
At one point, halfway to Orsk, a pale lieutenant colonel with Kamanin muttered, “He should be down by now.”
“Thank God,” Kamanin said. “This was too ambitious for a first flight. Two spacecraft, four cosmonauts, docking, spacewalks. What the hell were we thinking?”
He noticed me blinking sleepily across from him. “Getting out of Artemov’s organization is a smart move for you, Ribko.”
I was so tired it took me fifteen minutes to realize that Kamanin had just told me I was getting a job at the cosmonaut training center. I wasn’t so tired, however, that I assumed he meant as a cosmonaut.
Even from the air, Orsk looked like a grim little town, nothing but identical gray apartment buildings wreathed in smoke and dust. The only striking sights on the horizon were several factory smokestacks, clearly the source of the pollution.
As we strapped in for landing a little after ten A.M., Dubnin wound up next to me. “Your cosmonaut should be at the airport by now.” I hoped so. Kamanin and the other generals would take charge of him, while Dubnin and I flew off with helicopters to recover the spacecraft.
Taxiing in, however, it was clear that Komarov had not arrived. A faded yellow bus raced toward us, meeting our party as we came down the stairs. It had barely stopped and we had barely managed to drink in the noxious spring air of Orsk when a bald major general popped out of the bus, a gray look on his face. “General Kamanin, I’m General Avtonomov, deputy district commander. Soyuz 1 landed at 8:24 about sixty-five kilometers east of here.” He clearly didn’t want to say what came next: “The spacecraft is reported to be on fire and the cosmonaut has not been found.”
Kamanin and his colleagues exchanged quick glances. So did Dubnin and I. Fatigued and confused, I could not really react to the awful news. Soyuz on fire? Where would Komarov be? He couldn’t eject.
Just then a smaller car drove up, disgorging another general, this one wearing two stars, identifying himself as Lieutenant General Tsedrik, Avtonomov’s boss. “We just got a telephone call from a Rocket Force unit in Novo-orsk. They say Komarov is in a hospital in a settlement a few kilometers from the landing site.”
That was more promising: Soyuz 1 could have crash-landed, injuring Komarov, who was then taken to a hospital. “Let’s get going,” Dubnin said, but Tsedrik was going on: “I’ve reported this information to the Ministry of Defense.”
“We’re going to the landing site,” Kamanin said. “Is the helicopter ready?”
“Minister Ustinov insisted that you call him the moment you arrived,” Tsedrik said nervously, obviously not wanting to get into a crossfire between Ustinov and Kamanin.