“This has been a terrible year,” General Kamanin said. “So many losses. It feels like the war.” For him, it was true: Gagarin, Seregin, Ribko. And he could hardly have forgotten about poor Komarov. Of course, one of his friends had murdered the others. But things like that happened in war.
Eventually the mourners began to leave. I sent Katya home and accepted a ride back to Star Town with the Shiborins. I walked into my flat more alone in the world than I had ever been. I was now an orphan.
Through all of my mourning I had stayed dry-eyed, but here, now, I wept. I wept for myself, like a child. I wept for my country and my friends. I had lost my father, after all. Long before his actual death.
Colonel Belyayev had encouraged me to take some time off, but I presented myself at morning exercise the Monday after the funeral. I had already lost a week due to the cancellation of my winter survival training; I didn’t feel I could afford to miss anything else.
I needn’t have bothered. Most of my group’s training time was devoted to gossiping about the American program — it appeared as though Apollo 8 was truly going to be launched soon — or discussing Kamanin’s plans to reorganize the Gagarin Center, raising its status from that of a military unit to an actual scientific-research institute, doubling the size. Even the cosmonaut team itself, already divided into various branches, was to be split up.
There were also final examinations for the eight cosmonauts training for the next pair of Soyuz missions, including Saditsky. This time there was no political maneuvering; everyone scored well, and the crews got ready to leave for Baikonur confident we would finally accomplish a manned docking and spacewalk, almost two years after we first tried it.
These distractions were a blessing, because while I was present in body, I could not concentrate. Had I been graded on exercises or even my favorite academic subjects, I would have flunked. Belyayev had been right, and I should have taken a holiday.
After two weeks I began to emerge from my daze, becoming more active. I felt the urge to sweep everything bad out of my life, to start over for the New Year.
One of my first targets was the PB-8 pistol stashed behind my books. But on the morning when I went to find it, it was gone.
In its place was a note — a single piece of paper, written in my father’s neat hand. “Yuri, I will pay the penalty. Remember our good times and your mother, and forgive me. Papa.”
It had never occurred to me to ask what gun he had used to kill himself. He had come here and taken mine! No wonder he had been found so close by, at Tsiolkovsky Station.
(Had the weapon been found? If so, by whom?)
On that same day, Saturday, December 21, the American Apollo 8 roared off its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders were the crew. Within hours they had fired the upper stage of their Saturn V-5 and sent themselves soaring toward the Moon.
Three days later they burned the engine of the Apollo service module, putting themselves into lunar orbit, where they stayed for twenty hours. On December 25—Christmas Day in the West — they began their journey home, splashing safely down in the Pacific on December 28, winning the first heat of the race to the Moon.
51
The World’s First Experimental Space Station
Our national response to Apollo 8, as reported to the cosmonaut team by General Kamanin, was to press the battle on all fronts. An unmanned L-1 would be launched January 20; if it succeeded, a manned L-1 would follow in April.
The Soyuz docking, rendezvous, and EVA test of our prototype Hawk lunar spacesuit was to be launched in mid-January. There would be a second twin docking flight in summer, and two additional docking missions testing the lunar Soyuz/L-3 capture system (which was different from the Soyuz/Soyuz model) in the fall and winter.
The first Carrier launch vehicle would fly in February, a second in May.
The L-3 lander would begin its unmanned orbital trials by late in the year.
Finally, in summer we would send a new type of unmanned probe called the E-8 to the Moon: It would land, as the E-6 had, but dig up some samples, which would then be shot back to Earth and recovered! We hoped this sample-return mission would steal some of Apollo’s thunder, and might very well show that the creative Soviet approach to lunar exploration was just as timely and efficient as the American plan.
As we walked out of the meeting, I asked Saditsky what he thought of the staggering number and variety of launchers and spacecraft. “It’s like the Zhukov method of clearing a minefield,” he said, mentioning our honored commander of the Great Patriotic War. “If you don’t have well-trained sappers with useful tools, you simply line up vast numbers of soldiers and march them through it. Many soldiers will die, but the minefield will be cleared.”
Shortly thereafter, on Monday, January 13, 1969, Shiborin and I flew back to Baikonur for checkout on L-1 Number 13.
As a Bauman graduate, an engineer, and an atheistic Communist, I was not generally superstitious, but even I noticed the many instances of that unlucky number. Beyond the date of our flight and the serial number of the L-1, one of the two Soyuz was also serial number 13. And Lieutenant Colonel Shatalov, who would be launched as the pilot of Soyuz Number 12, was the thirteenth pilot-cosmonaut of the USSR in a line beginnning with Gagarin. (This public honor came complete with medals and special automobile license plates bearing that number!) Shatalov claimed to be unconcerned, but I heard there were discussions among the more superstitious members of the State Commission about the subject. (To this day you can find buildings in Moscow without a thirteenth floor — they call it “12-A.” And let’s not forget that the original surveyors of the Baikonur Cosmodrome made sure that “Area 13” would become the cemetery!)
In fact, the original launch date for our thirteenth pilot-cosmonaut was to have been January 13, but Shiborin and I knew it had been postponed even before we left Chkalov. Technical problems? No one seemed quite sure about the reason.
Nevertheless, on cold and snowy January 14, Vladimir Shatalov became Cosmonaut 13 when his Soyuz reached orbit safely and was announced as Soyuz 4. A day later, spacecraft Number 13 with a crew of Volynov, Yeliseyev, and Khrunov was also launched successfully, becoming Soyuz 5.
Having learned from the fiasco of Beregovoy’s failed docking, our flight directors allowed Shatalov — piloting the active craft in the scenario — two full days to adapt to weightlessness. Even the three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 5 were required only to make some small engine burns during the first day, placing their craft in the proper target orbit.
Shortly after noon (Baikonur time) on the sixteenth, Soyuz 4 approached to within one hundred meters of Soyuz 5 using the automatic guidance system. Then Shatalov took over manual control and eased into a perfect docking. Watching the events live on state television, we also heard a comment from the crew of Soyuz 5 as the probe of the active craft entered the drogue of the passive docking unit: “Help, we’ve been raped!”
I thought of the comments scrawled on the control panel of the Soyuz mockup used for winter survival training as those of us listening in the command post at Area 18 burst into laughter.
As State television’s censors no doubt began fielding irate phone calls from members of the Central Committee, our commentators trumpeted the establishment of “the world’s first experimental space station,” massing over thirteen thousand kilograms and consisting of four different habitable modules. Well, yes and no — to get from one pair of modules to the other, you had to go outside the space station, like swimming across a river to reach the other room of your house. Stupid.