Beyond by Stephen Walker

Author:Stephen Walker [Walker, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

BUT BOTH MEN still had to be told.

The day after the state commission meeting, Kamanin summoned Gagarin and Titov to his office. Nelyubov was not invited. As soon as they arrived, Kamanin got straight to the point. He told the two men that the state commission had agreed with his personal opinion that Gagarin should fly the first flight and Titov should be his back-up. And that, in a word, was that.

For Gagarin this was the greatest of accolades. Among this elite group of men it placed him at the very top of the top. His name, as Kamanin well understood, would very shortly be written into history – if he succeeded. But Gagarin was not the man to brag nor to wear his emotions on his sleeve, especially before his fellow cosmonauts. Repeatedly his contemporaries stress his modesty and self-restraint, although quite what lay behind this would often perplex even his closest friends. ‘He was like a sphinx,’ says Aleksey Leonov, who probably knew him as well as anybody. ‘And as impenetrable.’

For Titov the decision fell like a terrible blow. Even though both men had long known the likely decision, there was always the chance it might go another way. In later years Titov revealed that ‘up to that last minute I thought my chances were high enough that I could have been the commander of the Vostok capsule. We were all young and we all wanted to be first.’ But now that last minute had arrived and he had not been chosen. Kamanin recorded both men’s reactions: ‘The joy of Gagarin and Titov’s slight annoyance,’ he writes briefly, ‘were noticeable.’ By the time Pravda’s journalists described Titov’s reaction in his own sanitised late-1961 ‘autobiography’, Kamanin’s verdict of ‘slight annoyance’ had translated into this:

We all warmly supported the candidature of Yuri Gagarin, who had been nominated by our commanders. This excellent man, an absolutely sincere and honest Communist, enjoyed well-deserved respect among us cosmonauts . . . When I was appointed reserve space pilot, I was inexpressibly glad.

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