"I Am Eagle"

The morning sun had already topped the mountains edging the Kazakhstan steppes, deep in southern Russia, when Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, 26, rode to his waiting rocket in an eggshell-blue bus. Bulky in his orange spacesuit, Titov clambered up the gantry ladder and settled himself in the giant five-ton capsule perched on the rocket's nose. An attendant handed him a notebook labeled ''Log Book of the Spaceship Vostok II.'' With exaggerated care, Titov examined the pencil dangling from the log, and remembered: "Yuri Gagarin did not attach his pencil firmly and lost it." Then the hatch clanged shut, arid soon Vostok II lifted through the clear air to carry Titov on the longest journey ever made by man --nearly 435,000 miles in 17 hurtling orbits around the earth.

Seconds later, U.S. radar watchers knew a Russian spaceship was aloft, flashed word to Western tracking stations around the world. (In Hyannisport, it was 2 a.m.; President Kennedy had been alerted the night before that the Soviets had started a countdown for a manned shot, and was not awakened.) It was more than an hour before Tass interrupted radio and television programs to tell the Russian people of the new Soviet space triumph. By then, Titov, orbiting at 17,750 m.p.h., had finished one full 88-minute trip around the earth and dutifully reported by radio that all was well.

Overslept. Titov, in fact, seemed to be having the time of his life. Using his code name triumphantly, over and over again he radioed, "I am eagle, I am eagle." Once he added for any and all listeners: "I wish you had it so good." As the earth twisted beneath him--22DEG with each orbit--putting him successively over new continents and nations (see diagram), he proudly transmitted appropriate messages: Master Sergeant James

A. Duffy of Arlington, Va., hooked a tape recorder to his receiver, caught Titov flashing overhead saying "Sending my friendly greeting to the people of North America."

On his very first orbit, Titov took over the manual controls of the Vostok II, checked out the systems designed to let him steady his capsule as it curved along its predetermined arc in space. On the third orbit, Titov ate a three-course lunch, squeezed out of tubes like toothpaste. On the seventh orbit, after 9 1/4 hours in the air, Titov passed over Moscow, radioed: "I beg to wish dear Muscovites good night. I am turning in now. You do as you please, but I am turning in." With that, Titov lay back for the programed 7 1/2 hours of sleep, actually overslept by 35 minutes. On the ground, Russian scientists kept telemetered watch over the sleeping cosmonaut's pulse, respiration and heartbeat, watched his face by television when Vostok II circled within range. (A tape recorder automatically took down his every word in flight.)

While Titov ate and slept, whirling on an ellipse that ranged from 111 miles to 158 miles above the earth, Premier Khrushchev promoted the orbiting cosmonaut from captain to major, also promoted him from candidate to full Communist Party member. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin cut short a trip to Canada, flew back to Moscow to be on hand to greet Titov. Western scientists and technicians went about the business of tracking Titov's progress with understandable lack of enthusiasm. "It makes me sick to my stomach," growled one U.S. Air Force officer.

No Change. But most U.S. scientists and space experts seemed unsurprised at Russia's feat, and not unduly dismayed. It represented no new breakthrough for Russian rocketry: having lifted Gagarin into single orbit and brought him back, the Russians needed only to use the same booster and capsule for Titov's longer flight. To scientists, the principal interest in Titov's voyage was the question of how he would stand up to the prolonged 25-hour period of weightlessness--the one condition of space travel that had yet to be duplicated, except momentarily, during ground experiments and training.

As Western experts quickly calculated, Titov would have to wait 17 orbits before the earth's rotation rolled the globe under him so that central Russia was in the proper position for his re-entry and landing. While Titov was soaring over southwest Africa on his 17th circuit of the globe, his retrorockets fired to slow the space capsule and send it plunging back into the atmosphere. He had a choice, he said later, of riding his capsule all the way to earth, or of parachuting out once he dropped low enough. He chose to eject from the Vostok and use his chute, with which he drifted into a plowed field some 460 miles from Moscow, remarkably close to the spot where Yuri Gagarin landed.

Like Gagarin. Titov was a copybook example of the new Soviet man. Short (5 ft. 6 in.), ruggedly handsome with wavy blond hair, the cosmonaut had always been better at athletics than books, was an expert gymnast and bicycle racer before he elected to go to flying school and the Red air force rather than college. And like Gagarin, Titov was treated to a hero's welcome when he finally returned from his high-arcing trip. Khrushchev led Titov's pretty young wife Tamara to the Moscow airport to greet the newest Soviet spaceman and smother him with kisses. It was a gooey occasion. Thousands of Muscovites jammed Red Square to toast Titov as he stood saluting atop Lenin's tomb, while helicopters overhead rained tiny, multicolored pictures of Titov.

In his first public appearances, Titov promised to prove, like Gagarin, as articulate on the ground as he was able in the air. "Weightlessness," he explained with the assurance of a man who knows, "does not interfere with man's capacity for work," though at first he felt as if he were "flying legs up." He had suffered an uneasy sensation in his inner ear, he said, and though he ate his first two meals on schedule, his appetite was not normal. There was also a faint sense of psychological unease. "I knew that there was something in the nature of homesickness called nostalgia," he said, ''but up there, I found there is also a homesickness for the earth. I don't know what it should be called, but it does exist."

But all this was swept aside by the joys of space. Sunshine flooded his cabin. "I saw with my own eyes that the earth was a sphere. Blue coronas on the horizons were really indescribably beautiful. The stars seemed brighter. The spaceship seemed to be standing still and the moon floating by," he rhapsodized, quoting Gogol's "dark sky over which the moon floats." Then he added: "The cosmos awaits the painters and poets."

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