Meet the Press

Before an audience of 2,000 correspondents, cameramen and spectators in Moscow University's ornate assembly hall, Russia's space twins, Major Andrian Nikolayev and Lieut. Colonel Pavel Popovich, last week underwent a four-hour earth post-mortem of their memorable exploit in space.

Nikolayev and Popovich said that they had come to within three miles of each other in space, but had not attempted an actual rendezvous because it was not a part of their assignment. Both spaceships were slightly roomier than those used by Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, but the suspicions of U.S. scientists that Vostoks III and IV weighed approximately the same as the earlier models--some 11,000 lbs.--were confirmed. His craft "was designed for one person," declared Nikolayev. Though Tass had left the impression that the two cosmonauts had ridden their capsules all the way to the ground, both spacemen said that they had been ejected, and parachuted to earth after re-entering the atmosphere; the pair landed six minutes and 124 miles apart near Karaganda, 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow. The parachuted capsules came floating down near by.

Popovich said that Nikolayev's capsule "looked like a very small moon in the distance." Vision was so clear aloft, added Nikolayev, that he could see the main streets of cities on earth; at times, he added, moonlight flooded into his cabin, illuminating the switches before him. Popovich said that each time he finished eating, he switched on a vacuum cleaner to clear away the lint from his paper napkin that hung weightless in the cabin. In a personal experiment with weightlessness, Popovich said that he had carried a bottle half full of water aloft with him. The water gathered about both ends of the bottle "and the air collected in the middle in a little sphere. It stayed that way even when I shook the bottle."

Nikolayev admitted to some misgivings during his descent from orbit: "Out of the window, I saw smoke, then flames, which changed from red to orange to yellow to blue. You hear loud crackling and you begin to wonder if the ship's outer covering isn't about to slough off. As the deceleration forces decreased, it became like riding a cart on a bad road." When he landed, Nikolayev said, "my first inclination was to kiss the earth of our motherland."

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