Adventure into Emptiness

(See Cover) Tied to a capsule by a 16-ft. tether, the first human satellite whirled through the vacuum of space at 18,000 m.p.h.

For ten minutes Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov drifted and spun through dreamlike gyrations while he followed the spaceship Voskhod II in its swift, elliptical path around the distant earth. Then, as easily and efficiently as he had emerged from his ship, Leonov climbed back inside. After 15 more orbits, he and his comrade, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, began the long flight home.

With that brief solo excursion into hostile emptiness last week, Lieut. Colonel Leonov took man's first tentative step down the long and dangerous track that he must travel before he truly conquers space. Circling the earth in a sealed and well-provisioned capsule has been demonstrated to be well within human capabilities, but the moon will never be explored, to say nothing of Mars and the other planets, unless fragile men learn to function in the outside vacuum where no earthborn organisms are naturally equipped to live.

Leonov's short "stroll" into personal orbit was one of the most remarkable achievements of the remarkable age of space. The Soviet success, said Kurt Debus, German-born director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center, "points to sophistication in manufacturing, computers, metallurgy, ballistics, space medicine and the pure sciences. This effort proved in one stroke their standing in all these fields."

Characteristic Prudence. Well aware that their cosmonaut would be exposing his vulnerable body to several kinds of sudden death, the Russian space officials were characteristically prudent. Only when he was safely back aboard the Voskhod II did they announce the flight and release TV pictures of his lofty acrobatics so that the world could get a guarded glimpse of the wildest space fantasy made real.

Dim and probably purposely fuzzy shots showed the round white top of a helmet poking slowly out of a hatch.

Then came the visored face of a man, followed by his shoulders and his arms.

He seemed to push something away with his left hand before he moved his left arm back and forth as if to test its freedom. He reached for a hand rail, and quickly his entire body came clear of the hatch. Now it could be seen that he was dressed in a bulky pressure suit, with cylinders strapped on his back and a thick cable twisting behind him.

The camera followed as Leonov tumbled and turned through casual somersaults while the curving edge of the distant, sunlit earth supplied a moving backdrop. Next came TV shots of Voskhod's interior, with Leonov relaxing next to Capsule Commander Belyayev. Light streaming through a porthole showed the spacecraft to be revolving at about one revolution per minute.

Embarrassing Shadow. publicity -- After the TV came the standard publicity--the proud public announcements, the canned biographies of the cosmonauts. If it seemed stodgy and unsophisticated compared with the hoopla that surrounds U.S. space shots, the Russian performance was still perfectly timed. Voskhod trailed behind it an embarrassing shadow that seemed to darken the spring sunlight over Florida's Cape Kennedy. The planned U.S. Gemini shot dwindled in significance as Leonov's impressive feat added another first to the lengthening list that reminds the world how far the Russians are ahead in manned-space flight. Items: >First earth satellite, Sputnik I, Oct. 4, 1957. > First satellite to carry an animal, Sputnik II, Nov. 3, 1957. > First photograph of hidden side of the moon, Lunik III, launched Oct. 18, 1959. > First man in space, Yuri Gagarin,. April 12, 1961. > First double launching, Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich, Aug. 11, Aug. 12, 1962. > First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, June 16, 1963. > First three-man satellite, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, Boris Yegorov, Oct. 12, 1964.

The Russians have lagged in the construction of the delicate instrumented craft that the U.S. puts up for communications, observing the weather, studying the sun, photographing the moon and probing the planets. But, as yet, the U.S. has nothing to match their powerful, reliable boosters and their spacious, multi-manned satellites. The whole world was understandably impressed by the latest Soviet success.

Radar View. To be sure, Leonov did not take U.S. spacemen by surprise.

They had been expecting a space spectacular for months; the sharp-eyed, long-range radars of the North American Air Defense Command watched the launch of the Voskhod II and followed it on orbit. Forewarned that a hole might open in the side of the spacecraft, changing its reflectivity, the radar men watched the reflected blip with special attention. As expected, they saw an irregularity develop in the space ship's electronic "signature." That was the instant when Leonov opened the hatch.

It was never any secret that large Soviet spaceships such as the three-man Voskhod I were capable of many more actions than they had accomplished. Because of the lack of a big booster to launch them, U.S. man-carrying capsules, including Gemini, are comparatively light and have to be pared to the bone to save fractions of ounces. The Voskhods are roomy, and Soviet designers make the most of their space.

The chief Soviet space designer, a mysterious figure who is never identified, described his ship sketchily. To get out into space, he said, Leonov used an air lock, a chamber with airtight doors at both ends. When he crawled into it, Comrade Belyayev sealed the inner door tight, and Leonov presumably tested his space suit to see that it was working properly; then he cautiously loosened the outer door. Though it must have been rehearsed on earth over and over again, this was surely a moment of hideous crisis.

To wash his blood free of nitrogen that might bubble up and give him a fatal case of the bends, Leonov breathed pure oxygen for a while before he entered the lock. Now, enclosed in his space suit, he was still getting pure oxygen at just about the pressure that he would breathe it on earth. As air escaped from the lock, the vacuum of space reached into it like a monster's claw. The oxygen in Leonov's suit tried to expand, and the suit inflated like a balloon. The cosmonaut must have listened anxiously for the hissing of tiny leaks. But all went well; he flung open the outer door and was the first human to look the deadly vacuum full in the face.

Air locks are simple, straightforward devices; their relatives have been used for more than a century in underwater excavating. But to resist pressure, they must be bulky and fairly heavy. The cramped cabin of a U.S. Gemini has no room for them, and when the first U.S. astronaut ventures into emptiness, he will open a single hatch and expose the whole cabin to vacuum.

Autonomous or Umbilical. Much more interesting than the air lock, though, was Leonov's space suit. One Russian commentator called it "autonomous," which means that it is independent of the spaceship except for a simple tether. The pictures do show cylinders on Leonov's back that probably held oxygen, but the cable attaching him to the spaceship was thick enough to contain a good-sized oxygen tube. It may be an umbilical cord supplying oxygen from the spaceship's tanks, besides carrying wires for communication and telemetering. The tube could also carry away carbon dioxide from Leonov's breathing, water vapor from his perspiration and excess heat. The oxygen cylinders on his back may have been for emergency use.

Whether autonomous or not, the suit was well-insulated and covered with a white material to reflect all possible sunlight, for maintaining tolerable temperatures is one of the major problems in the design of space suits. Because sunlight in space is twice as strong as at the bottom of the atmosphere, and contains ultraviolet rays that quickly weaken many materials, the outer layer of a space suit must not only ward off light and heal, but must be proof against ultraviolet.

Almost as dangerous as radiant heat is the fearful cold of space, which strikes wherever an object is shadowed from the sun. If an astronaut stays long out of sunlight, as may be necessary on future space missions, his body heat will tend to leak away. Thus the outer layer must be made of material that does not radiate too much heat. The Russians have not told what they use for a space-suit coating, only that it is white.

Another serious space-suit problem is flexibility. Contrast between the pressure inside and the vacuum outside tends to make the suit as tight as a drumhead. To move at all, arms and legs must be fitted with accordion-like joints. To judge by his motions, Leonov could move his arms fairly freely, but his legs and torso seemed stiff and straight most of the time.

Weightless Work. The Russians announced that Leonov spent a total of 20 minutes in vacuum, took motion pictures, inspected the outside of the Voskhod II and did useful work. The TV sequences did not show all these actions, but work is not easy to do in weightless space. Even the simplest tools refuse to function when no weight can be brought to bear on them. If a weightless man tries to use a wrench, he is as likely to move himself as the bolt he is twisting.

Any work Leonov did was probably slight, and he may have inspected the ship by simply pushing off into space and swinging around a little. Even then, he must have been careful not to push too hard; though weightless, he still had inertia and if he got moving too fast he could have swung against the side of the ship with a dangerous thump.

Only Leonov could tell whether his somersaults in space that entertained the world's TV viewers were intended or accidental. Spinning in weightlessness is easy; more important is the fact that it is hard to avoid. All the cosmonaut had to do while floating beside the ship was to push against it carelessly and he would have been bound to spin, and keep on spinning, until some external force such as the kinking of his line made him stop.

Space Wardrobe. The Russians are surely developing even more elaborate space suits than the one used by Leonov, for if they intend to land men on the moon they will need a wide spectrum of space clothing to meet different needs. One type of suit will be for use in true weightless space outside an orbiting satellite or interplanetary spacecraft. Before its wearer can hope to do useful jobs, such as helping to assemble a space station, he must have the ability to move from place to place. This will call for tanks of an easily controlled propellant, such as hydrogen peroxide, and a cluster of small-thrust nozzles pointing in different directions. A total of twelve will be needed to give complete control, enabling a working cosmonaut to move in all directions and control his rotation in pitch, roll and yaw.

If a space-suited man ventures any considerable distance from his home ship, he will probably have a larger nozzle thrusting backward to propel him to the length of a long, thin tether. It might seem simple enough for his comrades to reel him in by the tether when his work is over, but nothing in space is as simple as it seems. A recent study by U.S. scientists warns that a reeled-in astronaut will be lost or killed unless elaborate precautions are taken.

As he floats at the end of a rope ahead of a spaceship, an astronaut may seem motionless in respect to the mother satellite, but since he is moving with it on a 90-min. orbit around the earth, he will actually be circling around it once every 90 min. If he is reeled in, a simple principle of elementary physics (the conservation of angular momentum) will cause him to circle faster and faster as his tether shortens. This is the same force that makes a skater spin faster when he moves his arms down against his sides.

Dangerous speeds and forces develop quickly. If an astronaut is reeled in from 5,000 ft. away, he will speed up to 600 m.p.h. before he gets within 25 ft. of the ship, and the strain on his tether will rise to many tons. Assorted and intricate schemes have been suggested for the avoidance of this dangerous difficulty. But the day may come when an astronaut will break his tether and drift off into endless space because a comrade has reeled him in too fast.

Limberer for Lava. A suit designed for use in weightless space can include several hundred pounds of instruments, oxygen, propellant, cooling agent, tools and other supplies. The wearer will not feel the weight, only the inertial mass. For some missions his less and torso will need little flexibility; they can stay stiff while the man works with his arms and moves around with his rocket thrusters.

But a suit for exploration of the moon presents different problems. Tt needs no built-in propulsion, but its limbs must be flexible to permit the wearer to clamber around on the moon's surface, which is probably covered in many places with chunks of rubble and unstable dusty slopes. One U.S. astronaut recently put on a moon-exploration space suit and stumbled across a lava bed in Oregon. He found the knees too stiff for such work, and the suit is being made more limber.

U.S. space-suit plans call for exchangeable equipment: a massive propulsive backpack for use in weightless space, and lighter suits emphasizing oxygen and cooling apparatus for exploring the moon. These suits have not reached the rigorous testing stage, in which men will wear them in a vacuum chamber under the glare of simulated space radiation. Less ambitious suits for emerging from Gemini capsules are farther advanced. Like the suit worn by Leonov. they will carry their own oxygen and cooling equipment and also trail an umbilical cord as an extra safety measure. They are designed to support life in a vacuum for several hours, and U.S. space-suit experts, who were deeply impressed by the pictures of Leonov's brief excursion, suspect that his suit could do the same.

Orbiting Station. It may not be long before Russian cosmonauts have the capability of doing serious work in space--which will be needed on their chosen lunar route. Present U.S. plans call for a giant rocket that will push astronauts near the moon, then send a part of the vehicle into lunar orbit. The Russians seem to be leaning toward the orbiting-platform concept promoted for years by German-born Dr. Wernher von Braun, who is now Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala.

The platform will be put together gradually while circling on an earth orbit, its parts and supplies carried up by rockets of reasonable size. A vehicle designed for flight in a vacuum will be assembled and fueled aloft, and after it is fully checked out, its trained crew will arrive. When it takes off for the moon, the vehicle will not need much extra thrust since the platform on which it stands is already moving around the earth at 18,000 m.p.h. The ship's structure can be light since it will not have to battle its way through the dense lower atmosphere.

This strategy has many technical points in its favor, and it may have special appeal to the propaganda-geared Russians. The orbiting space platform will be highly visible; after the sun and the moon, it may be the most conspicuous thing in the sky. For years while the Russians reach for the moon, their busy platform will impress billions of people on the earth below.

Maternal Glory. Not until Russian policies change will the full story of Leonov and Belyayev's flight become common knowledge. Only the lives of the cosmonauts themselves got a colorful airing. Leonov, now 30, was born in the village of Listvyanka in the Kuznetsk coal-mining region of Siberia, where his mother earned the Order of Maternal Glory, First Class, for her family of nine. In 1948 his parents moved to Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia), which had been abandoned by its German masters.

After finishing school in 1953, Leonov was sent by the Young Communist League to flying school at Chuguyev, near Kharkov, where he made 115 parachute jumps, became a parachute instructor, and was one of the first pilots to be selected for training as a cosmonaut. He was courting the girl whom, he was to marry when he learned that he might be sent on a novel and very difficult mission. Told that the mission would not interfere with his marriage, he signed up enthusiastically.

Press accounts described him as a man of notable endurance, coolness and high discipline, and they went into unusual rhapsodies about his physical perfection. Said Izvestia: "Connoisseurs of bodily beauty, the ancient Greeks would surely have judged his build as athletic."

Belyayev, 39, and the oldest cosmonaut who has yet flown in space, was born in the Vologda region east of Leningrad. As a child he skied three miles to school and tried at 16 to join the ski troops in the war with Nazi Germany.

Rejected as too young, he worked in a factory for two years, then went into training in the Red air force where he fought as a pilot for the rest of the war. He was studying at the air force academy when he was selected for cosmonaut training, and he astonished space physicians with the punishment he could take in centrifuge tests. At one time they stopped the machine for fear that he had gone too far. But Belyayev was undamaged.

He was not, however, wholly invulnerable. During parachute training he broke a leg. The double fracture healed slowly, and he feared he would be washed out of cosmonaut training. His father, a rural physician, prescribed weight-lifting to rebuild the damaged leg, and eventually it grew strong enough to pass examination.

All Experiments. Such hero biographies, not unfamiliar in the U.S., help not at all in evaluating the flight of the Voskhod II. The TV pictures of Leonov outside the spaceship might have told much more, but they seemed to have been deliberately thrown out of sharpness, as well as cut. If Leonov experienced any kind of trouble the pictures did not show it, and official announcements about the flight were as formal as if carved in stone. "The ship's systems functioned normally," said a spokesman, "and the two cosmonauts completed all scientific experiments assigned to them."

Political leaders of the U.S.S.R. appeared on TV applauding the flight. But there was none of the gay banter of one of Nikita Khrushchev's conversations with orbiting cosmonauts. Party Chief Leonid I. Brezhnev picked up a white telephone and did his leaden best. "We applaud you," he said to the Voskhod II. "We await you in Moscow." Congratulatory messages arrived from all over the world. The Pope and President Johnson both offered applause.

In the end, though, it was clear that not everything went as planned with Voskhod II. Its takeoff was normal, then it soared into a slightly more elliptical orbit than is usual for manned satellites, rising to 307.5 miles above the earth at apogee. Leonov took his vacuum stroll during the second orbit, when, as the Russians patriotically pointed out, he was over Russian soil. Then the spacecraft made 15 more orbits around the earth, followed all the while by U.S. trackers.

Down in Perm. First hint of any kind of trouble came when Russian radio and TV said nothing about the flight for more than eight hours. Finally came the announcement, four hours after the event, that the cosmonauts had guided their ship to a perfect landing near the city of Perm, 750 miles northeast of Moscow. This is hilly, forested country on the western slope of the Urals, and much more hazardous than the barren, level steppes of Kazakhstan, where Soviet spacemen usually touch down.

Still, landing on firm ground, instead of the warm oceans where U.S. astronauts dunk themselves, has its advantages. The Russians may do it primarily because they possess vast areas of flat and almost uninhabited territory, but they also prefer it. A spacecraft that descends too fast will hit the ground with little more impact than if it hits water. And survival on solid ground is a lesser problem than after a water landing. There is no chance that the men will drown or that their ship will sink if not picked up promptly. Storms do not corrugate the land with dangerous waves, as they do the sea, and if the spacecraft drops into an unscheduled spot, there are generally at least a few local people to report its descent and help the crewmen. Perhaps the greatest advantage is that a spacecraft designed for a ground landing does not have to carry flotation gear or be made waterproof.

The Russians have not been communicative about their landing methods. Their early cosmonauts were apparently ejected when they neared earth; they landed by personal parachutes, letting the empty capsules hit the ground hard. At the ends of other flights, they seem to have stayed on board, as U.S. astronauts do, while the ships landed beneath bigger and better parachutes. Retrorockets have also been used to check a ship's speed as it nears the ground. The three-man spaceship Voskhod I used this method with great success. Its designers were so sure that the soft landing would work that they gave the crew no parachutes or protective clothing.

Apparent Error. If any Soviet spacecraft has gone astray and landed on an ocean or other inhospitable spot, the world has not been told about it. Last week's landing near Perm was the first apparent error. A late report said that Colonel Belyayev fired his retrorockets while over Africa to check the ship's speed and start it curving down toward the earth. He was said to be the first Soviet spaceman to take over the landing controls himself, but whether this action was planned or was forced by some failure of the automatic-landing system was not made clear.

The ship was said to have made a soft touchdown on deep snow, with the aid of parachutes. Newspapers described its flaming descent through the atmosphere and discussed the loss of radio contact when an antenna burned off. But all this is normal. It was the long silence after landing that was ominous. Then word came that the cosmonauts were safe; Yuri Gagarin, Russia's space pioneer, talked to them by telephone and reported that "they are completely healthy." Whatever had gone wrong on the last, dangerous trajectory that led back to earth had apparently not detracted from the overall accomplishment of that spectacular flight.

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