The Heavenly Twins

(See Cover) Grey skies hung over Moscow, but the mood of the Soviet capital was far from somber. Patriotic marches blared from public loudspeakers, and hundreds of thousands of people milled about in streets festooned with flowers, banners and miniature rocket models. An Ilyushin turbo prop airliner, escorted by seven MIG jet fighters, swooped low over the city and dipped its wings. Moments later, at Vnukovo Airport on the outskirts of Mos cow, the plane came to a stop before a 100-long red carpet stretched over the runway. Out stepped Russia's two newest cosmonauts, Major Andrian Nikolayev, 32, and Lieut. Colonel Pavel Popovich, 31.

Their arrival triggered a riotous celebration in honor of another Soviet space first: the dual-manned orbit that proved the possibility of teamwork in space.

Seldom had Moscow witnessed such a display of public affection. An exultant Nikita Khrushchev kissed both spacemen smack on the lips, followed in turn by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and other members of the Presidium, as well as Russia's two previous cosmonauts, Ma jor Yuri Gagarin and Major Gherman Titov. As young women pelted them with flowers, the "Heavenly Twins," as the So viet press dubbed the cosmonauts, then hugged and embraced their families. The band of the Moscow garrison played the Soviet national anthem, punctuated by a 2 1 -gun salute. On the 20-mile trip from the airport to Red Square. Nikolayev and Popovich stood in a flower-covered Zil convertible and waved bouquets at the crowds that lined the route.

At the public reception atop Lenin's Tomb in Red Square, six-year-old pig-tailed Natasha Popovich stood at her father's side and happily waved at the 80,000 people jammed in the square below. Then it was time for speeches; sure enough, the Russians could not resist the chance to turn space prowess into political profit. "The group flight in outer space is one more vivid proof of the superiority of socialism over capitalism," said Nikolayev, or "Falcon," as he called himself during his globe-circling orbits. Added Popovich. whose orbital name was "Golden Eagle": "Across the ocean, the enemies of peace are fanning war hysteria and striving to turn the expanses of space into an atomic testing ground."

Later, at the private ceremony in the

Kremlin's St. George's Hall, the guests of honor walked into the reception room in a procession to receive Russia's highest decoration--Hero of the Soviet Union.

As the cheering echoed from Moscow, the world was assessing what the space duet meant in terms of positive scientific achievement, the cold war, and the race to the moon. Though there was no evidence of a basic new technological breakthrough, the dual orbiting of manned space capsules was a long step toward space rendezvous--the major way station on the road to the moon. Of more immediate concern to U.S. military leaders was the clear suggestion that manned Russian space capsules might soon be capable of observing, intercepting, and possibly even destroying U.S. scientific and military satellites whirling around in space. Moreover, Russia had gained precious information on man's ability to survive the physical hazards of the great unknown of space, and had reaped, at least for the moment, a substantial propaganda advantage by showing its heels to the U.S. space program.

On Wings of Song. When Moscow Radio reported that Nikolayev had blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Central Asia, scientists in the West could only wonder what the Russians were up to this time. No Russian cosmonaut had been sent into space in the year and five days since Gherman Titov's 17-orbit flight; surely, Russia had not waited all that time merely to duplicate Titov's feat.

Unsure of just what the Russians were planning, the West watched and waited.

The answer came Sunday morning, 23 hours and 32 minutes after Nikolayev's launching, with the news that Vostok IV was in orbit. The Soviet announcement said that the purpose of the mission was to check "contact" between spacecraft in similar orbits and to gain new knowledge on the effects of sustained weightlessness on the human body. Moscow declared that both cosmonauts were quickly in radio communication as they soared around the globe approximately every 88 minutes, were even able to exchange grins by means of direct television contact. Moreover, the cosmonauts reported to the ground that they could see each other in the distance through their portholes. At that time, Nikolayev and Popovich were about 50 miles apart. The apogee of Vostok Ill's initial orbit was 156 miles, its perigee 114 miles; Vostok IV circled at heights of between 158 and 112 miles.

At intervals, Nikolayev and Popovich reported that they unstrapped themselves from their harnesses and shifted weightlessly in their cabins, stretching their muscles as much as .their bulky orange space suits would allow. Through the portholes of their spacecraft, they photographed the moon and other celestial bodies. "The moon looked not flat, as from the earth, but like a ball hanging in empty space," said Nikolayev later. In their logbooks, they noted the temperature, pressure and humidity of their vehicles, as well as their own pulse and blood pressure. Soviet scientists on the ground received electrocardiograms direct from sensors attached to the spacemen's bodies.

Floating Pencils. Unlike Gagarin and Titov, the two cosmonauts ate solid food --bite-size chunks of veal cutlet, chicken, sandwiches and pastries. "It was just as pleasant as a good restaurant," recalled Nikolayev when he landed, and, depending on his knowledge of Russian restaurants, he may have meant what he said.

They exchanged greetings with Khrushchev, radioed "love and kisses" to the other Russian cosmonauts on the ground.

Passing over the U.S., Nikolayev wished "peace and happiness to the gifted American people." While not performing their technical duties, they read or dozed; Popovich said he pored over physics books, even studied English. Before retiring, the two cosmonauts lullabied each other to sleep by radio--singing back and forth verses of a Russian spacemen's song, 7 Believe, Friends: I believe, my friends, That caravans of rockets Will speed us from star to star.

On the dusty paths Of faraway planets Our traces will remain.

On the ground, Russia exulted. A Moscow postman's wife gave birth to twin sons and promptly named them Pavel and Andrian. From each capsule, cameras transmitted onto Soviet TV screens what the Russians said were live pictures of the spacemen, who demonstrated weightlessness to the viewers by floating pencils and other objects before the camera lenses.

When the heroes were not on camera, TV programming was sticky with sentiment.

Choirs sang the cosmonauts' song, and an ancient film on the life of Nikolai Zhu-kovsky (1847-1921), the father of Russian aviation, was resurrected for the occasion; the picture's final deathbed scene dissolved slowly into a shot of Soviet spaceships soaring off into the unknown.

Lenin Aloft. U.S. television networks asked to plug in on the space screenings via Telstar, but the Russians refused. At a once-removed distance, however, Soviet public relations men were shelling out a variety of corn that would have made a second-rate Hollywood puff merchant blush. Around the world, Soviet embassy officials peddled prepared picture layouts that showed the two cosmonauts with their families, and at play, wearing brief swimming trunks at a Russian beach resort. There were pictures of the two lolling on a grassy slope, riding a pedal boat, and even one of Nikolayev sniffing poppies. Handouts emphasized the human touch; the releases said that Popovich had christened his booster rocket Lastochka (The Swallow) and that Nikolayev had asked the ground station for the latest soccer scores. It was made known that Nikolayev's fellow cosmonauts, as a gag, slipped a sheet of jokes into his logbook before takeoff; the P.R. men announced that Popovich during his orbits was fondling a little cloth picture of Lenin as a child. In Moscow, government flacks passed out banners and cosmonaut photo placards for the jubilant throngs to wave in Red Square.

By Tuesday, tension and fatigue aloft were plainly beginning to wear the cosmonauts down. On his fourth day in orbit, Nikolayev blew up at a Soviet tracking station that had given him the wrong time. "You were wrong by five minutes," he said, in understandable anger. "Please give me a new time recording now. Can't you hear what I say? Start the timing, for heaven's sake."

By now, both orbits were fast decaying toward the upper edge of the earth's atmosphere, where the capsules had to be brought down or run the risk of fiery destruction. Up flashed a message from the Russian ground control station to Popovich: "Since your meter shows low temperature and humidity, and considering that you have completed your mission, make preparations to land on the 49th orbit. Check your ship's interior safety belt, the safety belt key, the seat catapult switch and the condition of your space suit. The wind velocity at the landing site is seven to nine meters per second."

Minutes later, Nikolayev radioed in. "This is Falcon. Confirming landing at 6sth orbit. The pressure in the cabin is i.i, the temperature 11DEG (Centigrade, equal to 52DEG F.), and the humidity 70% . . ."

Kiss on Earth. The Falcon landed first, at 9:55 Wednesday morning, in the hill and desert country near Karaganda, a Kazakhstan city 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow; he had completed 64 orbits, and in four days had traveled 1,663,000 miles, 3^ times the distance to the moon and back. Six minutes later, after 48 orbits and 1,247,000 miles, Popovich landed some miles away in the same region. Both men apparently stayed on board their capsules all the way down, unlike Titov, who parachuted to earth after completing his flight. Helicopters picked up the two cosmonauts and ferried them off to a gay landing reception.

The meeting between the two cosmonauts was as emotional as the third act of an operatic potboiler. If Tass was to be believed, they embraced and kissed each other, then burst into song:

It is not without reason That a poet has said That all that is best in life Ends with a song.

The heavily bearded spacemen munched watermelon and bantered with a mob of scientists, doctors and Soviet newsmen. Feeling the heat in the crowded resthouse, Popovich said, "I must admit that it was more comfortable in space." Added Nikolayev with a grin: "Yes, fewer people and less noise." Khrushchev telephoned congratulations from his Black Sea vacation spot at Yalta, told Popovich that he had seen a picture of his bushily mustached father in Pravda. "Your father curls his mustaches like Taras Bulba," said Nikita. "What a Cossack! He seems to be saying, 'Give me a horse and saber.' "

Widow's Sob. Not a Cossack but a sugar refinery worker, Roman Popovich, 57, wept with joy outside his home in the Ukraine in front of the photographers who gathered to catch his reaction at the news of his son's landing. In the Chuvash Republic, Anna Nikolayev, 62, a widowed peasant woman, tugged at her handkerchief and sobbed. Newspapers all over the world carried the photos.

Reaction to the Russian feat was mixed. "TWO UPMANSHIP," headlined London's Daily Sketch; the Laborite Daily Herald added soberly that while the "Russians have once again stirred the imagination and admiration of the world . . . today is the anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. That is the other side of Soviet achievement." In Rome, Pope John XXIII prayed that "these historic events can in some way become an expression of true and peaceful progress and a solid basis for human brotherhood." China's Mao Tse-tung, momentarily forgetting his quarrel with Russia, cabled Khrushchev, saying that the "Chinese people are immeasurably impressed by this new major victory."

Steppe Children. Whether they felt gloom or elation over the Soviet achievement, people the world over nevertheless praised the Russian spacemen, who came across as a couple of regular guys. Both of the new Russian cosmonauts are sons of the soil. One of four children, Nikolayev (it can also be transliterated as Nikolaev) was born on a collective farm in a village in the Chuvash region, an area of steppes and forests in the Volga River valley. He was stung by the flying bug at the age of eight, after a visit to a nearby airfield. Returning home, the lad talked of nothing but planes, shortly after climbed a tree and announced that he was going to fly from it; villagers gently persuaded him to come down without testing his wings.

When his peasant father died in 1944, Nikolayev wanted to leave school to help support his family, but his mother insisted that he complete his education. Nikolayev first tried medical school, then switched to forestry, was a lumberjack and timber camp foreman when he was drafted into the army in 1950. Trained as a radio operator and machine gunner, he applied later for pilot school, got his wings in 1954. Nikolayev, a longtime member of the Young Communist League, became a full party member in 1957, won the attention of his superiors when he crash-landed a flamed-out jet in a field rather than bail out and lose the plane.

Because of such "composure under stress," Nikolayev was picked for the cosmonaut list in 1959. It ended Bachelor Nikolayev's one serious romance. Deeply in love with a young girl, he was prevented by the secrecy of his mission from telling her what he was doing, asked her to wait. But the girl was dispirited by the prolonged separations and periods of silence, sent him a "Dear Andrian" letter and married another man. Nikolayev's mother Anna viewed the breakup with no remorse. "Andrian was in no great hurry to get married, and spent all his free time with his profession," she said. "But I think that the time will come when he will invite me to his wedding party." Nikolayev is quiet and reserved, in sharp contrast to Popovich, whose ready tongue and twinkling eye betray the personality of an irrepressible extravert.

Like Nikolayev, Popovich is a steppe child. Born and raised in the Ukraine, he grew up fast during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Rather than learn German at a school organized by Hitler's invaders, he stuffed cotton in his ears and was expelled. To prevent his being sent off to a slave labor camp in Germany, Popovich's mother dressed him in old frocks and passed him off as a little girl.

Songs in the Capsule. After the war, Popovich worked as a herdsman in the fields, later won his diploma at a technical school in the Urals by designing the reconstruction of the dormitory in which he lived. He entered the air force in 1951, became a Communist Party member in 1957. While on duty in Siberia, he met his future wife, Maria, a woodcutter's daughter and an accomplished amateur stunt pilot, at a flying club near his station. Married in 1955, they have a six-year-old daughter, Natasha.

Popovich was picked for the Soviet space program in 1960. His jovial spirits often relieved the tedium of many of the training missions at the Russian space center. During one long isolation test in a cramped training capsule, he combatted boredom by dancing and singing operatic arias with such gusto that scientists and doctors often gathered to listen. A voracious reader, Popovich is an admirer of Hemingway and Stendhal, can quote passages from the works of Soviet Poets Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Ironically, both Yesenin and Mayakovsky committed suicide after becoming disenchanted with Communism.

Loop the Loop. What did the new Russian shoot actually accomplish? Though most Western scientists feel certain that the cosmonauts did not try to mate their capsules in an actual docking maneuver, some believe that Nikolayev and Popovich did maneuver their craft toward each other in space. Cleveland's Sohio tracking station said that from its calculations Vostok III and Vostok IV were within a mile of each other at one point, then drifted nearly 2,000 miles apart. "We're convinced that if they had the proper equipment they could have touched," says the station's supervisor. If they did indeed maneuver so close together, the cosmonauts may well have picked up valuable data on rates of closure and relative velocities that will be needed for actual docking in space some time later.

U.S. scientists were clearly impressed by the precision of the Soviet guidance system. Because of the rotation of the earth, an orbiting object passes over the spot of launch only once every 17 orbits.

The "launch window" (margin of time in which a missile can be launched to fulfill its mission) of a second rocket trying to match the orbit of a vehicle already in space is only a very few minutes. Yet the Russians scored a virtual bull's-eye. "The Russians must have multiple launch pads, because you can't refurbish a pad in 24 hours and then check out another rocket for launching in the same place," said one top U.S. space scientist. The extra pads serve Russia well in the event that a rocket malfunctions during countdown.

"If we had three pads here, with three crews working on three boosters and capsules, we could speed up Project Mercury by a year." But the U.S. has only one launch complex available, since Project Mercury does not seek space rendezvous.

No Nausea? The fact that Nikolayev and Popovich were aloft for three and four days respectively and ate solid food also suggested that the Russians may have found a better way to dispose of or to store body wastes.-- Equally important was the indication that Russia had licked the problem of space sickness. Gherman Titov's bout of nausea during his ly-orbit flight had raised serious doubts about man's physical ability to withstand the effects of prolonged weightlessness. But last year Soviet scientists toughened the cosmonauts' training program to help them combat space sickness. New whirling and loop-the-loop exercises were prescribed; after rigorous physical exertion, a cosmonaut was required to stand on his head for long periods. The change in the training regime apparently worked; exultant Soviet scientists reported that neither Nikolayev nor Popovich suffered nausea aloft.

More important to the U.S. than waste disposal and space sickness, however, was the question of where it stood with Russia in the race to the moon. The most pessimistic view was taken by Britain's Sir Bernard Lovell, director of the Jodrell Bank space observatory: "I think that the Russians are so far ahead in the technique of rocketry that the possibility of America catching up in the next decade is remote." Almost as gloomy was U.S.

Scientist Edward Teller, who declared in a California speech: "There is no doubt that the best scientists as of this moment are not in the U.S., but in Moscow." Broader Base. Other U.S. scientists were less pessimistic. They emphasized that because Russia was still operating behind a curtain of secrecy, no one outside the Soviet Union could really gauge the scientific accomplishment of the two-man mission. The Russians did not announce the launchings until the capsules were in orbit, and kept strict control over all information. They did not reveal the size of either capsule, as they had done for the Gagarin and Titov flights,-- and the names of the rocket designer and standby cosmonauts were not disclosed.

"I don't think that there was any technical breakthrough," said U.S. Space Expert Wernher von Braun. "It does not look like the Russians used any new equipment." Von Braun was sure that Russia was still operating with the same rocket booster used in Vostok I and Vostok II, which is capable of lifting a 14,000-lb. payload. Hugh Dryden, Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, agreed, suggesting that while the Soviet booster was capable of such propaganda space spectaculars as the twin shoot, it was far too small for moon exploration.

While the Russians have concentrated on manned space-flight spectaculars, say U.S. scientists, the U.S.'s space effort has had a far broader base in space science as a whole. It is not focused on Project Mercury alone. Since Gherman Titov's space orbit last summer, NASA, the Navy and Air Force have successfully sent up more than 30 satellites. In the same period, Russia is known to have orbited only eight. Most of the U.S. vehicles were launched to gather meteorological and biological data and to set up a space communications system. The remainder were reconnaissance Samos. Midas and Discoverer satellites. Such a broad-based program is intended to push progress ahead on many fronts, coming to dramatic fruition when it is time for a shot at the moon itself.

A Military Matter. But at a Washington press conference, NASA officials admitted that things were going to get worse before they got better. They predicted that Russia would probably be the first to manage a space rendezvous, put a multi-man capsule into orbit, and orbit the moon. But both NASA Administrator James Webb and D. Brainerd Holmes, boss of the U.S.'s moon program, insisted that the U.S. would land on the moon and return before the Russians. The reason: the U.S.'s "driving effort to build big boosters," which will begin to pay off handsomely by 1964.

The driving effort, however, is currently very much in the rough. The hydrogen-powered Centaur project, which is to provide the second stage of the Saturn missile to power the U.S.'s first moon shot, is already 18 months behind schedule; Congress has called Centaur's NASA management "weak and ineffective." NASA officials are considering accelerating the U.S.'s $5.5 billion space program, but warned that such a move would cost $500 million more a year. "A speedup is possible," says Webb. "We have a fast-paced, not an all-out or crash program. We have the capacity to do more."

One huge reason for the growing pressure behind an emergency speedup is the specter of Russian military domination of space. Moscow has long indicated that it was aware that the nation that controlled space also controlled the earth.

Future Bird Watchers. The latest Soviet feat brings Russia to within a step of being able to intercept and destroy the U.S.'s spy-in-the-sky satellites. "If the Russians can send Colonel Popovich up to look at Major Nikolayev, they can go up and look at one of our birds," suggested a Pentagon officer. "Why, they could knock out those delicate instruments in some of our satellites by hitting them with almost anything." Some experts pooh-pooh these fears, say the interception of Vostok III by Vostok IV was immensely simplified by the fact that the Russians launched both satellites from the same spot and knew in advance the flight plan and basic physical qualities of the first vehicle.

This hardly diminishes the importance of last week's Soviet achievement, which showed impressive precision that no one could afford to disregard.

-- Some U.S. scientists believe that the cosmo nauts probably defecated into a slight vacuum, after which the feces were passed into a con tainer and frozen. Under this system the liquid content can be evaporated, purified, and passed back into the cabin as clean water vapor. The dried residue might then be stored in plastic bags. A similar condensation process could be used to dispose of urine. -- A Danish Communist paper speculated that the craft weighed &l/2 tons each, compared with the five tons of Vostok I and //.

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