technicians, designers and test engineers who actually participated in successfully
creating the hardware, equipment and procedures that later exempli®ed the Soviet
manned space¯ight programme.
This is a book that had to be written and needs to be read in order to gain a more
complete understanding of the incredible technological era known as the Space Race
and those humans who were the ®rst to train to leave our planet. One could not
imagine visiting a library without ®nding a profusion of books on the Mercury
programme and its astronauts, yet, apart from some excellent Who's Who±style
books, principally those of Michael Cassutt, Doug Hawthorne and Gordon Hooper,
no publication has ever speci®cally told of the ®rst group of Soviet cosmonauts. With
this book, the authors have hopefully redressed that anomaly. It has been researched
and written with the utmost respect for those who ¯ew atop the Soviet rockets, and for
those once-forgotten few who were left in their ®ery wake, never to realise their dreams
or potential.
During the period in which this book was being researched and written the world
celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, a feat which truly
ignited the incredible era known as the Space Race. Less than four years later a man
would follow that basicsatellite into orbit. At the time of writing this book, only 6 of
the original 20 Soviet cosmonauts who might have been the world's ®rst spacemen are
still with us as living ambassadors of one of the most exclusive fraternities of explorers
ever assembled: Valery Bykovsky, Viktor Gorbatko, Alexei Leonov, Pavel Popovich,
Boris Volynov and the un¯own Dmitri Zaikin. All of them have now been inter-
viewed, and their words are an intrinsicpart of this book. There are many revelations
contained in what they told the authors, giving even more personal and historical
impact to the remarkable story of the ®rst Soviet space team.
This collaborative eort had its genesis in the lifelong interest of two people on
either side of the world in the wondrous history of space¯ight. Both became entranced
by space exploration at a time when human activity in this new arena was in its
infancy, and for both it has remained an enduring interest. Some years back a mutual
Dutch friend by the name of Bert Vis provided the catalyst for introducing the two
authors of this book to each other. Bert, a ®reman from The Hague, is a long-time and
devoted researcher into Soviet/CIS space activities, and on many occasions he would
travel on self-funded trips to Moscow and other world capitals with the speci®c aim of
conducting in-depth interviews with dozens of cosmonauts and other leading ®gures
involved in the origins, and continuance, of this remarkable era in human history.
Many of those personalities are no longer with us, which lends these interviews an
even greater historical signi®cance. On occasion, Vis would be accompanied by other
space historians such as Gordon Hooper, Chris van den Berg, Neil Da Costa and
Rex Hall, together with Rex's wonderfully supportive life partner Lynn.
Many of the details within this book represent the extraordinarily incisive and
sometimes dicult work carried out by this small band of self-funded enthusiasts,
which is gratefully recognized and readily acknowledged by the authors.
xxiv Authors' preface
About the authors
COLIN BURGESS I owe an incalculable debt for much of my fascination with human
endeavours in space to my late and beloved grandmother, Beatrice Morgan. In my
early teens I used to treasure any time spent with her as precious days ®lled with
wonder and excitement. We would play old records and discuss episodes of human
triumph and tragedy, and together look through a modest collection of newspapers
she had collected over the years pertaining to these events. To me, they were a
goldmine of information.
Sometime during an Australian summer school break (I believe in January 1962)
my grandmother and I fell into a discussion on the much-delayed Mercury ¯ight of
Marine Lt. Colonel John Glenn. She said I should follow the progress of his ¯ight,
suggesting that this would be a truly pivotal event in history, and that I might begin my
own collection of historic newspapers with his safe return from space. From that time
on I found myself propelled into the interest and fascination of a lifetime. I not only
began clipping out newspaper and magazine articles on Glenn and his mission, but
started tracing back and reading up on earlier manned space¯ights; those of
Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard, Gherman Titov and Virgil ``Gus'' Grissom.
The following year I entered the workforce with a job near the notorious streets of
Kings Cross in Sydney, and one of my guilty pleasures each pay day was to visit a
small Red Star bookshop near where I worked. This tiny, ill-lit shop sold all manner of
magazines and books about life in the Soviet Union. After a while the elderly
proprietor came to know me well, and on each visit he would happily point out
magazines containing stories on the cosmonauts which I would purchase and take
home to add to my growing collection. I know my mother feared for my mortal
soul, and often told me that the FBI would have me on a list of suspected Soviet
sympathizers. In a cultural sense that was true, because in reading these magazines
I would come to know a great deal about the lives of the people of the Soviet Union,
and even though this was at the height of such worrying episodes as the Cuban missile
crisis, I never really feared our Cold War adversaries. I knew a lot about the way they