A member of
the first three-person space crew whose flight was onboard a vehicle he
helped design, cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov passed away at age 83
on Saturday, according to a statement by the Russian space
agency Roscosmos.
Feoktistov made his
first and only space flight on Oct. 12, 1964 aboard the USSR's
Voskhod 1 on a one-day mission to test the craft's
design, perform biomedical research and to study how a
multi-disciplinary team could work together in space.
Marking the first time that more
than one person, let alone three, were launched to orbit together,
Voskhod 1's trio of crew members included Feoktistov, the first
scientist to fly; Boris Yegorov, the first medical doctor in space; and
Vladimir Komarov, who later would become the first to fly to space twice
and tragically the first to die during a space mission.
Voskhod 1, which established an altitude record of 209 miles (336 km), was
also notable for being the first space flight to not include spacesuits
for its crew, an idea that history records was first put forth by
Feoktistov.
Credited as only second to Chief Designer Sergei Korolev in
the development of the world's
first manned spacecraft, Feoktistov initially opposed the idea of
adapting Vostok for a three-person crew, calling the idea unsafe. His
stated objections were all but abandoned however, after Korolev suggested
that Feoktistov might fill that third seat.
"Well, that was a very seductive offer," Feoktistov said in a
1991 interview with the U.S. television series NOVA. "A few days
later we produced some rough sketches [and] our first ideas were
accepted."
The decision to omit spacesuits for the crew and remove the ejection seats
used during the one-man Vostok flights was driven by logistics: three
suited cosmonauts would simply not fit within the spacecraft.
Fortunately, Voskhod 1 proceeded without incident as had there been an in-flight
emergency, there were no means of escape for the crew.
Feoktistov and Yegorov, the first civilians in space whose training
was shorter than prior cosmonauts, were initially disoriented by
the microgravity environment but recovered before the end of the
16-orbit mission.
All three men became
a bit disoriented after landing by the political landscape waiting for
them on the ground. Despite having talked with Nikita Khrushchev
during their third turn about the Earth, by the time they had touched
down, the Soviet Premier had been removed from power, replaced by
a trio of leaders.
Feoktistov would later recount the highlights of his flight to
authors Colin Burgess and Francis French for their book, "Into That
Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961 - 1965,"
published in 2007. He listed "the rising and setting of the sun; the
observation of layers of brightness above the horizon before the ship
would leave the shadow of the Earth; and the fast moving, recognizable but
very unusual colorful map of the Earth's surface."
After his flight, Feoktistov continued his previous work as a spacecraft
designer, contributing to the development of the Soyuz spacecraft, working
on the technology needed to accomplish rendezvous and docking, as
well as setting its dimensions.
He campaigned to fly on the second Soyuz mission, after the first suffered
a parachute failure taking the life of his Voskhod 1
commander Vladimir Komarov, but his efforts were rebutted by Nikolai
Kamanin, the head of cosmonaut training, who declared Feoktistov didn't
meet the physical standards for a pilot.
Feoktistov then turned his attention to the growing debate within
the Soviet Union's space program to pursue a moon landing or develop
a space station.
"In the 1960s, it was clear to us engineers that the most
important development for manned flights would be the creation of orbital
space stations," he told NOVA, "but the administration
was against it."
"We didn't know how to get the bosses to change their minds,"
he continued, "but some well-wishers in the Party Central Committee cunningly
inserted a passage into [the General Secretary Leonid] Brezhnev's
speech saying that orbital stations promised the right way forward."
Feoktistov went to work on the design of the Salyut space station, aiming
to fly aboard one himself. Initially refused again, he worked as a
flight controller until finally in 1980, he was assigned to the
Soyuz T-3 mission and the 13th expedition crew for the Salyut 6 station.
He would come within just a few days of launching when he was grounded due to
medical problems.
"The Voskhod venture opened a door to outer space," he told a
Russian TV journalist in 2001," and I hoped to walk through that door
once again on a serious and longer space mission."
"Life has, however, rewritten my plans," said Feoktistov.
Continue
reading about the life of Konstantin Feoktistov at collectSPACE.com.
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