Word: voskhods
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Died. Sergei Korolev, 59, long-rumored head of the Soviet space program, now identified by Tass as the hitherto anonymous designer of the 1957 Sputnik and 1959 Lunik satellites as well as the Vostok and Voskhod spacecrafts used in the world's first manned flight (Yuri Gagarin, in 1961) and first space walk (Alexei Leonov, last March); of complications following surgery; in Moscow...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...