The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

made. On the first, three seats were squeezed into a converted
Vostok, giving their occupants no room to wear
spacesuits—a life-threatening gamble in order to mount
the first three-man mission. (A similar gamble during the
early Soyuz program ended with the death of a crew after
the cabin depressurized.) The Voskhod 1 cosmonauts,
who included Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov,
the first scientist and the first physician in space, respectively,
and Vladimir Komarov, spent a day in orbit five
months before the first Gemini mission. Feoktistov
earned his berth through having figured prominently in
the design of Vostok and its transformation into Voskhod.
The two-man Voskhod 2 achieved another on-orbit
spectacular when Alexei Leonov carried out the first
spacewalk. To enable this, Soviet engineers had designed
an airlock that could be inflated in orbit to form a tunnel
for exiting and reentering without having to let the air out
of the cabin. (By contrast, American capsules of this era
had to be completely depressurized prior to EVAs.) However,
during Leonov’s 24-minute spacewalk, his suit ballooned
up more than expected and became too large and
rigid to fit back through the airlock. Leonov was compelled
to vent some of the suit’s air. Once he managed to
get back inside, the main hatch refused to seal properly,
causing the environmental control system to compensate
by flooding the cabin with oxygen and creating a serious
fire hazard in a craft only qualified for a sea-level nitrogenoxygen
mixture. More dangers were to follow. When the
Voskhod Flights
VSOP (VLBI Space Observatory Program) 473
time came for reentry, the primary retro-rockets failed,
forcing a manually controlled retrofire one orbit later.
Then the service module failed to separate completely,
leading to wild gyrations of the joined reentry sphere and
service module before connecting wires burned through.
Vostok 2 finally landed, about 2,000 km off course, in
heavy forest in the Ural mountains. The crew spent an
uncomfortable night in the woods, surrounded by wolves,
before being located. 142 (See table, “Voskhod Flights.”)
Vostok
See article, pages 474–475.
Voyager
See article, pages 476–477.
VSOP (VLBI Space Observatory Program)
An international radio astronomy project led by ISAS
(Institute of Space and Astronautical Science) and the
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. It involves
correlating measurements by the HALCA (Highly
Advanced Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy)
satellite with those of various ground-based telescopes
to form a telescope effectively 32,000 km across
(three times larger than the Earth), with a maximum
resolving power at radio wavelengths of about 90 microarcseconds
(roughly 100 times the resolving power of the
Hubble Space Telescope).
Mission Launch Recovery Crew
Voskhod 1 Oct. 12, 1964 Oct. 13, 1964 Feoktistov, Komarov, Yegorov
Voskhod 2 Mar. 18, 1965 Mar. 19, 1965 Belyayev, Leonov