A half a century ago at this time, about three and a half years had already passed since the late President Kennedy had set the goal of sending an American to the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. Despite setting this goal, the general perception at this time was that the United States was far behind the Soviet Union in this race to the Moon. With the completion of the last pair of Soviet Vostok flights in June 1963, the list of Soviet achievements in manned spaceflight far exceeded those of the American Mercury program which had ended in May 1963.

Over the course of 26 months, the Soviet Union had launched six missions into orbit for a total of 16 days of flight time with the longest lasting almost five days. The list of space firsts included the first man in orbit (Vostok 1), the first man to spend a full day in orbit (Vostok 2), the first dual manned space mission (Vostok 3 and 4), the longest manned space mission (Vostok 5) and the first woman in space (Vostok 6). By comparison, the US had managed to launch two men on a pair of 15-minute suborbital test flights and four men into orbit in the much smaller and less capable Mercury spacecraft. The total flight time accumulated by the six Mercury missions was just over two days with almost two-thirds of that total coming from the final flight lasting 34 hours.

With just over five years left in the decade, the US still had a lot of work ahead to send the three-man Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. At the same time unmanned test flights of Apollo hardware had begun (see “The Second Apollo Orbital Flight”), NASA was also pushing forward on an interim program called Gemini which had started unmanned flight testing in 1964 (see “The Launch of Gemini 1”). The Gemini missions would launch two men into orbit to test the technologies and techniques needed for the Apollo Moon missions as well as accumulate valuable flight experience needed to learn to live in space for up to two weeks. But as 1964 progressed, the Soviet lead in space seemed secure for the moment.

The Origin of the Voskhod 3KV

Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, a number of competing efforts were moving forward in secret to beat the Americans to the Moon including the development of the 7K circum-lunar spacecraft at OKB-1 (the Russian acronym for Experimental Design Bureau – 1) headed by the famed Russian aerospace engineer, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev. Unfortunately, the Soviet effort had much less focus and no where near the resources of the American Apollo program. While by government decree the first two-man orbital test flight of the 7K Soyuz (the precursor of the same Soyuz spacecraft that still flies today) was to take place in 1964 allowing the Soviet Union to maintain its lead in the Moon race before Gemini made its first manned flight, in reality it was widely known that this was simply impossible. The development of such an innovative and complex spacecraft would take much longer with the first flight coming no earlier than 1965 (for more background on the early development of the the 7K Soyuz, see “The Avoidable Tragedy of Soyuz 1“).

In order to maintain at least the perception of continued Soviet dominance in manned spaceflight, by November 1963 Korolev had conceived of a daring (and very dangerous) plan: he would modify the one-man Vostok 3KA to carry three men into orbit within a year’s time beating the first two-man Gemini mission into space. Korolev already had some design studies to modify the Vostok to carry two cosmonauts but by making it a three-man design, he could send an Apollo-size crew into orbit years ahead of the Americans. This modified 3KA spacecraft was designated 3KV and by mid-February 1964 it was officially named “Voskhod” which means “sunrise” in Russian.

Like most other Soviet spacecraft during the early years of the Space Age, the Vostok 3KA originated at OKB-1. The Vostok had been designed by team of engineers under the direction of Konstantin P. Feoktistov in Project Department No. 9 of OKB-1. Vostok was a two-module spacecraft composed of a spherical descent module and a separate service module with a typical launch mass of about 4,725 kilograms. Its launch vehicle was the 8K72K Vostok rocket which was also designed and built by OKB-1. Based on the R-7 ICBM, the 8K72K was an improved version of the 8K72 launch vehicle used to send the first Soviet Luna probes to the Moon in 1959.

Vostok’s 2.3-meter in diameter descent module carried the cosmonaut during his mission and provided all the equipment needed to safely return him to Earth. The simple spherical shape was chosen for the descent module because of its many advantages. First, the aerodynamics of a sphere were well understood and it is very stable. This shape also maximizes the interior volume for the passenger and critical recovery systems while at the same time minimizes the mass required for the structure and heat shielding. By offsetting its center of mass from its center of figure, the reentry module automatically kept itself oriented during its return to Earth without the weight penalty of an active attitude control system. This approach did result in a more punishing ballistic reentry but peak braking loads were limited to a tolerable 10 Gs.

The service module carried all the equipment not needed for the return to Earth. It was a double cone shape about 2.5 meters in diameter and about as tall. It was connected to the descent module by straps and an umbilical arm designed to burn away in case they failed to separate as intended before reentry. This module carried various consumables for life support, the attitude control system, batteries, telemetry systems, and a liquid propellant TDU-1 retrorocket at its base. Producing 16 kilonewtons of thrust for 45 seconds, the sole purpose of the TDU-1 was to deorbit the spacecraft at the end of its orbital mission. Spacecraft attitude was controlled automatically by gas jets using inputs from solar and infrared sensors. The cosmonaut could also manually control the orientation of the spacecraft using a spartan control panel included in the descent capsule with a specially equipped “Vzor” porthole providing visual information on the spacecraft’s orientation. The underside of the service module was covered with radiators to remove waste heat generated by the spacecraft systems. The interior of the service module, like the descent module, was pressurized to provide a laboratory-like environment for the onboard equipment to simplify equipment design and thermal control.

To get three cosmonauts into the descent module, the ejection seat of the 3KA and its associated support structure were removed and three couches were inserted at a 90 degree angle to the original seat’s orientation. In order to squeeze them in, the couches were in a “W” formation with the middle couch slightly above the outer two to make room for the cosmonauts’ shoulders. The control panel and Vzor porthole were left in their original locations forcing the pilot to look up and to one side to operate them. The couches included a suspension system to absorb the shock of launch as well as landing and padding was added to the interior of the capsule for additional protection.

Unfortunately, without the ejection seat of the original 3KA Vostok and no time available to develop a launch escape system like that later employed by the Soyuz (as well as by the earlier American Mercury and later Apollo), there was no way for the crew to escape from a launch vehicle failure during the earliest phases of the ascent – a situation similar to the American Space Shuttle decades later. Only after about 45 seconds of flight did Voskhod have the same abort options available as the earlier Vostok with comparable chances of survival. Also, the tight confines of the 3KV Voskhod capsule did not allow the crew to wear bulky pressure suits as protection from an accidental cabin depressurization. Instead the cosmonauts would wear lightweight flight suits and trust in the reliability of the spacecraft design. Korolev reasoned that this was not too dangerous a compromise since none of the Vostok manned or unmanned flights had lost pressure during flight.

Other modifications had to be made to the original Vostok design for the Voskhod flights. In case the TDU-1 retrorocket failed to fire to deorbit the spacecraft, the original Vostok was designed to maintain life support for up to ten days by which time the orbit would naturally decay to return the craft to Earth. With three cosmonauts now on board, there was not enough life support available to allow the orbit to naturally decay. Instead, a backup retrorocket package was attached to the top of the Voskhod descent module which would be fired in the event of a failure of the TDU-1. When no longer needed, the cylindrical backup retrorocket package would be jettisoned along with the service module just before reentry.

The landing system also had to be substantially modified for the Voskhod. On Vostok, the pilot used his ejection seat to leave the descent module once in the lower atmosphere after reentry to descend to a safe landing on his own parachute. This allowed the descent module to employ a much smaller parachute system to make a hard landing without the pilot on board at the end of the mission. Without this option available, the 3KV descent module included a much larger and heavier landing system that included two parachutes to slow the capsule’s descent to about 8 to 10 meters per second. To soften the touchdown on land, a solid braking rocket attached to the parachute lines was also included which would fire just before landing to reduce the touchdown speed to just 0.15 meters per second.

Voskhod Development

With all of the modifications needed to upgrade the original Vostok spacecraft for a three-man mission, the launch mass of the 3KV Voskhod had now grown by almost 600 kilograms to 5,320 kilograms. This was much heavier than the 8K72K Vostok launch vehicle could orbit. In order to get Voskhod into orbit, the new R-7-based 11A57 launch vehicle had to be used. The 11A57 was designed from the start at OKB-1 to be a “unified launcher” that could orbit a range of different unmanned and manned payloads with masses in excess of five metric tons. The configuration of the 11A57 was similar to the first three stages of the four-stage 8K78M Molniya launch vehicle used to launch Soviet lunar and planetary probes starting in early 1964. While the 11A57 used the same propulsion system and borrowed heavily from other elements of the 8K78M, it employed many new systems which were designed and built from the start to a set of strict requirements known as the “3KA Regulations” so that the launch vehicle was man-rated from the start.

The 11A57 was 44 meters tall and had a launch weight of 305 metric tons. With a liftoff thrust of 4,054 kilonewtons, it was capable of placing up to about 5.7 metric tons in low Earth orbit. Its first flight took place on November 16, 1963 when it successfully orbited the prototype of the Vostok-based 11F69 Zenit-4 reconnaissance satellite designated Kosmos 22. Eventually called the Voskhod launch vehicle, the 11A57 was the ancestor of the much improved and modernized Soyuz launch vehicle still in use today over half a century later.

After a month of intensive study, in late December 1963 Korolev presented his proposal to rebuild the one-man 3KA into a three-man 3KV. Despite much concern about the dangerous risks of the proposed mission voiced by a number of people at various levels, the official order from the Military Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers was issued on March 13, 1964 to convert four 3KA spacecraft to the 3KV configuration as well as construct the needed launch vehicles with the manned mission scheduled for the first half of August 1964. Korolev even sold the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, on the Voskhod mission unfortunately by mischaracterizing it as just a modification of the reliable Vostok design with only a slightly enhanced risk to the crew. It was decided that the risk was worth taking because of the positive political effect for Khrushchev whose standing in the government was beginning to falter because of his botched handling of the domestic economy and deteriorating relations with other communist countries like China, Yugoslavia and Albania.

The Voskhod development proceeded quickly but it was not without problems. There were a host of technical issues through the summer of 1964 with the new landing system not operating properly. The braking rockets would fail to fire at the right time and the first drop test of the Voskhod from 10,000 meters resulted in a crash when the parachute completely failed to deploy. Other technical issues as well the further expansion of the Voskhod program with additional flights to perform the first spacewalk (see “The Mission of Voskhod 2“) and a long-duration mission meant to compete with Gemini eventually pushed the scheduled first launch of Voskhod into the fall of 1964.

Other issues surrounding the selection of the crew for the first Voskhod mission pitted Korolev against the desires of the Soviet Air Force which further slowed crew selection and training. While there was little doubt that a pilot should command the mission, Korolev insisted on including a physician and one of his spacecraft engineers. In particular, Korolev wanted Feoktistov, who led the 3K spacecraft design efforts at OKB-1, to fly on the first Voskhod mission. In the end, Korolev’s wishes prevailed despite the resistance. In addition to the 38-year old Konstatin Feoktistov as the flight engineer, the first Voskhod mission included the 26-year old Boris Yegorov as the flight’s physician with the 38-year old military pilot Major Vladimir Komarov, who joined the cosmonaut corps in 1960, selected as the mission commander.

The first Voskhod flight, an unmanned test mission, was launched on October 6, 1964 at 10:12 AM Moscow Time on the fifth flight of the 11A57 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan. The launch vehicle placed what became known as Kosmos 47 into a 177 by 413 kilometer orbit with an inclination of 64.8°. After its planned one-day mission in orbit to rehearse the upcoming manned mission, Kosmos 47 returned to Earth with its landing system working as designed for a touchdown after a flight of 24 hours and 18 minutes. The only reported anomaly of the mission was that the descent module was dragged some 150 meters across the ground after landing because of strong winds. This would not be an issue with a manned mission since the crew could manually cut the parachute free after touchdown. The way was prepared for the first manned Voskhod mission.

The Voskhod 1 Mission

The 3KV No. 3 spacecraft mounted atop the 11A57 launch vehicle serial number R15000-04 was moved from the MIK horizontal assembly building and erected onto its launch pad at Site No. 1 on October 10, 1964. On the morning of October 12,1964 at 10:30:01 AM Moscow Time, Voskhod 1 lifted off with Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov on board. After 8 minutes and 43 seconds of powered flight, Voskhod had successfully entered a 177.5 by 407.9 kilometer orbit with an inclination of 64.9°. The first space “crew” was now in orbit with the radio call sign of “Rubin” (Russian for “Ruby”).

On the very first orbit, the crew set a human altitude record because the Voskhod’s mass was comfortably below the maximum payload capacity of the 11A57 launch vehicle resulting in a relatively high apogee and Voskhod’s backup retrorocket eliminated the need for a short-lived, low Earth orbit required by the Vostok missions. With the three cosmonauts in orbit and feeling well, they set about their assigned tasks. Feoktistov attended to a number of engineering-related visual observation and photography tasks while Yegorov started conducting an impressive array of medical experiments not possible on the earlier solo spaceflights. On the third orbit, the crew took time to speak with Premier Khrushchev who was vacationing at his dacha on the Black Sea. During the sixth and seventh orbits, television broadcasts were made from orbit and Komarov operated a set of experimental ion engines to control the attitude of the orbiting spacecraft.

During the eighth to thirteenth orbits, Voskhod was out of direct communication range of Soviet ground stations but the cosmonauts continued their activities including passing greetings to the Soviet team at the Olympic Games then being held in Tokyo. The cosmonauts apparently ate well but Feoktistov and Yegorov drank less water than prescribed (and subsequently complained of being thirsty after landing). Each cosmonaut rested in turn with at least one monitoring the spacecraft systems. No problems were noted except in Yegorov’s biotelemetry which indicated anomalously low pulse rates that were obviously due to a hardware malfunction.

As the planned one-day mission was approaching its end with all systems operating as expected and the crew feeling well, Komarov requested that the mission be extended by another day. Korolev’s reply, quoting from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. We shall go, nevertheless, by the program”. After 16 orbits, Voskhod fired its retrorocket on October 13 at 10:18:58 Moscow Time and began its descent. Having completed an uneventful reentry, the main parachutes deployed on schedule at an altitude of about 5,000 meters much to the relief of everyone. Touchdown took place at 10:47:03 Moscow Time 13 kilometers northeast of the Russian town of Kustanai. The total flight time had been 24 hours and 17 minutes.

Immediately after touchdown, which was so gentle the cosmonauts hardly felt it, Komarov manually cut the parachute line to prevent a recurrence of what had happened during the unmanned Kosmos 47 test flight. He then opened the descent module hatch with the three cosmonauts climbing out and into a light snow flurry. Recovery teams spotted the Voskhod crew waving at the helicopters which immediately reported back to the control center that the cosmonauts had been spotted. Korolev’s gamble had paid off and as news spread of the feat, the Soviet Union had maintained its position in the lead of the space race with a three-man spaceflight that beat not only America’s first Gemini mission by months (see “The Mission of Gemini 3“) but also Apollo by years.

After being picked up, the cosmonauts were whisked off to the cosmodrome where their journey had begun for their post-flight debriefings and examinations. Once there, they spoke briefly with the vacationing Khrushchev but the winds of political change were already at work in the Soviet Union. The next day the world found out that Khrushchev had been voted out of power during a special meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was now replaced by Nikolai Podgorny as President, Aleksei Kosygin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary of the Central Committee. As Brezhnev started to consolidate his power to lead the Soviet Union for the next 18 years, Korolev and his team at OKB-1 pushed on with the Voskhod program in hopes of maintaining their lead in the race with the American space program which, unknown to most at the time, was poised to surge ahead after the completion of the Voskhod program.

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Related Reading

“Vostok’s Legacy”, Drew Ex Machina, April 12, 2015 [Post]

“The Mission of Voskhod 2”, Drew Ex Machina, March 18, 2015 [Post]

“The Mission of Gemini 3”, Drew Ex Machina, March 23, 2015 [Post]

General References

Boris Chertok, Rockets and People Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War, SP-2009-4110, NASA, 2009

Rex Hall and David J. Shayler, The Rocket Men, Vostok & Voskhod, The First Soviet Manned Spaceflights, Springer-Praxis, 2001

Nicholas L. Johnson, Handbook of Soviet Manned Space Flight, Univelt, 1980

Timothy Varfolomeyev, “Soviet Rocketry that Conquered Space Part 10: The Unified Launcher for Heavy Satellites, 1963-1976”, Spaceflight, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 160-164, April 2000