He freely hovered at the end of a 5-meter rope above the planet, but when it was time to return, it turned out that the suit was swollen and could not get through the airlock.
To get there, he had to release the pressure in the suit to 0.27 Earth pressure - this happens somewhere three kilometers above Everest.
Miraculously, he didn’t lose consciousness. But now the second airlock would not let him in. It was possible to get into it, only in gross violation of the instructions - head first, not feet. Collapsed next to a friend. Barely catching my breath, the news came - the automatic return system to Earth is broken. Again, for the first time in human history, the ship had to be manually returned to the planet. And then a bad luck came out: on the new ship Voskhod - 2, the only window of the porthole looked sideways. Only the stars were visible in it. If you start the engine in the wrong way, instead of returning, you fly even further and stay there forever.
The astronauts desperately crawled around the cockpit, peered from different angles into the ill-fated porthole, wondered from memory where the Big Dipper was and where the Earth was, and finally the engine started. It probably sounds funny, but again for the first time in the history of mankind they took their places with the rocket engine running, the acceleration of which strives to turn into a cake. For them it remained a mystery where she would take them.
They don't remember much of the descent. We woke up, got out. Around the snowdrifts to the waist. Cold - minus 30. The ship had a lot of rescue equipment - fish hooks, a shark deterrent, a single TT pistol, and so on. But they didn't think about it because of the cold. The cosmonauts took off their spacesuits, poured five liters of sweat out of them, lit a fire naked, wrapped themselves up carefully and began to wait, periodically tapping a Morse code - SOS. They did not diversify the text - but what exactly should be written for the whole planet? We are Soviet cosmonauts, we are, hell knows where, we feel bad …
This signal was screened by trees. The cosmonauts guessed and moved through the snowdrifts. In the end, the SOS was caught in Bonn. The Germans reported to the Kremlin. Ours did not believe it.
And at this time - the only thing that the Mission Control Center knew about the missing cosmonauts was that they had landed somewhere in Russia. Hundreds of helicopters were taken into the air and combed the surroundings. At this time, it was reported on TV that the cosmonauts had landed safely and were resting in a sanatorium. The pause between this message and the appearance on the screen of the astronauts themselves was obviously prolonged. Unable to bear it, Brezhnev called Korolev and asked what the hell. Korolev replied angrily: “My business is to launch astronauts, yours is to inform. You were in a hurry, not me."
Finally, one of the helicopters spotted the fire and two hapless astronauts near it. But it was impossible to sit there. A group of skiers went on foot to clear the area with axes. And gifts fell from the sky - warm clothes and boxes of cognac. All my clothes were hanging on the trees, the brandy was breaking. The astronauts dodged and cursed gloomily.
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I deliberately set out everything in the genre of a cheating adventure novel. To make the contrast clear. I just retold the documentary recording of Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov. As if in refutation of complete delirium, two stars of the Hero of the Soviet Union burned on his chest. I would give a dozen - so that more than Brezhnev's, and for each "for the first time in the history of mankind" in this flight. All of them are so Russian …
Diana Gerasimova