Andriyan Nikolayev

Andriyan Nikolayev: The Iron Man of Star City

In the isolation chamber at the Soviet cosmonaut training centre, candidates were sealed in silence and darkness to see how long they could stand it. Most broke within a couple of days. Andriyan Nikolayev sat there for four, emerged apparently unbothered, and was thereafter known to his colleagues as the Iron Man. It was not a compliment about his intellect. It was an observation about his nervous system, and it is the reason the Soviet space programme kept sending him up to find out what space does to a human body.

Shorshely

Nikolayev was born on 5 September 1929 in Shorshely, a village in the Volga valley of Chuvashia, and grew up on a collective farm. He was ethnically Chuvash, a Turkic people of the middle Volga, and would become the first Turkic cosmonaut — a fact the Soviet propaganda apparatus made a great deal of, and which mattered genuinely to a republic that had produced few national figures. His father died in 1944, when he was fourteen, and he took on the support of his family while continuing to study. He went to medical school, then enlisted in the army, and qualified as a pilot in 1954. What his superiors noticed, repeatedly, was his composure under stress.

Selection

In March 1960 he was chosen for the first Soviet cosmonaut group, the twenty men that included Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. It was the isolation chamber that distinguished him within that company. In a selection process built to find the emotionally unbreakable, he was measurably the most unbreakable person in the room.

Vostok 3: Two Ships at Once

He launched on 11 August 1962 as the third Soviet cosmonaut in space, call sign Falcon. The following day Pavel Popovich went up in Vostok 4, and for the first time in history two crewed spacecraft were in orbit simultaneously. The two men established radio and visual contact with each other; there was no attempt to dock, and none was possible, but the demonstration that two vehicles could be launched into compatible orbits and find one another was the necessary first step toward every rendezvous that followed.

Nikolayev stayed up 96 hours and completed 64 orbits, an endurance record at the time and roughly four times anything an American had then achieved. He also made the first television broadcast from space, letting audiences on the ground watch a human being floating in orbit in real time. Both spacecraft landed on 15 August.

The Space Marriage

On 3 November 1963 he married Valentina Tereshkova, who had flown Vostok 6 that June. It was the most publicised wedding in the Soviet Union, a union of the state's two most useful symbols, and it was widely understood to have been encouraged from above. They had one daughter, Elena Andriyanovna, who became a physician. The marriage did not survive; the divorce was finalised in 1982.

Soyuz 9 and the Lesson of the Weak Legs

In June 1970 Nikolayev flew again, commanding Soyuz 9 with Vitaly Sevastyanov. They stayed in orbit for nearly eighteen days — the longest flight ever made by a spacecraft operating alone, and a record that stood as a serious achievement of Soviet engineering.

It is also the flight that taught spaceflight medicine its hardest early lesson, and it did so by going wrong. Overloaded with an experimental workload, the two men skipped their scheduled exercise sessions. When they returned to Earth they were severely debilitated — barely able to support themselves, their cardiovascular systems badly deconditioned by eighteen days without gravity or countermeasures. The result was unambiguous and it changed practice permanently: exercise became a mandatory, protected, non-negotiable part of every long-duration mission flown since, by any nation. Nikolayev's total time in space came to 21 days, 15 hours and 20 minutes.

Star City

He rose to major general in the Soviet Air Force and retired from the cosmonaut corps in 1982, having spent his later years in the training establishment at Star City preparing the crews who followed him. He was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, in 1962 and 1970, held the Order of Lenin and a long list of foreign decorations, and has a crater on the far side of the Moon named after him. He died of a heart attack on 3 July 2004 in Cheboksary, the Chuvash capital, aged 74. There was a dispute about where he should be buried; he was interred at Shorshely, the village he came from.

Why Andriyan Is Called a Genius

The claim here is not intellectual and should not be presented as one. Nikolayev was an able military pilot and a competent engineer-operator, but no source credits him with scientific originality, theoretical insight or invention. He did not design the spacecraft he flew or the programme he served.

What he had was a rare physiological and temperamental endowment, and it is worth being exact about what it consisted of and why it mattered. The early space programme needed people whose autonomic responses did not spike — whose heart rate, judgement and decision-making stayed flat while sealed alone in a metal sphere with no ability to abort, no rescue, and instruments that might or might not be telling the truth. That capacity is partly trainable and largely innate, and Nikolayev possessed it to a degree that startled the doctors who tested him. Four days in the isolation chamber, when the cohort average was under two, is a measurable outlier. It is why he was given the first four-day flight and the first eighteen-day flight: the programme was using his unusual tolerance as an instrument.

The counter-case is that this is endurance rather than achievement, and that a flat nervous system is a gift rather than a skill. There is force in that. It is also true that his most scientifically consequential flight produced its knowledge through failure — the Soyuz 9 crew's collapse taught the world about deconditioning precisely because they had neglected their exercise regime, which is a lapse, not a triumph. Nikolayev is remembered as a pioneer of the physical limits of human spaceflight rather than as a mind that advanced it. That is an honest description and still a substantial one: somebody had to be the first to find out, and finding out required a specific kind of person.

Legacy

Every astronaut on the International Space Station who straps into a treadmill or a resistive exercise device is complying with a rule written in the recovery ward after Soyuz 9. That is Nikolayev's real monument, and it is a larger one than the medals. In Chuvashia he remains the republic's most famous son, a farm boy from Shorshely who became the first Turkic person in orbit and came home to be buried there. The dual flight of Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 has been overtaken by half a century of routine rendezvous and docking, but on 12 August 1962 two men in separate capsules looked out of their portholes and saw each other, and nobody had ever done that before.

Achievements

• Educated at Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy
• Worked as aircraft pilot, astronaut and writer