Evgeniy Vasilievich Khrunov

Yevgeny Khrunov: One Hour Outside the Ship

On 16 January 1969, in orbit above the Soviet tracking station at Yevpatoria in Crimea, two spacecraft touched at a closing speed of a few centimetres per second. Then a hatch opened and two men climbed out of one ship and into the other, across the outside, in pressure suits, with nothing under them but the planet. It had never been done. Yevgeny Khrunov, a farmer's son from a village in Russia who had been among the first twenty men selected as cosmonauts nine years earlier, spent roughly an hour in the vacuum making the first crew transfer between two spacecraft in history. It was the only spaceflight he ever made.

A Village Childhood

Khrunov was born on 10 September 1933 in Prudy, into a farming family. His parents were Vasily Yegorevich and Agrafena Nikolayevna; he was one of eight children, with five brothers and two sisters, and was known in the family as Zhenya. He started school in 1941 — the year Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

In 1952 he graduated from the Kashira Agricultural Secondary School on a scholarship. The intended trajectory was agriculture. The Soviet Army intervened, drafting him the same year.

Into the Air Force

He was sent to the Pavlograd pilot school in Ukraine and then to the Serov Higher Air Force School in Rostov Oblast, and was commissioned as a lieutenant on graduation. On 6 August 1958 he was promoted to senior lieutenant. He married Svetlana Sokolyuk; their son was born on 13 July 1959.

Then, in 1959, he was interviewed for a programme whose purpose was not disclosed to him — alongside Viktor Gorbatko, who would remain a lifelong colleague. After medical evaluation, he was approved.

The First Twenty

On 25 February 1960 Khrunov was selected as one of the first Soviet cosmonauts, one of twenty men in a group that included Yuri Gagarin, Alexei Leonov and Andriyan Nikolayev.

He was not among the Vanguard Six, the inner group from which the earliest flights were drawn, and this shaped his career. He waited nearly nine years for a seat. Nine years of centrifuge runs, parachute jumps, engineering courses and simulator hours, in a programme where colleagues flew, became global celebrities, and in Gagarin's case died, while he trained. Very few professions demand that kind of deferred patience.

What he was training for turned out to be the hardest physical task the Soviet programme had yet attempted. Preparation in the Yastreb — "Hawk" — spacesuit produced exertion levels recorded at around 600 to 900 calories per hour. That is sustained heavy labour, performed inside a pressurised garment that resists every movement, in a body that in orbit would have no gravity to brace against.

Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5

Soyuz 4 launched on 14 January 1969 at 10:30 Moscow time carrying Vladimir Shatalov alone. Soyuz 5 followed on 15 January at 10:04, with Boris Volynov, Alexei Yeliseyev and Khrunov aboard.

On 16 January, at 11:20, the two craft docked manually above Yevpatoria — the first docking of two crewed spacecraft. Shatalov flew the active Soyuz 4 onto the passive Soyuz 5, bleeding off approach speed until contact came at a few centimetres per second.

Then came Khrunov's hour. He and Yeliseyev depressurised, went outside in their Yastreb suits, moved along the exterior of the joined vehicles, and entered Soyuz 4. Two men had launched in one spacecraft and would land in another. Shatalov, who had gone up alone, came home with company.

The technical significance is easy to state and easy to underrate. Every subsequent orbital station — Salyut, Mir, the International Space Station — depends on the proposition that crews can be exchanged between vehicles in orbit. On 16 January 1969 that proposition stopped being theoretical.

After Orbit

He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR, and received the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Star and numerous jubilee and commemorative medals.

He never flew again. He remained in the cosmonaut corps until 1980, then worked at the 30th Central Scientific Research Institute of the Ministry of Defence, and was subsequently appointed to the Chief State Committee handling foreign economic relations. He retired in 1989 and died of a heart attack on 20 May 2000, aged sixty-six.

Why Yevgeny Is Called a Genius

The case here is not intellectual originality, and it should not be presented as such. Khrunov designed no spacecraft and formulated no theory. He was an executor of a plan built by engineers whose names are less famous than his.

What he possessed was a specific and rare cognitive capacity that the early space programme selected for above almost anything else: the ability to perform a long, precise, memorised procedural sequence flawlessly while under extreme physical load and in an environment where a single error is unrecoverable. The Soyuz 4/5 transfer had no rehearsal in the real conditions, no rescue option, and no second attempt. It required moving a suited body along a handrail in weightlessness — where every push generates an equal and opposite problem — while metabolising at several hundred calories an hour, with a fogging visor and gloves that resist closing, executing steps in an order that cannot be improvised. Nine years of preparation compressed into sixty minutes in which he had to be exactly right.

The honest counter-case is clear. One flight, one hour, and the historical credit is shared with Yeliseyev, who did the same thing beside him, and with Shatalov, whose manual docking made it possible at all. Nothing in the sources consulted here records anyone describing Khrunov as a genius; the Soviet state described him as a Hero of the Soviet Union, which was the vocabulary available. If the word applies, it applies to a form of trained physical and procedural excellence, not to invention — and the honest description is that he was one of a small number of people on earth capable of performing an unrepeatable task correctly the first time.

Legacy

Khrunov belongs to the generation of the first twenty, the men chosen in February 1960 who turned an idea into a routine. His hour outside the ship established the technique on which every crewed space station since has depended. He returned to earth in a spacecraft he had not launched in, worked out the remainder of his career in defence research and trade administration, and died with a single flight on his record — which happened to be one of the flights that mattered.

Achievements

• Educated at Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots named after Hero of the Soviet Union A.K. Serov, Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy and V. I. Lenin Military-Political Academy
• Worked as aircraft pilot, astronaut and writer