 Gagarin’s time overheating in the uncomfortable garment. As he continued his own suiting-up, Gagarin realized for the first time that he was—or soon would be—the most famous man on Earth. In his heavily censored account of the mission, The Road to the Stars, he recalled technicians offering him slips of paper and work passes on which to sign. Titov beheld this and wished Gagarin luck, although he was disappointed and considered his role as hopeless. “He was commanding the flight and I was his backup,” Titov said later, “but we both knew, just in case wasn’t going to happen. What could happen at this late stage? Was he going to catch the flu between the bus and the launch gantry? Break his leg? It was all nonsense! We shouldn’t have gone out to the launch pad together. Only one of us should have gone.” Vladimir Yazdovsky, who was aboard the bus and gave him the order to remove his suit as soon as Gagarin was strapped inside Vostok, recalled Titov’s tension.
Much tradition surrounds Gagarin’s trip to the pad, including, famously, his need to relieve himself through his suit’s urine tube against the tires of the bus. Unable to share the going-away custom of kissing three times on alternate cheeks, he and Titov merely clanked their helmets together in a sign of solidarity. After reaching the top of the gantry, Gagarin maneuvered himself into his ejection seat. Senior engineer Oleg Ivanovsky and chief test pilot Mark Gallai tightened his harnesses and plugged his suit hoses into Vostok’s oxygen supply. After giving him a good-luck tap on his helmet, Ivanovsky motioned for Gagarin to lift his faceplate to inform him of three significant numbers.
Since the beginning of their adventure in space, the Soviets had operated their machines through on-board systems controlled exclusively from the ground and, for a time, considered that manned missions should be undertaken in the same way. What would happen, wondered the medical experts, if a cosmonaut went mad in orbit, overcome by a profound sense of separation from his home planet? Guidance, it was decided, must be automatic. However, if the cosmonaut’s sanity and devotion to the Motherland could be demonstrated, and if he needed to assume command, a six-digit keypad was provided to unlock Vostok’s navigation system, disengage it from the automatic controls, and allow him to fly the ship. The three-digit combination for the keypad would be radioed to Gagarin if ground staff considered him sane enough to take over. Yet the logic was questionable: What would happen if Vostok lost attitude control or its radio went dead and communications were impossible? Instead, a face-saving measure was adopted, whereby the three-digit code would be kept in a sealed envelope aboard the spacecraft, ready for the cosmonaut to open if needed. Gagarin’s ability to open the envelope, type in the numbers, and activate the keypad would supposedly “prove” that he had not lost his mind and was fully aware of his actions.
“It was a dangerous comedy,” Ivanovsky recalled later, “part of the silly secrecy we had in those days.” The envelope, though, had to be placed somewhere within easy reach, should he need to get to it in an emergency, and a mentally unstable Gagarin could easily have opened it if he really wanted to do so. Mark Gallai, whose role included supervising the training of the Vostok cosmonauts, agreed, pointing out that all were qualified military pilots with experience of flying high-altitude, nighttime missions. The chance of them going mad was considerably less likely than suffering a radio failure. Consequently, betraying an official state secret and theoretically putting himself at risk of a lengthy prison spell, Ivanovsky told Gagarin the three digits: 1-2-5. To his surprise, the cosmonaut smiled and replied that his commander, Nikolai Kamanin, had already given him the combination!
Assisted by the chief of rocket troops, Vladimir Shapovalov, and two launch pad staff members, the next task for Ivanovsky and Gallai was to seal Gagarin inside his capsule for liftoff. At this point, a problem 