Daina Bouquin: There is a birch tree in the way.
Daina Bouquin: The two cosmonauts inside the cramped capsule cannot see much of it.
Daina Bouquin: Just a pale trunk pressed against the hatch.
Daina Bouquin: But it is enough to trap them.
Daina Bouquin: They have fallen out of the sky into a forest, into deep snow, and the only door out will not open because a tree is holding it shut.
Daina Bouquin: They fire the mechanism to open the hatch anyway, and the explosive bolts go off.
Daina Bouquin: The cabin fills with the smell of gunpowder, but the hatch just jerks hard against the trunk and stays where it is.
Daina Bouquin: So they decide to rock the capsule.
Daina Bouquin: Two men in stiff pressure suits throw their weight one way and then the other, over and over, until finally the hatch shifts enough to come loose.
Daina Bouquin: Then the air pours in and they feel their lungs contract with the sudden blast of cold.
Daina Bouquin: Then they climb out and they immediately sink into the snow up to their chests.
Daina Bouquin: A few hours ago they were in orbit.
Daina Bouquin: They were never meant to be here in a frozen forest in the Ural, hundreds of kilometers from anyone who is looking for them.
Daina Bouquin: They were never really meant to bring the ship down themselves at all.
Daina Bouquin: But something went wrong up there.
Daina Bouquin: And now they are here, alive in this exact wrong place, trying to get home.
Daina Bouquin: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
Daina Bouquin: In 1961, nobody knew what space would do to a person's mind.
Daina Bouquin: Soviet doctors worried about something the literature of the era called space madness.
Daina Bouquin: A panic or a psychotic break brought on by weightlessness or by the sight of the whole Earth through a window.
Daina Bouquin: A cosmonaut who came apart up there could take the whole mission with him.
Daina Bouquin: So the program put its trust in the machinery and in the men running it from the ground.
Daina Bouquin: Soviet spacecraft would reach orbit on their own, hold their attitude, turn themselves for descent, and fire a break.
Daina Bouquin: All of it on a plan written before launch.
Daina Bouquin: The cosmonaut was meant to ride along and to monitor the control panel.
Daina Bouquin: The first control panel for Soviet spaceflight was built in Zukhovsky, just outside Moscow, in a branch of the Flight Research Institute called simply Laboratory 47.
Daina Bouquin: It was run by an engineer named Sergei Darevsky and focused on the place where the human meets the instrument, a field called aviation ergonomics.
Daina Bouquin: Among the most important components needed for this first control panel were the devices meant for an emergency, the ones that would allow the cosmonaut to take control and fly the spacecraft manually.
Daina Bouquin: These tools needed to be able to go on working in a vacuum.
Daina Bouquin: They needed to withstand radiation.
Daina Bouquin: And they needed to be instantly understood by someone traveling at 8 kilometers per second in a tiny capsule while under unknowable duress.
Daina Bouquin: And the plan was for a man to be in orbit within a year.
Daina Bouquin: So the engineers decided to give them something familiar.
Daina Bouquin: They decided to give them the world.
Daina Bouquin: Now there are roughly 30 people in Laboratory 47, and the ones who took the lead were young.
Daina Bouquin: We don't know how young, we don't even know their first names.
Daina Bouquin: But a much later account of this work in English lists them as young engineers.
Daina Bouquin: Nosov, Marchenko, Makarov, and Lavrov.
Daina Bouquin: They led the project.
Daina Bouquin: The designers weren't called young, but maybe they were.
Daina Bouquin: Avarin, Safetkin, Simonenkova, and Tsypin.
Daina Bouquin: The list of manufacturing specialists is long and ends with the phrase and others.
Daina Bouquin: The young engineers and the team in the lab built something called the IMP, from the Russian term indicator of position in flight.
Daina Bouquin: But everyone just called it the globus because it was a globe.
Daina Bouquin: It was about the size of a grapefruit, made of aluminum and wrapped in printed paper with coastlines and rivers and mountains and heavy colored lines drawn around the borders of the Soviet Union.
Daina Bouquin: There were eight numbered circles to show the position of radio sites.
Daina Bouquin: It sat in a box about the size of a large toaster under a clear dome with a fine crosshair etched into the middle.
Daina Bouquin: Beside it, they placed a small counter like the odometer of a car to tick off the orbits as they went by.
Daina Bouquin: But the inside looks like it was made by watchmakers.
Daina Bouquin: It contains hundreds of metal components aligned in complex gear trains.
Daina Bouquin: Every second, something inside this machine gives a small push that travels outward through a chain of brass gears until the carefully angled globe begins to turn.
Daina Bouquin: And it has to turn two ways at once, because two things are moving.
Daina Bouquin: The ship is sweeping around the earth, and the earth is revolving underneath the ship.
Daina Bouquin: There are gears that add those two motions together continuously, using the same arrangement that lets the back wheels of a car turn at different speeds around a corner.
Daina Bouquin: It's called a differential.
Daina Bouquin: And then there are the cams, wheels with irregular edges.
Daina Bouquin: Their shapes are where the orbit lives.
Daina Bouquin: A latitude over the course of an orbit is translated into a curve, and then someone has to grind that curve into the edge of a piece of metal.
Daina Bouquin: Each of the cams has another component pressed against its rim, and as the wheel goes round, its movement falls with the shape of the edge.
Daina Bouquin: You could feel the equations with your fingertip.
Daina Bouquin: Here is the thing about it though.
Daina Bouquin: Nothing reaches it from the ground.
Daina Bouquin: No signal comes in from a gyroscope or anything else to tell it where the ship actually is.
Daina Bouquin: It is a dead reckoning device.
Daina Bouquin: It finds its current location by using a set starting point and then measuring speed, direction, and travel time.
Daina Bouquin: Everything it knows a person has to put into it by hand.
Daina Bouquin: So before launch, someone sets it to the coordinates the ship is supposed to reach.
Daina Bouquin: Then the ship goes up.
Daina Bouquin: And the orbit it actually ends up in is not exactly the orbit on paper.
Daina Bouquin: So radar and radio on the ground measure the real one.
Daina Bouquin: People at desks work out the difference and then they read the numbers up to the crew.
Daina Bouquin: And in the cabin, someone turns the knob.
Daina Bouquin: There is a knob for longitude at the equator.
Daina Bouquin: A knob for where you are along the orbit.
Daina Bouquin: The cosmonaut sets each of them and then they do it again.
Daina Bouquin: Every time they come back into radio contact, the ground tells them what it knows and they wind the thing back into agreement with the Earth whenever it's needed.
Daina Bouquin: But there were not many Soviet ground stations.
Daina Bouquin: For most of every orbit, there was nobody to talk to.
Daina Bouquin: No voice, no data.
Daina Bouquin: And for half of every orbit, it's night.
Daina Bouquin: The ship has a sight in the floor for looking at the ground, but at night there is no ground to look at.
Daina Bouquin: Clouds do the same thing.
Daina Bouquin: Which leaves the globe.
Daina Bouquin: Turning quietly with a crosshair gliding over the paper.
Daina Bouquin: And the globist did one other thing.
Daina Bouquin: If you threw a switch, a motor ran the globe forward about a third of the way around and stopped.
Daina Bouquin: Now the crosshair was not over where you were.
Daina Bouquin: It was over where you would come down if you fired your brake right now.
Daina Bouquin: In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin went up, went round the world once, and the ship did every part of it alone.
Daina Bouquin: The little globe turned the whole way and told him where he was over and over, and nothing went wrong.
Daina Bouquin: For four more years it goes like that.
Daina Bouquin: The ships fly, the machines hold, the globus gets set and reset and set again.
Daina Bouquin: And every crew that goes up knows where they are, even in the dark.
Daina Bouquin: But then came March 1965.
Daina Bouquin: Voskhod 2.
Daina Bouquin: The mission had two men aboard instead of one.
Daina Bouquin: Pavel Belyayev, the commander, and Alexei Leonov, the navigator.
Daina Bouquin: Early in the flight, Leonov becomes the first human being to do a spacewalk.
Daina Bouquin: And it nearly kills him.
Daina Bouquin: In the vacuum, his suit swells so stiff that he cannot bend it enough to get through the small hatch.
Daina Bouquin: He ends up having to bleed off his own air and go in backwards to get himself back inside.
Daina Bouquin: But that was only the first problem.
Daina Bouquin: Because to get home, the ship has to point exactly at the right angle and fire its brakes at exactly the right time.
Daina Bouquin: But the automatic system that does this fails.
Daina Bouquin: They need to bring the ship home by hand.
Daina Bouquin: Now the Voskhod was a retrofitted one-man Vostok with the ejection seat pulled out and two seats put in.
Daina Bouquin: They were turned 90 degrees so they would fit.
Daina Bouquin: And the control panel meant for one man sitting in the other direction did not move.
Daina Bouquin: The sight was in the floor, and it also did not move.
Daina Bouquin: And it was small.
Daina Bouquin: A sphere with an interior diameter of about two meters.
Daina Bouquin: And it was mostly full of equipment.
Daina Bouquin: So when the automatic system fails, getting to the site in the floor is a bizarre feat.
Daina Bouquin: Belyayev has to leave his seat and stretch himself sideways across the cabin to look through the site while Leonov holds him still in zero gravity.
Daina Bouquin: And remember, Leonov is the navigator.
Daina Bouquin: He also has to decide where on earth this ship is going down.
Daina Bouquin: He throws the switch and the globe runs forward.
Daina Bouquin: It shows their orbit will take them straight over Moscow.
Daina Bouquin: He writes later that they could have sat down in Red Square, but he picks open country near the city of Perm, west of the Urals, reasoning that even if he is off, they will at least come down on Soviet ground.
Daina Bouquin: But Belyayev has to get back in his seat before he can fire the brakes.
Daina Bouquin: And it takes him 46 seconds in his bulky, stiff suit.
Daina Bouquin: A 46-second delay at nearly 8 kilometers per second will throw you off course.
Daina Bouquin: But they do finally fire the brakes.
Daina Bouquin: Only now something else is wrong.
Daina Bouquin: The two halves of the spacecraft that are meant to separate just fail to come apart.
Daina Bouquin: A cable holds them together and the whole thing begins to spin harder and harder.
Daina Bouquin: The force of it eventually bursts small blood vessels in their eyes.
Daina Bouquin: But then the cable burns through and the module comes free.
Daina Bouquin: The parachute opens.
Daina Bouquin: They can hear and feel the wind whistling in the straps as the module swings on the landing chute.
Daina Bouquin: Then they come down into the deep snow and meet the tree.
Daina Bouquin: Nobody actually knows where they are.
Daina Bouquin: They do not know either.
Daina Bouquin: But search planes spot the capsule chute a few hours later.
Daina Bouquin: They cannot land in that forest though, so the first help to arrive is a scatter of supplies dropped from the sky, most of which break or get stuck in the tree branches.
Daina Bouquin: And the temperature that night falls past 22 below Fahrenheit.
Daina Bouquin: Their suits are full of sweat from the spacewalk and from the fight to get down, so they strip, wring them out, and put them back on, hoping they won't freeze to their skin.
Daina Bouquin: And then they wait in the dark, listening to trees crack in the cold.
Daina Bouquin: Rescuers reach them on skis the next morning, but it takes another full day to cut down enough trees for a helicopter to land about 9 kilometers away from where they landed.
Daina Bouquin: On the third morning, they ski out and the helicopter lifts off.
Daina Bouquin: The globus kept flying.
Daina Bouquin: A person could read it at a glance.
Daina Bouquin: It was completely immune to software crashes, cosmic radiation bit flips, and electromagnetic interference.
Daina Bouquin: It was there in the radio silence and in the dark.
Daina Bouquin: A larger version of it went into Soyuz and stayed there through the Salyut stations, through Mir, through the crews ferrying up to the International Space Station.
Daina Bouquin: Until 2002, a small paper-covered globe turned behind a domed window while somebody in orbit kept it on track.
Daina Bouquin: But cosmonauts felt the limitations.
Daina Bouquin: They complained.
Daina Bouquin: They had been given a perfectly predictable world to operate in the real one.
Daina Bouquin: The engineers who built it couldn't account for us.
Daina Bouquin: For the shape of a human being trying to turn at a cramp space.
Daina Bouquin: For the things that inevitably break because they always do.
Daina Bouquin: And yet, those two men who landed in the snow landed in their own country.
Daina Bouquin: They didn't land in Red Square.
Daina Bouquin: They didn't land in a foreign city or the ocean.
Daina Bouquin: And they were found.
Daina Bouquin: They were able to leave that forest alive.
Daina Bouquin: They made it home.
Daina Bouquin: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
Daina Bouquin: If you enjoyed this story, please leave a rating or review wherever you listen.
Daina Bouquin: And if you'd like more content from me, I've started a Patreon.
Daina Bouquin: Supporters get access to my new mini-series, Found in the Margins, where I'm telling stories about things I come across while doing research for the main feed.
Daina Bouquin: The most recent bonus episode was about the escape key.
Daina Bouquin: And I have ideas for some really fun things to come next.
Daina Bouquin: You can find the Patreon and more ways to support the show by going to foundinthemachine.com/support.
Daina Bouquin: Thanks so much for listening.