WEBVTT 00:00:28.719 --> 00:00:30.800 There is a birch tree in the way. 00:00:30.800 --> 00:00:36.240 The two cosmonauts inside the cramped capsule cannot see much of it. 00:00:36.240 --> 00:00:40.320 Just a pale trunk pressed against the hatch. 00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:43.600 But it is enough to trap them. 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:56.000 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. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:02.399 They fire the mechanism to open the hatch anyway, and the explosive bolts go off. 00:01:02.399 --> 00:01:10.000 The cabin fills with the smell of gunpowder, but the hatch just jerks hard against the trunk and stays where it is. 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:13.920 So they decide to rock the capsule. 00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:27.519 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. 00:01:27.519 --> 00:01:33.920 Then the air pours in and they feel their lungs contract with the sudden blast of cold. 00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:39.840 Then they climb out and they immediately sink into the snow up to their chests. 00:01:39.840 --> 00:01:44.400 A few hours ago they were in orbit. 00:01:44.400 --> 00:01:53.200 They were never meant to be here in a frozen forest in the Ural, hundreds of kilometers from anyone who is looking for them. 00:01:53.200 --> 00:01:56.959 They were never really meant to bring the ship down themselves at all. 00:01:56.959 --> 00:02:00.159 But something went wrong up there. 00:02:00.159 --> 00:02:09.360 And now they are here, alive in this exact wrong place, trying to get home. 00:02:09.360 --> 00:02:15.280 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:02:15.280 --> 00:02:22.800 In 1961, nobody knew what space would do to a person's mind. 00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:29.840 Soviet doctors worried about something the literature of the era called space madness. 00:02:29.840 --> 00:02:39.759 A panic or a psychotic break brought on by weightlessness or by the sight of the whole Earth through a window. 00:02:39.759 --> 00:02:44.960 A cosmonaut who came apart up there could take the whole mission with him. 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:52.080 So the program put its trust in the machinery and in the men running it from the ground. 00:02:52.080 --> 00:03:01.520 Soviet spacecraft would reach orbit on their own, hold their attitude, turn themselves for descent, and fire a break. 00:03:01.520 --> 00:03:05.599 All of it on a plan written before launch. 00:03:05.599 --> 00:03:10.560 The cosmonaut was meant to ride along and to monitor the control panel. 00:03:10.560 --> 00:03:23.840 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. 00:03:23.840 --> 00:03:35.360 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. 00:03:35.360 --> 00:03:48.080 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. 00:03:48.080 --> 00:03:52.800 These tools needed to be able to go on working in a vacuum. 00:03:52.800 --> 00:03:55.520 They needed to withstand radiation. 00:03:55.520 --> 00:04:04.800 And they needed to be instantly understood by someone traveling at 8 kilometers per second in a tiny capsule while under unknowable duress. 00:04:04.800 --> 00:04:08.960 And the plan was for a man to be in orbit within a year. 00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:12.800 So the engineers decided to give them something familiar. 00:04:12.800 --> 00:04:16.399 They decided to give them the world. 00:04:16.399 --> 00:04:24.879 Now there are roughly 30 people in Laboratory 47, and the ones who took the lead were young. 00:04:24.879 --> 00:04:29.439 We don't know how young, we don't even know their first names. 00:04:29.439 --> 00:04:36.000 But a much later account of this work in English lists them as young engineers. 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:41.680 Nosov, Marchenko, Makarov, and Lavrov. 00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:44.800 They led the project. 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:49.839 The designers weren't called young, but maybe they were. 00:04:49.839 --> 00:04:56.800 Avarin, Safetkin, Simonenkova, and Tsypin. 00:04:56.800 --> 00:05:04.720 The list of manufacturing specialists is long and ends with the phrase and others. 00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:14.800 The young engineers and the team in the lab built something called the IMP, from the Russian term indicator of position in flight. 00:05:14.800 --> 00:05:19.279 But everyone just called it the globus because it was a globe. 00:05:19.279 --> 00:05:32.399 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. 00:05:32.399 --> 00:05:37.199 There were eight numbered circles to show the position of radio sites. 00:05:37.199 --> 00:05:46.480 It sat in a box about the size of a large toaster under a clear dome with a fine crosshair etched into the middle. 00:05:46.480 --> 00:05:54.319 Beside it, they placed a small counter like the odometer of a car to tick off the orbits as they went by. 00:05:54.319 --> 00:06:00.480 But the inside looks like it was made by watchmakers. 00:06:00.480 --> 00:06:07.040 It contains hundreds of metal components aligned in complex gear trains. 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:18.800 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. 00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:25.040 And it has to turn two ways at once, because two things are moving. 00:06:25.040 --> 00:06:31.439 The ship is sweeping around the earth, and the earth is revolving underneath the ship. 00:06:31.439 --> 00:06:42.560 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. 00:06:42.560 --> 00:06:45.120 It's called a differential. 00:06:45.120 --> 00:06:51.120 And then there are the cams, wheels with irregular edges. 00:06:51.120 --> 00:06:54.480 Their shapes are where the orbit lives. 00:06:54.480 --> 00:07:05.519 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. 00:07:05.519 --> 00:07:14.000 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. 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:17.279 You could feel the equations with your fingertip. 00:07:17.279 --> 00:07:20.800 Here is the thing about it though. 00:07:20.800 --> 00:07:24.160 Nothing reaches it from the ground. 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:30.720 No signal comes in from a gyroscope or anything else to tell it where the ship actually is. 00:07:30.720 --> 00:07:34.160 It is a dead reckoning device. 00:07:34.160 --> 00:07:42.480 It finds its current location by using a set starting point and then measuring speed, direction, and travel time. 00:07:42.480 --> 00:07:47.600 Everything it knows a person has to put into it by hand. 00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:53.279 So before launch, someone sets it to the coordinates the ship is supposed to reach. 00:07:53.279 --> 00:07:55.439 Then the ship goes up. 00:07:55.439 --> 00:08:02.000 And the orbit it actually ends up in is not exactly the orbit on paper. 00:08:02.000 --> 00:08:06.160 So radar and radio on the ground measure the real one. 00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:11.759 People at desks work out the difference and then they read the numbers up to the crew. 00:08:11.759 --> 00:08:15.120 And in the cabin, someone turns the knob. 00:08:15.120 --> 00:08:19.360 There is a knob for longitude at the equator. 00:08:19.360 --> 00:08:23.199 A knob for where you are along the orbit. 00:08:23.199 --> 00:08:27.839 The cosmonaut sets each of them and then they do it again. 00:08:27.839 --> 00:08:38.240 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. 00:08:38.240 --> 00:08:41.759 But there were not many Soviet ground stations. 00:08:41.759 --> 00:08:46.720 For most of every orbit, there was nobody to talk to. 00:08:46.720 --> 00:08:49.679 No voice, no data. 00:08:49.679 --> 00:08:52.799 And for half of every orbit, it's night. 00:08:52.799 --> 00:08:59.840 The ship has a sight in the floor for looking at the ground, but at night there is no ground to look at. 00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:02.639 Clouds do the same thing. 00:09:02.639 --> 00:09:04.960 Which leaves the globe. 00:09:04.960 --> 00:09:09.840 Turning quietly with a crosshair gliding over the paper. 00:09:09.840 --> 00:09:12.879 And the globist did one other thing. 00:09:12.879 --> 00:09:19.600 If you threw a switch, a motor ran the globe forward about a third of the way around and stopped. 00:09:19.600 --> 00:09:23.360 Now the crosshair was not over where you were. 00:09:23.360 --> 00:09:28.720 It was over where you would come down if you fired your brake right now. 00:09:28.720 --> 00:09:40.399 In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin went up, went round the world once, and the ship did every part of it alone. 00:09:40.399 --> 00:09:46.320 The little globe turned the whole way and told him where he was over and over, and nothing went wrong. 00:09:46.320 --> 00:09:50.159 For four more years it goes like that. 00:09:50.159 --> 00:09:57.600 The ships fly, the machines hold, the globus gets set and reset and set again. 00:09:57.600 --> 00:10:02.879 And every crew that goes up knows where they are, even in the dark. 00:10:02.879 --> 00:10:06.000 But then came March 1965. 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.639 Voskhod 2. 00:10:08.639 --> 00:10:12.720 The mission had two men aboard instead of one. 00:10:12.720 --> 00:10:20.000 Pavel Belyayev, the commander, and Alexei Leonov, the navigator. 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:24.960 Early in the flight, Leonov becomes the first human being to do a spacewalk. 00:10:24.960 --> 00:10:27.360 And it nearly kills him. 00:10:27.360 --> 00:10:33.840 In the vacuum, his suit swells so stiff that he cannot bend it enough to get through the small hatch. 00:10:33.840 --> 00:10:40.159 He ends up having to bleed off his own air and go in backwards to get himself back inside. 00:10:40.159 --> 00:10:43.039 But that was only the first problem. 00:10:43.039 --> 00:10:50.559 Because to get home, the ship has to point exactly at the right angle and fire its brakes at exactly the right time. 00:10:50.559 --> 00:10:54.960 But the automatic system that does this fails. 00:10:54.960 --> 00:10:58.720 They need to bring the ship home by hand. 00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:08.000 Now the Voskhod was a retrofitted one-man Vostok with the ejection seat pulled out and two seats put in. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:10.720 They were turned 90 degrees so they would fit. 00:11:10.720 --> 00:11:17.600 And the control panel meant for one man sitting in the other direction did not move. 00:11:17.600 --> 00:11:22.639 The sight was in the floor, and it also did not move. 00:11:22.639 --> 00:11:24.960 And it was small. 00:11:24.960 --> 00:11:29.919 A sphere with an interior diameter of about two meters. 00:11:29.919 --> 00:11:32.320 And it was mostly full of equipment. 00:11:32.320 --> 00:11:38.559 So when the automatic system fails, getting to the site in the floor is a bizarre feat. 00:11:38.559 --> 00:11:49.519 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. 00:11:49.519 --> 00:11:52.480 And remember, Leonov is the navigator. 00:11:52.480 --> 00:11:56.799 He also has to decide where on earth this ship is going down. 00:11:56.799 --> 00:12:00.080 He throws the switch and the globe runs forward. 00:12:00.080 --> 00:12:04.159 It shows their orbit will take them straight over Moscow. 00:12:04.159 --> 00:12:18.480 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. 00:12:18.480 --> 00:12:23.919 But Belyayev has to get back in his seat before he can fire the brakes. 00:12:23.919 --> 00:12:29.840 And it takes him 46 seconds in his bulky, stiff suit. 00:12:29.840 --> 00:12:36.399 A 46-second delay at nearly 8 kilometers per second will throw you off course. 00:12:36.399 --> 00:12:39.039 But they do finally fire the brakes. 00:12:39.039 --> 00:12:42.159 Only now something else is wrong. 00:12:42.159 --> 00:12:47.360 The two halves of the spacecraft that are meant to separate just fail to come apart. 00:12:47.360 --> 00:12:53.600 A cable holds them together and the whole thing begins to spin harder and harder. 00:12:53.600 --> 00:12:58.559 The force of it eventually bursts small blood vessels in their eyes. 00:12:58.559 --> 00:13:02.720 But then the cable burns through and the module comes free. 00:13:02.720 --> 00:13:04.399 The parachute opens. 00:13:04.399 --> 00:13:13.919 They can hear and feel the wind whistling in the straps as the module swings on the landing chute. 00:13:13.919 --> 00:13:19.759 Then they come down into the deep snow and meet the tree. 00:13:19.759 --> 00:13:23.279 Nobody actually knows where they are. 00:13:23.279 --> 00:13:25.679 They do not know either. 00:13:25.679 --> 00:13:30.000 But search planes spot the capsule chute a few hours later. 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:41.519 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. 00:13:41.519 --> 00:13:46.080 And the temperature that night falls past 22 below Fahrenheit. 00:13:46.080 --> 00:13:58.320 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. 00:13:58.320 --> 00:14:04.799 And then they wait in the dark, listening to trees crack in the cold. 00:14:04.799 --> 00:14:16.080 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. 00:14:16.080 --> 00:14:20.480 On the third morning, they ski out and the helicopter lifts off. 00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:25.200 The globus kept flying. 00:14:25.200 --> 00:14:27.840 A person could read it at a glance. 00:14:27.840 --> 00:14:36.240 It was completely immune to software crashes, cosmic radiation bit flips, and electromagnetic interference. 00:14:36.240 --> 00:14:40.960 It was there in the radio silence and in the dark. 00:14:40.960 --> 00:14:52.639 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. 00:14:52.639 --> 00:15:02.799 Until 2002, a small paper-covered globe turned behind a domed window while somebody in orbit kept it on track. 00:15:02.799 --> 00:15:06.639 But cosmonauts felt the limitations. 00:15:06.639 --> 00:15:08.720 They complained. 00:15:08.720 --> 00:15:14.559 They had been given a perfectly predictable world to operate in the real one. 00:15:14.559 --> 00:15:18.159 The engineers who built it couldn't account for us. 00:15:18.159 --> 00:15:22.639 For the shape of a human being trying to turn at a cramp space. 00:15:22.639 --> 00:15:27.360 For the things that inevitably break because they always do. 00:15:27.360 --> 00:15:34.879 And yet, those two men who landed in the snow landed in their own country. 00:15:34.879 --> 00:15:37.840 They didn't land in Red Square. 00:15:37.840 --> 00:15:42.159 They didn't land in a foreign city or the ocean. 00:15:42.159 --> 00:15:45.200 And they were found. 00:15:45.200 --> 00:15:49.039 They were able to leave that forest alive. 00:15:49.039 --> 00:15:51.919 They made it home. 00:15:51.919 --> 00:15:58.960 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:15:58.960 --> 00:16:04.799 If you enjoyed this story, please leave a rating or review wherever you listen. 00:16:04.799 --> 00:16:09.279 And if you'd like more content from me, I've started a Patreon. 00:16:09.279 --> 00:16:19.679 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. 00:16:19.679 --> 00:16:22.720 The most recent bonus episode was about the escape key. 00:16:22.720 --> 00:16:26.240 And I have ideas for some really fun things to come next. 00:16:26.240 --> 00:16:33.360 You can find the Patreon and more ways to support the show by going to foundinthemachine.com/support. 00:16:34.399 --> 00:16:36.480 Thanks so much for listening.