On October 26, 1968, the ship was piloted by a not quite ordinary cosmonaut - already a Hero of the Soviet Union, Honored Test Pilot of the USSR, participant of the Great Patriotic War, in particular, battles on the Kursk Bulge, 47-year-old native of Donetsk region Georgy Beregovoy.
The defining words for that extremely dangerous launch in the honorary list of regalia and achievements of Georgy Timofeevich were the words honored test pilot, that is, very experienced.
Until the moment when Beregovoy finally, tangibly returned to Earth, his colleagues considered him a suicide bomber.
Several times this terrible word will sound in the wonderful film by Ruslan Bozhko and Alexander Ostrovsky, “Space Kamikaze. The angle of attack of the cosmonaut Beregovoy (screenwriters A. Ostrovsky and A. Merzhanov). And this is not a catchphrase. Why did knowledgeable people call Beregovoy a suicide bomber? Because they really knew that another cosmonaut was flying on a doomed ship: before that, four Soyuz were killed in a row. The first three are unmanned. One exploded on the launch pad, two others were declared unsuccessful. In the fourth, Soyuz-1, in April 1967, Vladimir Komarov ascended into space for the second time in his life. During landing, a malfunction occurred, and the first burnt fragments of the pilot-cosmonaut's body were found only an hour after the descent vehicle crashed into the ground; after a while others were found, so that twice Hero of the Soviet Union V. M. Komarov's two graves: in the Kremlin wall and in the Orenburg steppe …
There is nothing more dangerous than desolation in something significant and important, which until recently attracted the attention of admired contemporaries. It was in this position that the space industry found itself, which, as it turned out, rests exclusively on outstanding personalities - from the Chief Designer to a completely ordinary Master at a plant that produced delicately executed parts for rockets and ships (about him, about the Master, he wrote brilliantly at one time publicist Anatoly Agranovsky). But people are mortal. At the beginning of 1966, shortly before the fifth anniversary of the flight of the first cosmonaut of the Earth, Yuri Gagarin, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the genius General Designer, who was also distinguished by incredible severity, even captiousness, passed away. And the space industry shuddered, was confused and, one might say, dropped its hands. Failures followed one another.
In the VGTRK film about the space feat of test pilot Beregovoy, it is said about the subsequent events as follows:
“In the second half of the 60s, after the deafening triumph of the first years, Soviet cosmonautics found itself at a dead end. Then two outwardly very similar people managed to save her. One had power, the other had a talent for testing …"
And their surnames were somewhat similar. The first of these two was Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the second was Georgy Timofeevich Beregovoy.
Brezhnev met Beregov in 1961, when he had not yet ascended the communist throne, although he held a significant position in the Soviet upper echelons. When presenting the diplomas of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he drew attention to a tall, brave Ukrainian, surprisingly similar to himself (after 8 years, this similarity will unexpectedly save Leonid Ilyich from the bullets of an inadequate Leningrader who attempted on him - they mortally wound the driver, and the broken glass will scratch pilot-cosmonaut Beregovoy, who was traveling to the Kremlin for a reception in the first car of the motorcade). And when the General Secretary, who took this post in October 1964, was reported about the ongoing difficulties with the Soyuz spacecraft, he said: "Well, there you have a test pilot in your detachment …"
Beregovoy was enrolled in the cosmonaut corps in the same 1964. Younger colleagues greeted him with hostility: "An old favorite came for glory." They meant that Beregovoy once served under the command of a prominent military leader Nikolai Kamanin, who took care of future cosmonauts.
Yes, only the glory of the Beregovoi was not to be occupied. Once he asked the pilot-cosmonaut Zholobov: "Vitalka, what year are you?" “1937,” he replied. "And I have been wearing this headset since the 37th." After graduating from the Yenaki aeroclub with his older brother (Mikhail Timofeevich, now a lieutenant general-engineer, took part in the filming of a film about his younger brother), Georgy became a professional pilot. From the first days of the Great Patriotic War he took part in air battles. He flew on the Il-2 attack aircraft, which the Germans called the "plague", that is. "Black death", if literally. The "flying tank" was tenacious and because of this vitality is omnipresent, and that is why our hero said about the IL-2: "All types of weapons work against him."
Beregovoi's pilot turned out to be inventive. Once, seeing the superior forces of the enemy, he ordered the wingmen to switch to shaving flight mode, and they really dropped to a height of one and a half to two meters (!) Above the sunflower field, so they completely shaved off the heads of the tallest sunflowers - but the squadron survived! Then comrades in arms told him: "Zhorka, you can live and fight with you."
He was shot down three times, but he escaped death. At 23 he became a Hero of the Soviet Union.
At the front, Georgy Beregovoy did not part with the book "Test Pilot" published in the USSR by the American pilot Jimmy Collins, and after the end of the war he himself became a test pilot. The first - and extremely serious test of many others was the MiG-15. The plane was chased by an accident. He fell into a tailspin differently from others, completely unexpected for the pilots. Beregovoi was the first to figure out the nature of a jet fighter and earned the nickname … Comrade Corkscrew. Since then, all military pilots began to fly on the Beregovoy science. Georgy Timofeevich's teacher in astronautics, 13 years younger than him, the famous pilot-cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov said about him in the film as follows: "For him, the wings were an extension of his arms."
So Beregovoy did not come to cosmonautics for fame. Now we can say that fate itself brought him - who, besides him, would have guessed the character of the "Union"?
Yuri Gagarin unexpectedly played a tragic-mystical role in the fate of Beregovoy himself, and therefore of the Soyuz, and of our entire cosmonautics. For some reason he said to Georgy Timofeevich: "As long as I live, you will not fly into space." This is extremely unpleasant to think about - after all, we all loved the cheerful Gagarin and respected the serious Beregovoy very much - but that is what happened. Pilot-cosmonaut Gagarin died in the spring of 68, and in the fall of the same year, it was decided to send test pilot Beregovoy into space.
In the photograph of Georgy Beregovoy shown in the film before the start, he is so joyful, so pleased that it is difficult to recognize him. As if someone wrote on his face: "You can't catch us!" - although in reality he spoke differently: "That's it, they won't capture me anymore." That is, they will not be excommunicated from flights, they will not be stopped.
Good start. Entering a near-earth orbit. First round. Approaching an unmanned spacecraft to dock with … And - failure. It turned out to be impossible to repeat the docking attempt - only fuel was left for landing.
He did not know that for everyone in the space industry, the Tassian phrase "All the systems of the ship were working normally" was already a victory for this not young test pilot with a real military background.
Beregovoi did not immediately understand what had happened in space. And then, with some instinct, he realized that the ship approached the drone upside down - the unusual state of weightlessness at first does not allow the astronaut to orient himself in space. But he made a very detailed report on the flight and possible shortcomings in the design of the ship.
Later, engineers would call the order to dock at the first loop stupid, but for Georgy Timofeevich this was little consolation. Until the end of his days it seemed to him that he "did not complete the task."
Although, in fact, he exceeded it. Major General of the Medical Service Vladimir Ponomarenko said in the film: "He, Beregovoy, was the first cosmonaut who was not afraid to tell the designers what he considered unsuccessful in the design of the spacecraft." He didn’t make excuses - he was looking for reasons. He found and, in fact, became a co-designer of the Soyuz, which to this day is considered the most reliable spacecraft.
The ship is excellent, and the story of the man who saved its reputation is also excellent. Only one question haunts: why such a beautifully made, so necessary at least for example to other, younger people, to remember the national importance of astronautics, the film was shown after midnight, five minutes before the performance of the national anthem? No answer…
