More Details for 1967-03-12
Original archive entry. The text, images and links below are kept as they were written.
Spiral and Soyuz training
Titov visits Kamanin on leave from test pilot duties at Vladimirovka. Titov will spend a year training as a test pilot on MiG-21, Su-7, and Su-9 aircraft. He flies well, and has matured and changed for the better over the last two years. Kamanin has talked to him 3 or 4 times about his future plans. Titov has bound his future with the Spiral spaceplane programme.
Kamanin cannot convince him to work on the manned lunar landing programme instead. Kamanin cannot understand why Titov is not interested in landing on the moon. Kamanin was 60 and could not qualify for spaceflight, but would have jumped at the chance to walk on the moon if younger. Titov's position seemed to be based on his belief that the space programme managers would have no faith on his ability to make another spaceflight after the problems he had with space sickness on Vostok 2.
Meanwhile Nikolayev has injured himself when trying to close the BO airlock hatch on the Soyuz mock-up, removing 20-25 mm of scalp in the process. Things are going badly with Soyuz training at Baikonur. The flight spacecraft has no crew seats, and is lacking the orientation system and other equipment. Therefore the cosmonauts have to occupy themselves with basic classroom training. Their time would have been more productively used in Moscow.