Voskhod

Voskhod flew twice, in October 1964 and March 1965, using leftover Vostok hardware reworked to carry a larger crew and to let one of them go outside. Fitting three men into a one man capsule meant removing the ejection seats and the spacesuits, which left the crew with no way to survive a launch abort and no protection from a leak.

How it went

1. 01

   Khrushchev wanted an answer to the two seat Gemini and the three seat Apollo, so the capsule already in the shop was reconfigured instead of a new one being designed.

2. 02

   Voskhod 1 flew three men on 12 October 1964 with no suits and no ejection seats, seated at angles to one another because that was the only arrangement that fitted.

3. 03

   Alexei Leonov left Voskhod 2 on 18 March 1965 for twelve minutes and nine seconds, then found his suit had ballooned too stiff to fit back through the airlock and had to bleed it below its safe pressure to get in.

4. 04

   The same flight lost its automatic landing system, came down 386 kilometres off target in deep forest, and left the crew two nights in the snow before they could be lifted out.

5. 05

   Four further Voskhod flights were cancelled, because Gemini was by then doing everything they had been planned to demonstrate.

What it flew

• Voskhod (11A57)

What it cost, what it got

Two flights, two firsts, and nobody killed, which owed as much to luck as to engineering. It bought headlines with hardware and schedule the Soviet Union needed for Soyuz and for the Moon, and it came closer to killing a crew than any Soviet flight had yet.

Sources

1. 1Voskhod: the first multi-crew spacecraftRussianSpaceWeb
2. 2Voskhod 2Wikipedia
3. 3Voskhod programmeWikipedia