The morning sun had already topped the mountains edging the Kazakhstan steppes, deep in southern Russia, when Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, 26, rode to his waiting rocket in an eggshell-blue bus. Bulky in his orange spacesuit, Titov clambered up the gantry ladder and settled himself in the giant five-ton capsule perched on the rocket's nose. An attendant handed him a notebook labeled ''Log Book of the Spaceship Vostok II.'' With exaggerated care, Titov examined the pencil dangling from the log, and remembered: "Yuri Gagarin did not attach his pencil firmly and lost...
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