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This strategy has many technical points in its favor, and it may have special appeal to the propaganda-geared Russians. The orbiting space platform will be highly visible; after the sun and the moon, it may be the most conspicuous thing in the sky. For years while the Russians reach for the moon, their busy platform will impress billions of people on the earth below.
Maternal Glory. Not until Russian policies change will the full story of Leonov and Belyayev's flight become common knowledge. Only the lives of the cosmonauts themselves got a colorful airing. Leonov, now 30, was born in the village of Listvyanka in the Kuznetsk coal-mining region of Siberia, where his mother earned the Order of Maternal Glory, First Class, for her family of nine. In 1948 his parents moved to Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia), which had been abandoned by its German masters.
After finishing school in 1953, Leonov was sent by the Young Communist League to flying school at Chuguyev, near Kharkov, where he made 115 parachute jumps, became a parachute instructor, and was one of the first pilots to be selected for training as a cosmonaut. He was courting the girl whom, he was to marry when he learned that he might be sent on a novel and very difficult mission. Told that the mission would not interfere with his marriage, he signed up enthusiastically.
Press accounts described him as a man of notable endurance, coolness and high discipline, and they went into unusual rhapsodies about his physical perfection. Said Izvestia: "Connoisseurs of bodily beauty, the ancient Greeks would surely have judged his build as athletic."
Belyayev, 39, and the oldest cosmonaut who has yet flown in space, was born in the Vologda region east of Leningrad. As a child he skied three miles to school and tried at 16 to join the ski troops in the war with Nazi Germany.
Rejected as too young, he worked in a factory for two years, then went into training in the Red air force where he fought as a pilot for the rest of the war. He was studying at the air force academy when he was selected for cosmonaut training, and he astonished space physicians with the punishment he could take in centrifuge tests. At one time they stopped the machine for fear that he had gone too far. But Belyayev was undamaged.
He was not, however, wholly invulnerable. During parachute training he broke a leg. The double fracture healed slowly, and he feared he would be washed out of cosmonaut training. His father, a rural physician, prescribed weight-lifting to rebuild the damaged leg, and eventually it grew strong enough to pass examination.
All Experiments. Such hero biographies, not unfamiliar in the U.S., help not at all in evaluating the flight of the Voskhod II. The TV pictures of Leonov outside the spaceship might have told much more, but they seemed to have been deliberately thrown out of sharpness, as well as cut. If Leonov experienced any kind of trouble the pictures did not show it, and official announcements about the flight were as formal as if carved in stone. "The ship's systems functioned normally," said a spokesman, "and the two cosmonauts completed all scientific experiments assigned to them."