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Political leaders of the U.S.S.R. appeared on TV applauding the flight. But there was none of the gay banter of one of Nikita Khrushchev's conversations with orbiting cosmonauts. Party Chief Leonid I. Brezhnev picked up a white telephone and did his leaden best. "We applaud you," he said to the Voskhod II. "We await you in Moscow." Congratulatory messages arrived from all over the world. The Pope and President Johnson both offered applause.
In the end, though, it was clear that not everything went as planned with Voskhod II. Its takeoff was normal, then it soared into a slightly more elliptical orbit than is usual for manned satellites, rising to 307.5 miles above the earth at apogee. Leonov took his vacuum stroll during the second orbit, when, as the Russians patriotically pointed out, he was over Russian soil. Then the spacecraft made 15 more orbits around the earth, followed all the while by U.S. trackers.
Down in Perm. First hint of any kind of trouble came when Russian radio and TV said nothing about the flight for more than eight hours. Finally came the announcement, four hours after the event, that the cosmonauts had guided their ship to a perfect landing near the city of Perm, 750 miles northeast of Moscow. This is hilly, forested country on the western slope of the Urals, and much more hazardous than the barren, level steppes of Kazakhstan, where Soviet spacemen usually touch down.
Still, landing on firm ground, instead of the warm oceans where U.S. astronauts dunk themselves, has its advantages. The Russians may do it primarily because they possess vast areas of flat and almost uninhabited territory, but they also prefer it. A spacecraft that descends too fast will hit the ground with little more impact than if it hits water. And survival on solid ground is a lesser problem than after a water landing. There is no chance that the men will drown or that their ship will sink if not picked up promptly. Storms do not corrugate the land with dangerous waves, as they do the sea, and if the spacecraft drops into an unscheduled spot, there are generally at least a few local people to report its descent and help the crewmen. Perhaps the greatest advantage is that a spacecraft designed for a ground landing does not have to carry flotation gear or be made waterproof.
The Russians have not been communicative about their landing methods. Their early cosmonauts were apparently ejected when they neared earth; they landed by personal parachutes, letting the empty capsules hit the ground hard. At the ends of other flights, they seem to have stayed on board, as U.S. astronauts do, while the ships landed beneath bigger and better parachutes. Retrorockets have also been used to check a ship's speed as it nears the ground. The three-man spaceship Voskhod I used this method with great success. Its designers were so sure that the soft landing would work that they gave the crew no parachutes or protective clothing.