“Each of us would be happy to stand in the place of this heroic pilot. Our hearts were with him during the flight,” wrote A. Ishin, Hydro- Turbine Shop Foreman.  

One of the longest serving employees at Special Design Bureau Turbina is Igor Yablokov, a design engineer who joined the plant in August 1957. In September 1959, the young specialist was called up for military service and joined the Air Defense Forces.

In April 1960, his reserve regiment was deployed from Zelenogorsk to Baikonur to guard the cosmodrome which only a year later became the launch facility that gained fame around the world. “It was a time of great achievements,” Igor Vitalyevich reflects. “The most impressive and memorable of them were the launches of space rockets with our first astronauts – Yuri Gagarin, German Titov, Pavel Popovich and Andriyan Nikolayev – on board. We were so proud of our homeland then.”

“Listening to the radio messages about the flight, I was concerned for him as I would be concerned for the most important person in my life,” wrote A. Nikolayev, Head of Assem- bly Fitters Team at the Steam-Turbine Shop.

“When I served as radioman, I was lucky to record signals transmitted by the first Sovi- et satellite. It was only a short time ago. And now the whole world listens to the news and finds out that a Soviet man is in space! No one expected this could happen so fast,” wrote G. Deyanov, Lath Operator at shop No. 1.

As Boris Chertok, who worked closely with Sergey Korolev, later wrote in his book “Rockets and People”, the trickiest part was that at the point of deployment, the launching system and the spacecraft were elements of a single dynamic system. The rocket’s movement could not be analyzed without taking into ac- count the behavior of the launching pad, and the dynamics of the pad’s working parts could only be analyzed together with the rocket position indicators.

A solution to this challenge was found at Leningradsky Metallichesky Zavod. Here, the new building of Steam-Turbine shop No. 21 (known today as No. 201), where major caliber gun mounts for the Navy were, at the time, produced, had the required high-bay area, embedding depth and erecting cranes.

According to Boris Chertok, in the autumn of 1956 the launching system was delivered to LMZ instead of the launch site. Here, it was as- sembled and tried out by a team of specialists, including the plant workers. The experiment also required another manufacturing facility to construct full-scale mock-ups of all the assemblies made at LMZ. In Leningrad, the rocket met its launching system for the first time. Once all preparatory work was complete, a test “launch” was held – the spacecraft was lifted not with its engines, but with a crane.

The process of testing the rocket and the launching system continued day and night. Over several hundred faults in the project and design, as well as errors in operational documentation, were identified and corrected. Sergey Korolev himself visited the plant to monitor the process.

“Hundreds of design engineers, constructors, project engineers and military men were bustling about sawing, welding, reassembling all sorts of rocket parts; they were writing stuff down, discussing and debating about various issues,” Boris Chertok recalls.

“In the area of shop No. 33 where heat treatment of impellers takes place, metal structures of Gagarin’s spacecraft were as- sembled and welded,” says Vladimir Brainin, Lead Engineer at the Principal Welder Department of LMZ, and the plant’s employee since 1959. “A special platform was constructed for production of assemblies for the rocket; there were spot wielding machines and a huge pavilion tent. You could only enter the tent if you had a special pass, which a sentry always checked.”