Voskhod 1 - Background

Background

The original prime crew of cosmonauts for Voskhod 1, composed of Boris Volynov, Georgi Katys, and Boris Yegorov, was rejected just three days before the scheduled launch date for the space capsule, reportedly due to the State Commission's discovery that Volynov's mother was Jewish.

Politics played a role in the crew's selection. Beyond Volynov's Jewish mother, Katys' father had been arrested (like Chief Designer Sergey Korolyov) and shot during the Great Purge. Various factions each supported their own representatives for the flight. Korolyov wanted his engineers to become cosmonauts, believing that spacecraft designers should fly in their own vehicles. The Soviet Air Force agreed to a crew composed of a military pilot, an engineer or scientist, and a doctor, but advocated for an all-military crew. Konstantin Feoktistov, who had been a design engineer for the Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz programs, was selected for this flight, becoming the only Soviet outer space designer to make a spaceflight. Yegorov, a medical doctor, used his political influence to get selected for the crew through his father's Politburo connections. The Soviet space program viewed its crews as passengers more than pilots; the new cosmonauts received only three to four months of training, perhaps the briefest in space history other than that received by the American politicians Jake Garn and Bill Nelson for Space Shuttle flights in the 1980s.