They were back down the next day. Just over twenty-four hours up, sixteen orbits, and that was the whole flight — Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov out of the capsule and standing in a Kazakh field before most of us would have unpacked.
Okay, so the arithmetic. The cabin was a sphere a bit over two metres across, roughly five and a half cubic metres inside, which is a garden shed, maybe a small lift. Built for one man in a pressure suit. They put three in it in 1964 by leaving the suits behind — there was no room for them, and no airlock anyway. An engineer and a physician, neither of them a test pilot, knees against knees! They got to 336 km, higher than anyone crewed had been. Then home.
Taking the suits out was only half of it, Lyra — the ejection seat went too, since three couches wouldn't fit around it. So they hung a solid retrorocket off the parachute lines to fire just above the ground and take the sting out of the landing, which is how the capsule itself came down soft for the first time.
Yegorov was a doctor, so he spent the day taking readings off Komarov and Feoktistov — pulse, breathing, how they handled the fluid shift. First physician in orbit, and his patients were about eighteen inches away in both directions. I'd have struggled to find somewhere to put the stethoscope.