Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (50th Anniversary Edition)

⁸ THE SPACE RACE

Yuri Gagarin’s short journey through space was one of the most important events of the twentieth century – not for Russia, but for America, where an industrial shake-up of colossal proportions was unleashed in response. It was not just Velcro fabric and the non-stick frying pan that emerged as a result of the Space Race, but the entire fabric of modern technology. Microchips were developed because 1950s’ circuitry was not small enough to fit inside rockets and missiles. The Internet emerged from an attack-proof communications network laid down by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a pre-NASA government department that planned, among other things, for America’s future in space). Modern diagnostic medicine owes an incalculable debt to the research conducted by the space doctors. The development of the global communications industry – for so long a science-fiction dream – happened with incredible speed after the invention of satellites. In all likelihood these technologies would have come along of their own accord, but probably nothing like as fast as they did. And all because a farmboy from Smolensk laid down a challenge to the most powerful nation on earth.

Dr John Logsdon, who heads the Space Policy Institute in Washington, DC, and has advised a succession of Presidents, explains the impact of Gagarin’s flight on the American psyche. ‘It was a sudden rebalancing of our power relationship with the Soviet Union, because of the clear demonstration that – if they wanted to – they could send a nuclear warhead across intercontinental distances, right into the heart of “Fortress America”. There was an uproar: how did we get beaten by this supposedly backward country?’

President Kennedy had not taken space particularly seriously until now, but on the evening of April 14, 1961 he was deeply agitated at the global response to Gagarin’s flight. He paced his office at the White House, asking his advisors, ‘What can we do? How can we catch up?’ Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner cautiously suggested a three-month study period to assess the situation, but the President wanted a more urgent response. ‘If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody – anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows how.’ He deliberately made these remarks within earshot of Hugh Sidey, a senior journalist from Life magazine. All of a sudden the President wanted to be seen as an advocate for space.[1]

Three days later Kennedy suffered another, more serious defeat. A 1,300-strong force of exiled Cubans, supported by the CIA, landed at the ‘Bay of Pigs’ in Cuba, with the intention of destroying Fidel Castro’s communist regime. Kennedy had personally approved the scheme, but Castro’s troops learned of the operation well ahead of time and were waiting on the beaches. The raid was a total disaster, because the CIA failed to deliver the promised support. Contrary to all expectations, the ‘subjugated’ population of Cuba showed absolutely no desire to participate in Castro’s overthrow. To the CIA’s lasting embarrassment, no attempt was made to rescue the invaders.

The Kennedy administration seemed to be faltering in its first 100 days, the traditional ‘honeymoon’ period during which a new president is supposed to shake things up and make his mark. Kennedy immediately turned to space as a means of reviving his credibility. In a pivotal memo of April 20, he asked Vice-President Lyndon Johnson to prepare a thorough survey of America’s rocket effort:[2]

This single-page document can be read either as one of the most sensational directives of the twentieth century or as a hastily dictated panic response to a bad week at the White House, but without doubt it laid the foundations for the largest technological endeavour since the wartime ‘Manhattan’ development of the atomic bomb: the Apollo lunar landing project.

NASA’s chief administrator James Webb certainly believed that the Soviets could beat America at the short-term goals outlined in Kennedy’s famous memo, such as orbital rendezvous and simple space stations. He suggested a landing on the moon as a longer-range goal, requiring such a tremendous input of resources and technical development that, in all likelihood, the Soviets could not match it. Webb persuaded Kennedy and Johnson to take the longer view, because the short-term battle for rocket supremacy was already lost.[3]

A final decision hinged on NASA literally getting their manned space programme off the ground. On May 5, just twenty-three days after Gagarin had flown, US astronaut Alan Shepard was launched atop a small Redstone booster. His flight was not a full orbit, merely a ballistic ‘hop’ of fifteen minutes’ duration. In contrast to Vostok’s orbital velocity of 25,000 kmph, Shepard’s Mercury achieved only 8,300 kmph. Vostok girdled the globe, while the Mercury splashed down into the Atlantic just 510 kilometres from its launch site. But this cannonball flight was enough to prove NASA’s basic capabilities.

Immediately in the wake of Shepard’s successful flight, Webb made good use of the opportunity to strengthen NASA’s position. His budget advisors within the space agency suggested that he should keep the cost estimates for a moon project as low as possible, if he was to obtain presidential approval, but Webb did not agree. Instead, in one of the most talented administrative bluffs ever attempted by a US civil servant, he doubled the estimates and presented them to Kennedy with an absolutely straight face. It represented a colossal sum of money: upwards of $20 billion in 1960s’ dollars, projected to be spread over the next eight years.

Stunned by the figures involved, Kennedy nevertheless decided to support Apollo. In a historic speech before Congress on May 25, 1961 he said, ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.’

Meanwhile, Webb and Johnson, canny southern politicians both, began to lay down a subtle and far-reaching network of aerospace contract pledges, construction schemes and political patronage to ensure funding approval for Apollo across forty states. Within four years, NASA’s spending would command 5 per cent of the nation’s entire annual federal budget, and would employ upwards of 250,000 people from coast to coast. Webb called his financial bluff an ‘administrator’s discount’. Modern NASA was built on his belief that the agency had only this one chance to establish itself as a permanent feature of national life, before the momentum for space exploration slackened off. He was quite right. Over the last four decades no other President since Kennedy has been so supportive, nor so willing to spend money on space.[4]

All this happened because Alan Shepard flew just twenty-three days later than Yuri Gagarin. John Logsdon raises a fascinating conjecture. ‘The flight that Shepard made on May 5 1961, just three weeks after Gagarin, should have happened in March, but a previous Mercury test on January 31 had a chimpanzee called “Ham” on board. The retro-rockets fired late, sending Ham [210 kilometres] downrange of the correct splashdown zone, and it took several hours to recover him – which made for one very unhappy chimpanzee, by the way. The technical problem was very simple, very easy to fix, but they had to do another test of the Mercury before committing a human. So it’s an interesting question: what would have happened if Gagarin had been second? I think history would have worked out very differently.’

But Gagarin was first, and the American reaction was inevitable, particularly given the President’s driven personality. Logsdon says, ‘This wasn’t a Soviet success, but an American failure. I don’t think it was just a question of Kennedy’s responding to public opinion [about Gagarin]. I think he had his own very personal reaction. He always had a very strong need to be first. He was a very competitive person… Perhaps he was looking for an opportunity to show leadership and take some kind of bold action.’

Hugo Young, a journalist from the London Times, observed something similar in 1969:

Science advisor Jerome Wiesner surrendered to the inevitable, although he still could not see the point of spending such colossal sums on Apollo. He salved his conscience by forcing a promise from Kennedy. ‘I told him the least he could do was never to refer publicly to the moon landing as a scientific enterprise, and he never did so.’[6]

The West quickly developed an obsession with the Space Race, much to the bemusement of cosmonaut Gherman Titov and his friends. ‘What kind of race were they talking about? There wasn’t a race, because we Russians were already ahead of the entire planet.’

Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo did not immediately respond to Kennedy’s speech with their own moon project. Instead, Khrushchev pressured Korolev for short-term rocket ‘spectaculars’, in the hope of demoralizing the American space effort before it became totally unstoppable. In the longer term, the Soviet economy could not hope to match America’s staggering budgets for Apollo. However, as long as he continued to deliver results with Vostok and with his converted R-7 missile, Korolev could count on the Kremlin’s continuing support for space exploration.

For the time being, NASA was also relying on converted weapon launchers rather than custom-made space boosters. On July 21, 1961 astronaut Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom flew another sub-orbital curve in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone ballistic missile, reaching an altitude of 190 kilometres. His mission nearly ended in disaster when the small hatchway on the capsule blew off shortly after he splashed down. He clambered out of the waterlogged craft without his helmet, and water poured down his neck ring and into his spacesuit. He tried to signal the approaching rescue helicopters for help and was amazed to see them flying over the capsule, instead of coming directly to his aid. The helicopter pilots thought Grissom was waving, not drowning. Ignoring him completely, they concentrated on trying to hoist the capsule out of the water before it sank, but it was now so heavy with water that it threatened to pull the helicopter down. Eventually Grissom was rescued, while his capsule sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, beyond all hope of recovery. NASA downplayed the fact that their astronaut was almost lost at sea and hailed Grissom’s mission as a near-perfect success.

On August 6, Gherman Titov took off from Baikonur and flew seventeen orbits aboard the second manned Vostok, staying aloft for twenty-four hours and flying the ship manually for a short period. ‘When I was launched, my wife [Tamara] went into the forest to pick some mushrooms. It was a Sunday, and she disappeared on purpose, to get away from all the journalists asking her annoying questions.’ Titov was extremely nauseous during his flight, the heating in the cabin broke down so that he nearly froze, and his retro-pack did not separate cleanly before re-entry, which gave him some cause for concern: ‘Whether you need this, eh?’ His ejection and landing in the Saratov region were also hazardous, as he recalls today. ‘Under my parachute I passed about fifty metres from a railway line, and I thought I was going to hit the train that was passing. Then, about five metres from the ground, a gust of wind turned me around so that I was moving backwards when I hit the ground, and I rolled over three times. The wind was brisk and it caught the parachute again, so I was dragged along the ground. When I opened my helmet, the rim of the faceplate was scooping up soil. You know, the farmers in Saratov had done their ploughing quite well that season, otherwise my landing would have been even harder.’

The train screeched to a stop, and a small crowd of people jumped out and ran towards Titov, who recalls that he was not in the best of moods by then. ‘I said to them, “What are you staring at? Help me take off my spacesuit. I’m very tired.” There was supposed to be a clean lightweight overall for me to get into, but as usual somebody forgot to pack it in my emergency kit.’

A civilian woman arrived by car, who she had been in such a hurry to drive into the field that she drove over a pothole and banged her head on the steering wheel. To his bemusement, Titov found himself applying the bandages from his emergency space medical kit to her wound.

Sick, exhausted, bruised, befuddled but alive, Titov was the first man to spend an entire day in space, and the first to make multiple orbits around the earth. Perhaps he can take additional satisfaction from beating Gagarin at his own game. Saratov is 1,500 kilometres away from Baikonur, which means that Gagarin’s historic but incomplete first orbit on April 12 fell short by that distance; so Titov was actually the first man to complete a whole orbit. With all the fuss in the aerospace history books about Gagarin’s ‘altitude record’, this detail seems to have slipped everyone’s attention.

Titov is philosophical about the hazards that he and Gagarin endured aboard the temperamental Vostoks. ‘I can’t say I was ready for any of it, but we couldn’t train for these malfunctions, because with so few flights behind us, nobody knew what kind of things could go wrong. Yuri and I came up with our own emergency manual [for Vostok] and we tried to anticipate all the things that could create difficulties. I can tell you, that manual was a pretty thin document. When you drive a car, you have to expect a puncture at some point. Machines in motion have a right to go wrong.’

One week after Titov’s landing, construction of the Berlin Wall began. According to Korolev’s biographer James Harford, Khrushchev ordered the timing of Titov’s flight deliberately to encourage the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in its loyalty to Moscow.[7] However, there was more to the relationship between Khrushchev and Kennedy than simple-minded East–West aggression. It is now becoming clear that the two men considered the possibility of collaboration in space. John Logsdon, who has researched this issue, says, ‘Kennedy was ambivalent about space even after he’d announced Apollo. In his Inaugural Address he suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union should explore space together, and that wasn’t simply rhetoric. He created a group of advisors to look for ways of increasing cooperation… He sent feelers through his brother Bobby into back channels at the Kremlin… We’re learning now that Khrushchev was ready to say, “Yes, let’s explore, let’s do it together.” If those two men had survived, history might have been different, but Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, a very strong nationalist, and Khrushchev was ousted by Brezhnev, who was far more militaristic… The contingency of history is that you end up with things as they happened, not as they might have been.’

NASA considered a third sub-orbital mission to qualify Mercury for more demanding missions, but the puny Redstone rocket’s more powerful replacement, the Atlas (a fully fledged ICBM), was now ready to take a capsule into a full orbit, and the sub-orbital ‘hop’ schedule was cancelled. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn completed three full orbits and was applauded by US citizens, just as Gagarin had been in Russia. NASA also began testing unmanned prototypes for their giant Saturn lunar rockets. Admittedly they were only half the size of the superboosters that would eventually carry Apollo to the moon, but already they were close to outstripping the power of Korolev’s R-7.

Korolev urgently needed to develop a successor for Vostok, which was limited in its capabilities, but Khrushchev wanted further triumphs within weeks and months, not years. Andrian Nikolayev was launched on August 11, 1962 for a four-day mission, and Pavel Popovich went up the very next day for a three-day stint. For the first time two people were in space simultaneously. Korolev timed the launches so that the second Vostok would briefly come within seven kilometres of the first: a cosmic clay-pigeon shoot, which enabled the Soviets to claim a ‘space rendezvous’. In fact, the two craft quickly drifted apart and could never have regained their initial close formation. Their small rocket motors lay dormant throughout the flight, conserving fuel for re-entry braking at the end of the mission. However, appearances counted for a great deal. A number of aerospace professionals in the West were fooled into thinking that the Soviets had developed genuine rendezvous skills. In a 1995 interview with space historian James Harford, Vasily Mishin (who succeeded Korolev as chief of the OKB-1 Design Bureau in 1966) said, ‘With all the secrecy we had in those days, we didn’t tell the whole truth… As they say, a sleight of hand isn’t exactly a fraud. It was more like, our competitors [in the West] deceived themselves all on their own. Of course we didn’t want to shatter their illusions.’

The double Vostok mission seemed far in advance of American achievements. NASA launched astronaut Scott Carpenter on May 24, but it was hard not to see Mercury as a ‘second-best’ programme, by comparison with the remorseless originality of the Soviet missions. Even in the immediate wake of the Vostok double-flight, NASA’s response was simply ‘more of the same’, with an October 3 mission for Walter Schirra lasting just nine hours.

A few days later, US spy planes photographed Soviet missiles in secret bases on Cuba, and public attention in that terrifying autumn of 1962 turned from space to the very real prospect of global nuclear war – not as some dim and distant prospect but as a horror that might be unleashed at any moment. President Kennedy initiated a naval blockade of all Soviet shipping approaching Cuba. Given the stark alternatives – a formal US invasion of Cuba or an air strike against the missile bases – the blockade seemed the least dangerous of several extremely high-risk strategies available to him. As is now clear from recently released tapes of White House crisis meetings, Kennedy and his staff went to bed on the night of October 23 not knowing if they, or anyone else in the world, would be alive next morning. Kennedy and Khrushchev very nearly backed themselves into a corner from which they could not withdraw.

Boris Chertok, a senior rocket engineer, recalls in an interview with James Harford that another attempt to launch a Mars probe from Baikonur that fateful October was interrupted when the military ordered Chertok ‘to get the launch vehicle off the pad so they could replace it with an ICBM, because there was some kind of a national emergency. The military was using all the phone links, so I couldn’t get hold of Korolev, who was at home in Moscow ill with a cold. They told me I’d be court-marshalled if I didn’t move the Mars rocket away from the pad, and they began to check the systems on their missile. Only Korolev could have got through to Khrushchev to countermand these terrible instructions.’[8]

Chertok flew to Moscow and went to Korolev’s house, where the Chief Designer solved the problem with a quick call to the Kremlin. By a horrible irony, when the Mars probe was launched on October 24, right in the middle of the Cuban crisis, it blew up, causing the ultra-alert US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) to suspect a nuclear attack. Fortunately, the BMEWS tracking computers got to grips with the situation within a few seconds, and a counterstrike was not initiated.

Another terrible irony: the catastrophic R-16 missile explosion at Baikonur on October 24, 1960, which killed 190 people, may have precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Quite apart from the vainglorious Marshal Nedelin, a significant number of skilled military missile engineers died that day, and the development of a credible intercontinental Soviet nuclear-strike capability was severely delayed by their loss. For the time being, US strategic targets could not be reached from within the Soviet Union. The one fully functioning ICBM available to Khrushchev was the Chief Designer’s R-7, which took too long to prepare for launch and was not available in sufficient numbers to pose much of a threat. The missiles despatched to Cuba were simpler and less powerful battlefield nuclear weapons: small, numerous, easy to launch, but capable only of short flights.

Once the Cuban crisis was over, Khrushchev may have thought it better to carry on playing harmless space games with the Americans rather than risk all-out nuclear confrontation on the ground. As far as can be judged, the next orbital propaganda coup seems mainly to have been his idea. He wanted Korolev to launch the kind of person no one had thought of before: a woman.

By 1962, up to 400 women candidates had been screened for a possible space flight. On February 16, five were selected for training. In keeping with Khrushchev’s orders, the women were chosen from the ranks of peasants and factory workers, rather than from specialist scientific or academic professions. The most suitable candidates were those who could combine humble origins with at least some kind of suitability for space flight. It just so happened that parachuting was becoming a popular hobby for many ordinary women in those days. The most favoured candidate to emerge for space training was Valentina Tereshkova, a 25-year-old parachuting champion with fifty-eight jumps to her credit. Tereshkova’s father, a tractor driver on a collective farm, was killed in action during the war. Her mother became a weaver in a textile plant, and Valentina herself learned a similar trade. She was ideal for Khrushchev’s purposes: fit, handsome, sufficiently smart for the intellectual challenges of space training, but not so advanced in her education that she could not safely represent the ordinary peasant and working classes.[9]

Gherman Titov remembers how the female cosmonauts were greeted with distrust when they arrived at Star City. ‘Frankly speaking, we didn’t believe that womenfolk belonged anywhere near a flying machine. At that time, we thought that only men could carry out all the tasks involved in space flight. When the first women arrived, my feelings were negative. As everyone knows, Titov states his opinions on everything! But in the end we saw it was quite correct to have female cosmonauts, and we soon thought of them as good fellows, just like us.’

At last Yuri Gagarin was reassigned to a meaningful work schedule. At Star City he was appointed to head the female cosmonauts’ training programme, in conjunction with his cosmonaut colleague and friend Andrian Nikolayev. On July 12, 1962 he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, and eased his way back into the rhythm of real work by serving as prime radio communicator (what NASA would call a ‘CapCom’) during Nikolayev and Popov’s double Vostok flight in August. Then he laid down an intensive physical training regime for his five female students (though he was still called away at intervals for yet more foreign trips).

By now, the training for a fully automated Vostok mission was not particularly difficult. Tereshkova’s eventual flight on June 16, 1963 presented very few fresh technical challenges. She made a close approach to another Vostok carrying Valery Bykovsky, but, as with the previous double-flight, the real trick was in the timing of the respective launches. However, her success gave Khrushchev the opportunity he was waiting for – to gloat about ‘the equality of men and women in our country’. Once this propagandist experiment was successfully completed, the women’s cosmonaut squad was quietly disbanded. On November 3, 1963 Tereshkova and Nikolayev were married in Moscow in a very public ceremony. It was the social event of the season, much enjoyed by Khrushchev. Three days later Gagarin was promoted to full Colonel. It seemed as if his career was progressing, but, as he would discover, higher rank could hinder as well as help him in his quest for another flight into space.

Bykovsky and Tereshkova’s double-flight was the last mission for Vostok in its current configuration. By the summer of 1963 there was no longer any need for the Soviets to compete with America’s Mercury. After launching Gordon Cooper for a 34-hour mission on May 15, 1963, NASA decided that the programme had nothing else to prove. What more could these simple one-man capsules possibly accomplish?

In fact, NASA was planning to use a new missile, the ‘Titan’, developed by the US Air Force and reluctantly hired out on licence. Titan’s fuel tank and outer skin were one and the same component, which saved weight. On the launch pad, the rocket was so flimsy that it could only stand upright if it was pressurized with inert gas, but it was so powerful in relation to its weight that it could carry a payload much heavier than the Mercury capsule.

NASA knew that its three-man Apollo moonship and its huge Saturn V rocket were years away from a first flight. So far they had only designers’ mock-ups, not real hardware, to play with. Meanwhile, an interim vehicle was developed: a cross between the simplicity of Mercury and the complexity of the emerging Apollo. ‘Gemini’ was a two-man capsule designed to mate with the Titan missile. It incorporated ejection seats and hatches that could be opened in orbit to allow for spacewalks. The design was familiar to Korolev from NASA’s open literature.

By 1963 the Gemini capsules were under construction at the McDonnell Douglas plant in California, but none of them had actually flown yet. Korolev was anxious to start work on a successor to Vostok, a larger capsule to match or even surpass NASA’s new design. If he could launch what appeared to be a multi-man craft before the first Gemini was launched, then he would gain political support for building a genuinely more powerful competitor. Certainly Khrushchev wanted him to conjure up a three-man mission as soon as possible, to trump Gemini and embarrass the Apollo effort, although the extent to which he supported the taking of risks with cosmonauts’ lives to achieve this goal cannot be judged today. Khrushchev is often blamed for pushing Korolev into hazardous decisions, but he could not possibly have decided all the technical details. He must have trusted the Chief Designer’s judgement as to whether or not a particular space project was safe.

Korolev took a risk. He decided to adapt the current Vostok hardware to carry two cosmonauts in the same ball – and even three, if they gave up their spacesuits. This new seating arrangement was purely cosmetic; it did not make the Vostok any better, just more cramped and significantly more dangerous. The bulky ejection seats had to be sacrificed in order to make room for the extra men, and if anything went wrong on the launch pad, there was no chance of escape. The new scheme was called ‘Voskhod’ (‘Sunrise’).

Despite its dangers, Voskhod would eventually prove capable of maintaining the Soviet lead, thereby adding impetus to Apollo, and also to Korolev’s ambitious plans for his own moon shot. Vasily Mishin, his eventual successor at OKB-1, insists that the Chief Designer made a man-to-man deal with Khrushchev. Korolev would develop a multi-crew programme at very short notice in return for Khrushchev’s approval for a giant new rocket, the N-1, a superbooster almost the equivalent of NASA’s Saturn V.

By 1964 the space effort was securely established on both sides of the superpower divide. In August the Politburo approved development of the N-1, as well as two competing projects generated by Korolev’s rivals in other sectors of the Soviet space industry. Ultimately this confusion, and Korolev’s early death in 1966, would doom the Soviet moon programme to failure, but in the summer of 1964 almost all the cosmonauts were gearing up for ever more elaborate flights, with real hopes of planting their feet in lunar soil. To his dismay, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin found that he was no longer qualified to join in the fun.

It was not merely that his public duties were taking him away from his real work at Star City. Back in 1961 he had done something very foolish, only a few months after his historic flight, when he took a holiday and fell from grace.