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

⁶ 108 MINUTES

An hour before the launch, Korolev came on the link. ‘Yuri Alexeyevich, how are you hearing me? I need to tell you something.’

‘Receiving you loud and clear.’

‘I just want to remind you that after the one-minute readiness is announced, there’ll be about six minutes before you actually take off, so don’t worry about it.’

‘I read you. I’m absolutely not worried.’

‘There’ll be six minutes for all sorts of things, you know.’ He meant that a minor instrument problem had created a six-minute delay in the launch sequence.

Then cosmonaut Popovich came on the line. ‘Hey, can you guess who’s this talking to you?’

‘Sure, it’s “Lily of the Valley!”’

‘Yuri, are you getting bored in there?’

‘If there was some music, I could stand it a little better.’[1]

Concerned for every last detail of the flight, Korolev took care of this personally, ordering his technicians to find some tapes or records and set something up straight away.

‘Haven’t they given you some music yet?’ he asked a few minutes later.

‘Nothing so far.’

‘Damned musicians. They dither about and the whole thing is sooner said than done.’

‘Oh, now they’ve done it. They’ve put on a love song.’

‘Good choice, I’d say.’

8.41. Gagarin felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut; the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. ‘Yuri, we’re going down to the control bunker now. There’ll be a five-minute pause and then I’ll talk to you again.’

8.51. The music stopped. Korolev’s deep, stern voice on the link, all seriousness now. ‘Yuri, the fifteen-minute mark.’ This was the signal for Gagarin to seal his gloves and swing down the transparent visor on his helmet. In these last minutes before lift-off there was no NASA-style 5–4–3–2–1 ‘countdown’ on the public-address system (and no public-address system). The rocket would be fired at the appointed instant: 9.06 a.m. Moscow Time. Vostok’s guidance expert Yuri Mazzhorin says, ‘The Americans only counted down to add drama for their television.’ Gagarin’s final seconds on the ground were almost anti-climactic.

‘Launch key to “go” position.’

‘Air purging.’

‘Idle run.’

‘Ignition.’

All kinds of vibrations now, high whinings and low rumbles. At some point Gagarin knew he must have lifted off, but the exact moment was elusive, identified with precision only by the electrical relays of the gantry’s hold-down arms as they moved aside, the four sturdy clamps disconnecting from the rocket’s flanks within a single hundredth of a second of each other. Gagarin lay rigid in his seat and tensed his muscles. At any moment something could go wrong with the booster, the hatch above his head might fly away and his ejection charges punch him out into the morning sky like a bullet. This ‘life-saving’ jolt might kill him – crunch his spine; snap his neck like a chicken’s; the hatchway’s rim might snag his knees and tear them right off. He had to be prepared.

The g-load climbing. No emergency ejection yet… He didn’t remember it later, but they told him he shouted out, ‘Poyekhali!’ – ‘Let’s go!’ His officially sanctioned account of the lift-off in The Road to the Stars clearly shows his fascination with the launch:

‘T-plus seventy.’

‘I read you, seventy. I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing. All is well.’

‘T-plus one hundred. How do you feel?’

‘I feel fine. How about you?’

Two minutes into the flight Gagarin was finding it a little hard to speak into his radio microphone. The g-forces were pulling at his face muscles, ‘but really this was not so difficult. The stress was hardly more severe than in a MiG doing a tight turn,’ he recalled afterwards. There was a strange moment when all the weight lifted and he was thrown violently forwards against his straps. A shudder told him that the R-7’s four side-slung boosters were falling away. The ‘Little Seven’ paused in its acceleration, as if taking a big breath before the final spurt. Then the central core picked up the pace and the sensation of great weight returned.

At three minutes, the nose fairing fired its pyrotechnic charges, pulling away to expose the ball. Gagarin caught a glimpse of dark blue, high-altitude sky through his portholes. Now he became slightly annoyed at the brightness of the television lamp, which made him squint if his head was tilted a certain way – when he was trying to look out of a porthole, for example.

Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of roubles-worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground. Vostok climbed the rest of the way into orbit atop a stunted upper stage, with just one small rocket engine. Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never travelled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘the eerie silence of outer space’. The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system, and yet more fans behind the instrument panels to cool the electrical circuits. Anyway, Gagarin’s ears were covered with microphones hissing with their own special static, or with ground control’s ceaseless demands for news. ‘Weightlessness has begun,’ he reported. ‘It’s not at all unpleasant, and I’m feeling fine.’

Vostok was rotating gently, partly so as not to waste thruster fuel on unnecessary maneouvres, and partly to prevent the sun from heating any surface area of the craft for too long. Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upwards out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball, before drifting downwards out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again – the horizon not straight, but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.

Travelling eastwards, ever eastwards, flying at eight kilometres per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!’

As Vostok swept over Siberia, less than twenty minutes after launch, its steeply tilted orbit carried it to the Arctic Circle, then over the north-eastern hemisphere and towards the North Pacific. At Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, almost on the extreme east of the Soviet subcontinent, a remote radio monitoring station calculated Vostok’s speed and altitude from the incoming telemetry. This would be the final opportunity for accurate measurements before the less well-equipped sea-borne stations took over. Alexei Leonov had arrived at Petropavlovsk a day or two before Kamanin and the State Committee at Baikonur had made the final cosmonaut selection for the flight. As Leonov waited for Vostok’s signals, including the crude television picture from within its cabin, he had no idea which of his friends would be in there. ‘When Yuri flew, there wasn’t a central mission-control complex like the one we have today [at Kaliningrad, north-east of Moscow]. Therefore a number of cosmonauts, familiarized with all aspects of the mission, were disbursed among all the major radio listening posts around the Soviet Union, and as part of that operation I came to Petropavlovsk. I had a small television monitor, and when I saw the picture coming back from Vostok I didn’t know if it was Yuri or Gherman, but then I saw some body movements that were characteristic of Yuri. As soon as we made contact he heard my voice and said, “Hi, to the blond man!” That was his nickname for me.’

Petropavlovsk received the telemetry from Vostok, and the signals were laboriously keyed into a secure code, then relayed over ground links to Moscow, where Yuri Mazzhorin, Academician Keldysh and a squad of computer operators unscrambled the codes and fed the data into their gigantic machines.

Petropavlovsk’s window of opportunity for radio contact was very brief. Less than thirty minutes after launching into Baikonur’s early morning, Vostok swept over the Pacific, into the vast shadow of earth’s sleeping half. Down below, the Americans were asleep. Their night-shrouded continents, North and South, sped beneath the ship, and Gagarin would have noted them only as geographers’ rumours on his little navigation globe. Now, in this darkest realm, he could see the stars. They were sharp and bright, and did not flicker. There were more stars than he had ever seen from the ground, even on the clearest winter nights.

As its tilted orbit carried Vostok into the southern hemisphere, it sped over Cape Horn and across the South Atlantic. The ground controllers instructed Gagarin to make his switch settings for the re-entry procedure. He checked the ‘Vzor’ to confirm that the systems had aligned the ship correctly, with the retro-rockets pointing against the direction of travel and aimed above the horizon at a certain precise angle. But Gagarin did not have many switches to alter. It was more a question of telling the controllers on earth what the ship around him was doing of its own accord. As far as any published account shows, he never once touched the controls, or punched the three secret numbers into his keypad.

At 10.25 Moscow Time, seventy-nine minutes into the flight, Vostok’s retro-rockets began their deceleration burn precisely on time, just as the craft was sweeping over West Africa, firing for exactly forty seconds, then shutting down correctly. This was the last duty required of the equipment and retropack module behind the ball. The four metal wrap-around straps that held the ball in place were snapped apart by small explosive charges. Gagarin felt the ball twist violently as it came away.

The first phase of the de-orbit burn went according to plan. And in a quiet moment, while the automatic systems ran through their paces, Gagarin began to realize the enormity of what he had done.

No, his family had not been prepared for the news, because of the secrecy that surrounded the whole mission. Gagarin had been allowed to inform Valya, but he misled her with a white lie, saying that he was going up on April 14, so that she would not worry on the real launch day.

Zoya was getting ready for her shift at the main hospital in Gzhatsk when the news exploded. ‘It was very difficult for us. We found it out from the radio. Yuri had told mother he was going on a business trip. When mother asked, “How far?” he said, “Very far”, so we didn’t know where he was going, or when.’ In fact, they had not intended to switch on the radio that morning. Zoya’s young son (another Yuri) was doing his homework and needed to concentrate. Anna was quietly cooking. As Zoya recalls, ‘Suddenly Valentin’s wife Maria came hurrying through the door, out of breath. “Yura!” she said. Mamma became very still. “Tell me, what is it – has he crashed?” And Maria said, “No, not yet.” Looking back, it was quite comical, although we were very worried. Maria finally explained, “He’s in space!” I lost my temper without thinking. “My God, he’s got two young daughters, how did he decide to do that? He must be crazy!” I said.’

But Anna remained perfectly calm. She reached for her coat. ‘I’ll go to see Valya in Moscow. She’ll be alone with the children.’

She was calm, but she wasn’t thinking straight, either. Of course she could not just walk out of the door and go to Moscow. She had to get herself to the railway station several kilometres away. Perhaps Valentin could organize a lift for her.

Then they turned on the radio.

Anna put on her quilted coat and best headscarf, then left to see about a train ticket. Zoya contacted her hospital and told them she felt too unwell to work. ‘A neighbour came into the house to sit with us, and we listened to the radio. The music with the news reports was cheerful, and we felt a little more at ease. Then the music stopped, and the announcer said that the name of Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was to be included in the Komsomol Central Committee Roll of Honour. “That’s what they do for dead people,” I thought.’

Much to Zoya’s relief, the TASS radio reports resumed their cheerful tone, and the music came on again, a patriotic march. The announcer said that Gagarin had landed safely. ‘It seemed like a huge rock had fallen off my shoulders,’ Zoya recalls.

Valentin Gagarin, who lived just next door, was strolling down the road towards work, after spending an hour’s lunch break at home, when he heard the news somewhat indirectly. Suddenly his little daughter Olya called after him, ‘Papa, come back quickly! Mamma’s crying!’

There was a flurry of shouting and rushing from one house to another. Yura was in space, and Anna needed someone to drive her to the station so that she could get to Moscow …

For Valentin, it was the parked trucks that made it seem real. He was working in the motor pool. When he reported to the office, he found something strange going on – or, rather, not going on. ‘All the trucks were lined up in readiness for their rounds, as usual. The doors of the maintenance shed were open, but none of the drivers were sitting in their cabs. Every engine was switched off. The managers waiting at the other end of the routes weren’t calling in to complain about their missing loads. But they always called… Nobody in the motor pool was moving. Valentin went to the foreman to see about some time off to take his mother to the station. My boss said, “Can’t you see? None of the drivers are working today because they’re all listening to the radio about your little brother in space.” So I asked: could I borrow a truck for an hour? In his excitement he yelled at the top of his voice, “Yes, take any truck you like. Take the nearest and go!” I climbed into a fuel tanker because it was the first vehicle I found with the keys still in the ignition.’

Valentin picked Anna up near the old electrical sub-station. They had fifteen minutes before the Moscow train was due to leave. As they approached the station there was some confusion with a local motorbike policeman, who wanted to know why Valentin was in such a tearing hurry. When it transpired that he had the First Cosmonaut’s mother in his truck, things went more smoothly. The train was already pulling away from the platform, but the stationmaster quickly put out a signal to stop it. ‘Mother got aboard, and the ticket officer ran into the carriage also, because in her distraction she’d forgotten to collect her change.’

His nerves thoroughly rattled, Valentin now had to go straight away to the district Party office, because there were many phone calls to answer.

For his part, Yuri’s father Alexei Gagarin had left the house very early that morning. There was a job on at the collective farm near Klushino, their old home village. He was contentedly going about his business when another farm worker came up to him and started asking strange questions about his son Yuri. ‘What’s it to you?’ Alexei demanded warily.[4]

‘Didn’t you hear? On the radio they said that Major Gagarin is flying in space.’

‘No, my son’s only a Senior Lieutenant. Still, good luck to our namesake, eh?’

All the same, it was a strange coincidence. Alexei thought he might just stroll over to the local Soviet (elected council), for a few minutes and see what was what. When he arrived and popped his head round the door, he found the place crowded and noisy. Local Soviet chairman Vasily Biryukov was busy on the telephone, talking to a district Party official in Gzhatsk. The official was saying, ‘We must find out where the cosmonaut was born. Is he in your village records?’

‘I don’t need any records!’ Biryukov shouted excitedly, ‘I’ve got his dad in the room with me! Here, I’ll give him the line.’[5]

Startled, unprepared, Alexei took the receiver. Now that he understood what was going on, he was too emotional to speak.

The Gzhatsk officials wanted Alexei to come there straight away, but Gzhatsk and Klushino were completely cut off from each other just now. The spring floods had swept away all the roads. Alexei’s lame leg and general health made it difficult for him to walk too far, so Biryukov organized transport by horse over the wettest mud. Then they sat him on the back of a tractor and made a short-cut over the fields, leaving out the drowned roads altogether. One way and another his proud companions got Alexei back to Gzhatsk, where he joined Valentin and Boris in the local Party office, answering a seemingly endless stream of phone calls.

Valentin remembers, ‘Each of us was given an office and a phone. A secretary of the Regional Soviet asked, ‘For God’s sake, can you answer questions about biography? We can’t cope with the incoming calls. You see, people will be asking questions that only you can answer.’ My brother Boris and I sat down by our phones, and they rang endlessly. There were calls from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Vladivostok and many other towns I’d never even heard of. There were calls from abroad, too. The democratic countries – Romania, Poland, Hungary, all of these.’ The switchboard operators had to ration the calls to two or three minutes each. ‘At two o’clock the television people came. The district Soviet building was buzzing all day like a disturbed beehive.’

Until this moment, nobody in the world had heard of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, farmboy pilot from the Smolensk region.

As Zoya recalls, ‘Of course there was no rest for us. The journalists came from everywhere.’ They certainly did. A crowd of journalists with cameras and tape-recorders arrived seemingly out of nowhere. They tried to reach Gzhatsk in Volga cars, Chaikas and Zils, but the rough roads around the town were good only for tractors because of the recent spring floods. The Moscow correspondents had to stop several hundred metres away from the Gagarins’ house, then trudge in their city shoes through the mud. Some well-equipped camera crews arrived by helicopter, avoiding the roads altogether. That morning Anna had thrown open the windows of the house to let in the fresh spring air. This was a mistake. A few of the journalists knocked politely on the door and asked to be invited inside, but others clambered in through the windows. Suddenly the house was full of journalists rifling through the Gagarins’ every possession, touching, probing, getting things out of place. They were very efficient, almost as intrusive as the KGB, and barely more polite. They asked if any private family photographs might be available and promised to bring them back safely, but they never returned a single one. ‘After that, we had no peace,’ Zoya says. ‘We had telephone calls from everywhere. They all wanted to find out who Yuri was, and where he came from. They didn’t know!’

Of course a private telephone was not available to the Gagarins. The only available handsets were in the nearby Soviet community hall, where Alexei and Valentin were busy fielding calls. One of these, later in the day, was from Yuri himself to say that he was all right. Anna had a chance to speak with him that evening, after she’d arrived in Moscow, ‘but of course we couldn’t quite believe that everything was all right until we could actually see him,’ Zoya says. ‘You know, we Russians have a saying. You have to touch it to believe it.’

Most published accounts state that Gagarin’s descent to earth went smoothly, without serious incident. Gagarin himself was always careful to support this version of events. His official account of the flight, The Road to the Stars, contains only a hint of trouble, so fleeting that it was entirely overlooked by Western experts:

The turning I had worried about… The only opportunity Gagarin had to tell the truth, formally at least, was when he testified to a special State Committee, headed as always by Korolev, Kamanin and Keldysh. This meeting was a private opportunity for the cosmonaut to report candidly on Vostok’s overall engineering performance during the flight. It was not considered appropriate to release any sensitive technical details to outsiders. Certainly there was no need for Gagarin to tell the world that he could have been killed.

Just before re-entry the ball’s main linkages with the rear equipment module separated correctly, but the umbilical cable, with its dense bundle of electrical wires that transferred power and data to the ball, did not come away cleanly. For several minutes the ball and the rear module remained tied together, like a pair of boots with their laces inadvertently knotted. The whole ensemble tumbled end over end in its headlong rush to earth.

The ball was weighted with a special bias, so that the thicker layer of heat shielding at Gagarin’s back would swing round naturally of its own accord to face the super-hot onrush of the earth’s atmosphere. With the equipment module corrupting the air flow and distorting the proper mass distribution, this alignment was no longer possible. ‘The craft began to rotate rapidly. I was like an entire corps de ballet,’ Gagarin reported to the secret State Committee. ‘I waited for the separation but there wasn’t any. When the braking rocket shut down, all the indicator lights on the console went out. Then they lit up again. There was no separation whatever. I decided that something was wrong. The craft’s rotation was beginning to slow, but it was about all three axes, ninety degrees to the right, to the left… I felt the oscillations of the craft and the burning of the coating. I don’t know where the sound of crackling was coming from. Either the structure was cracking, or the thermal cladding was expanding as it heated, but it was audibly crackling. I felt the temperature was getting high.’[7]

The heat of re-entry created an ionization layer around the ball, and no voice radio messages could get through. Korolev and his ground controllers probably did not become fully aware of Gagarin’s problem until after he had landed.

Atmospheric heating eventually burned through the cable and separated the rogue equipment module, but the effect was to sling the ball away at a tangent with an additional sickening spin. At one point the rotation was so severe that Gagarin began to lose consciousness. ‘The indicators on the instrument panels became fuzzy, and everything seemed to go grey.’

Perhaps the State Committee’s discussions of this problem did not come soon enough for the engineers to make suitable adaptations, ahead of Gherman Titov’s mission? At any event, he survived a similar difficulty when he flew on August 6, 1961. Gagarin’s post-flight description of the separation failure was perfectly calm, quite relaxed, but Titov says that if his own experience was anything to go by, he must have wondered: ‘Which is stronger, the capsule or the other module? Which will break first? You switch on all the recorders and transmitters, to try and report in case you don’t make it. You see the little earth globe rotating, and the clocks still running, which means information is still coming from the equipment module through the cables. The capsule rotates very fast. Then there’s a huge shaking. Both compartments are hitting each other. Is it scary? That’s an interesting question. I could have been scorched, but so what? Similar things have happened.’

At last Gagarin heard denser air whistling past the ball and his whirlwind rotation became less severe. Outside the charred porthole he saw pale blue sky. He was shaken, but any minute now he knew that further stresses awaited him. At seven kilometres’ altitude the hatch above his head blew away. The noise was terrible. The cabin seemed suddenly so very open, so exposed. According to Gagarin’s published account, he wondered for a crazy moment: ‘Was that me? Did I eject just then?’

His account does not quite square with the recollection of Vladimir Yazdovsky, Korolev’s Director of Medical Preparations, and a member of the ground-control team at the time. He remembers Gagarin triggering the ejection himself.

The entire procedure was supposed to be automatic. When the pressure sensors registered an atmospheric pressure consistent with an altitude of seven kilometres, Gagarin would come shooting out of the ball, and at four kilometres, the ejection seat’s propulsion pack and large parachute canopy would fall away, releasing him so that he could descend more gently under his smaller personal parachute. If his seat did not fire at the right time of its own accord, then he had the option of triggering the ejection himself, but he was not supposed to do this without good reason.[8]

As the ball began to slow down in the denser atmosphere and the heat of the initial re-entry faded away, Gagarin’s radio link with ground control was restored. According to Yazdovsky, ‘He reported that the g-loads were still very heavy, and they were pulling him in different directions. We said, “Hang on in there.” We suggested to him not to eject too soon, but he ejected early, from an undefined height.’

It seems that the ground controllers were unaware of the separation problem that Gagarin had encountered earlier and did not realize why he was complaining about excess spin and g-loading. Perhaps Gagarin did not have time to explain in greater detail; or perhaps he knew that he should not discuss the separation problem over the voice link, in case any Western listening posts were eavesdropping. The dialogue in this very last phase of the mission has never been published, but the historian Philip Clarke believes that the ball might still have been rotating at an uncomfortable rate, long after the equipment module had finally separated. Gagarin’s decision to eject early was not necessarily a panic reaction. He may have believed that the spinning of his capsule would interfere with his ejection, and the sooner he attempted it, the better.

In the event, Gagarin’s ejection and touchdown went smoothly. As soon as the ejection seat’s rocket charges were spent, a large parachute canopy unfurled to slow down his fall. Then the seat fell away, as planned, leaving him to drift more gently to the ground under his own parachute.

Baikonur’s morning was Washington’s night. At 1.07 Eastern Standard Time, American radar stations recorded the launch of an R-7 rocket, and fifteen minutes later a radio monitoring post in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska detected unmistakable signs of live dialogue with a cosmonaut. White House science advisor Jerome Wiesner called President Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger with the news. Salinger had already prepared a statement for Kennedy to read out. The President had gone to bed a few hours earlier with a sense of foreboding. Wiesner asked him whether he wanted to be woken as soon as the rocket was launched? ‘No,’ the President answered wearily. ‘Give me the news in the morning.’[9]

At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his cramped office cot. He and many other NASA staffers were working 16-hour days in the lead-up to astronaut Alan Shepard’s first flight in a Mercury capsule. When the phone at his side rang in the pre-dawn silence, he was irritable and unprepared. ‘Hey, what is this!’ he yelled into the phone. ‘We’re all asleep down here!’ Next morning the headlines read: ‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.’[10]

On the afternoon of April 12, President Kennedy held a press conference in Washington. Normally a self-confident and eloquent public performer, he seemed distinctly less sure of himself than usual. He was asked, ‘Mr President, a member of Congress today said he was tired of seeing the United States coming second to Russia in the space field. What is the prospect that we will catch up?’

‘However tired anybody may be – and no one is more tired than I am – it is going to take some time. The news will be worse before it gets better. We are, I hope, going to go into other areas where we can be first, and which will bring perhaps more long-range benefits to mankind. But we are behind.’[11]