Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight

by Brennan, Gerald

  “Good,” Blondie says. “Now show us the moon. I’ll give you the coordinates.”

  He reads up the translations in the x, y, and z axes that will get the external camera properly oriented. There is some stickiness to the z-axis translation and it takes a few thrusts back and forth before I’m correctly oriented. But once the numbers on the console have changed by the proper amounts, I call it out.

  “It’s at the right bottom of the frame,” Blondie responds, so I make a couple quick pulses with the thrusters and he’s happy. Meanwhile I see nothing.

  “I’d like to get a look myself,” I tell him.

  “Very well.”

  After a quick pulse, I can see the moon in the porthole, half full. Already it is looking bigger. For every other human in recorded history it has been the same size. But not me, not now.

  •••

  The second day after East-1, they flew me to Moscow.

  I had been a nobody, a simple fighter pilot in his late 20s, and now I was descending to the tarmac to report to Khrushchev himself. Such a staged spectacle! Amidst all my smiling and waving on the way down the airplane stairs, I remember thinking how silly it was. As if Khrushchev didn’t know the flight was a success! If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t be here.

  Still, I felt confident: I had checked myself off in the small mirror of the airplane lavatory, and every time I turned my head I saw the shoulder boards of my new rank, these unfamiliar symbols of the state’s approval. But at the bottom of the stairs: catastrophe. I realized my shoelace was untied. Ahead of me lay the red carpet, the dais, the dignitaries and the cameras and Khrushchev himself, and everyone was looking, and there was no way to tie my shoe. For a brief moment I imagined tripping, losing my shoe, or worse, falling on my face in front of the world. Believe me, I was more nervous than I had been orbiting the earth!

  But I strode off smartly. Saluted and reported. Nobody else noticed the shoelace, not then. And Khrushchev was obviously elated. Another son of the soil made good.

  Then it was time for the motorcade to Red Square. Getting into the car, I at last had time to tie my shoe. We rolled on through the city, past more people than I ever would have imagined. And after that, standing on Lenin’s tomb, looking out at the crowd—they seemed genuinely happy. There were immense posters of Lenin, and next to them, equally large, posters of me. I smiled and waved and thought constantly, first and foremost, that I had better not make an ass of myself. And thought: do I really deserve all of this?

  That night, they brought me by the control room of the state television station to review footage of the day’s festivities. My untied shoelace was clearly visible.

  “We can go ahead and take that footage out, sir,” the technician said.

  “No. Leave it in. I insist.” I figured: let them know I’m a real man.

  •••

  Another silent meal.

  More food packs. This time, veal and cheese. Better than what I had in the isolation chamber, but still, it depresses me. Although I’m the first man to truly voyage out into the solar system, we are not yet capable of living here. Existing for brief periods of time, yes. Eking out a few days of life in the midst of a vast and all-consuming nothingness. But that’s all. No life, in the grand and full sense. Just preventing death. How long will it be before space feels like home? Perhaps it will be different when we have bases on the moon, on Venus, on Mars. Places to go. Beds to lay down on at night.

  (It might have been better had this been a two-man voyage. It was supposed to be, originally—as much as I enjoyed being first on East-1, this time I’d wanted someone along for the ride. I’m not a narcissist, after all! Not so eager for triumph that I need to hoard it all for myself. And we were training as a two-man crew—myself as commander and Kubasov as flight engineer. But, of all things, it turned out the designers were having a hard time with the loads for the parachute system, and the burden on the environmental system. And the easiest way to make sure both would work properly was to remove one cosmonaut and launch couch, subtracting a set of lungs and a couple hundred kilograms so as to bring all the equations within the safety margins.)

  The 7K-L1 is hurtling moonward, but more slowly now. Second cosmic velocity means I’ve acquired enough speed to escape earth’s gravity, but it doesn’t mean earth’s gravity has no effect on me. So my ship will get slower and slower and slower over the next couple days until I’m in the moon’s sphere of influence, at which point I’ll start accelerating once more. I cannot feel this—it affects me the same way as it affects my craft, so my body has no motion relative to the walls of the ship. All I know is numbers and readouts. My body floats in weightless oblivion.

  I realize that, in my eagerness to get the television testing done, I’d not done a thorough job of cleaning after lunch. The empty package I’d swatted away is now over by the intake for the environmental system. I grab it, then see a couple stray bits of food that somehow got loose. It’s strange cleaning in space: you can’t just assemble a pile of trash. You can take something, some bit of rubbish, and assign it its own airspace and it will stay there, as long as it’s not too close to the intakes or outlets for the environmental system. But then if you bump into it, it will go caroming off into some hard-to-reach spot that will force you to bend your arm like a contortionist just to get it, like when something rolls under your bed.

  The problem’s made worse by the fact that one must take care of all one’s bodily functions in this weightless environment, and any errors can result in disgusting little brown specks or yellow globules floating about the cabin along with everything else. (It occurs to me that, for all its fun, weightlessness is also chaotic, whereas gravity at least imposes a certain order on things: unwanted objects fall to the ground and either disappear down drains and sewers, or remain there to be swept up and disposed of in the dustbin.)

  When at last all the housekeeping chores are done, I settle in for my sleep period.

  One can’t call it night, of course, for there’s no night in cosmic space. And it turns out that one of the nightshades for the portholes is stuck and won’t come down. The moon ship must rotate about the solar axis for the bulk of the trip, so there’s nothing to be done, no way to keep out the sun.

  The sleep periods have been scheduled to coincide with gaps in our transmission coverage. (The relay ships can do in a pinch, but we’re trying to rely on land-based stations and Molinya satellites for the bulk of our transmissions at translunar distances.) Given my excitement about the flight, and assorted other household issues, I didn’t get a lot of sleep on my last few nights in our apartment in Star City, nor did I get much the night before the launch, since I had to wake up early. I’m tired, and longing for one night of clean full sleep to get caught up.

  But: nothing.

  I think of Valya, and our children. (Are you judging me now, for taking so long to mention my wife? You shouldn’t. On such adventures, it’s best not to clutter one’s mind with thoughts of home, particularly when there’s work to be done.) Valya knew something was up before I left; I couldn’t entirely contain my excitement. And of course, in the ways of women everywhere, she took that as an excuse to be petulant and pouty. (Women are of course nervous about things like spaceflight—a judgment born of ignorance, like all judgments, perhaps. Forgive me. Tereshkova is of course excepted, though she and her ilk are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Although my wife didn’t know for sure I’d be going into space, there were enough similarities with the last time that she suspected it. She wants me to be happy with her and the kids, at home. She doesn’t want me to be off doing dangerous things. (Unless of course I’ve been home for more days than normal, in which case she wants me out of her hair. Surely this is how it is for everyone! None of this should be foreign to you! Further from the eye, closer to the heart.)

  Still nothing. No sleep.

  I watch the spot of sunlight from the porthole as it slices a slow circular path across the inside of the ship’s hull. Moving
in phases: narrow stab wound to slender ellipse, fattening into a circle, then waning and disappearing.

  I try again to get comfortable. The problem of the arms is paramount. On their own, they float up, and one gets worried about bumping a switch. And worry, of course, is the thief of sleep. I try to tuck my thumbs under my straps, but then of course there are issues of circulation.

  To be a real man means to explore, to test one’s limits, to see how far one can get and still make it back home. I would have taken my wife and our daughters with me if it were possible, although of course it isn’t, so perhaps this is just an empty wish, wasted words.

  I fall asleep.

  I wake up.

  I fall asleep.

  I wake up.

  •••

  As I said before, everything changed after my flight. I was born again, deposited into a new life; my closest connections were the same, but everything beyond them was not, and even every interaction with them felt different.

  And my role was new: I was a representative of the state. When they realized how my flight had captured imaginations, not just in the Soviet Union, but in the world-at-large, they sent me on tour. I had never left my country before my flight; now I was going everywhere. A whirlwind tour.

  I’m proud to say I handled myself well, for the most part.

  In Manchester, when I visited England, it was raining severely. But people had lined up in the streets to see me all the same! (Here and there I was being compared to President Kennedy. It was embarrassing, but I suppose I can see why: we were both young faces for our countries. Proof that we were moving dynamically forward into a better future. Countries need their old faces, too—their Khrushchevs, their Eisenhowers. But people do get bored of the past, and yearn for something new. Youth and hope and strength and vigor. Potential. I did not expect this level of excitement, let me assure you! It was truly humbling, and a reminder of something fundamentally human: the desire for better accomplishments, longer trips, progress: the relentless march away from the dustbin of history and towards a clean and new future.)

  The trade union that had sponsored my visit had arranged for a motorcade, a train of black convertibles to take me through the city and give the masses a chance to see me. But they had put the tops up on the cars, because of the rain.

  Soon, we were inching through the rain-slick streets. I’d seen the crowds at the airport. I didn’t expect them elsewhere. But when I wiped the fog from the car’s inside windows I saw: they were still there! Lining the roads, despite the awful weather! Crowds of wet people, blurry shapes in the rain—all there to see me!

  “Stop the car. Put the top down,” I told the driver.

  Kamanin gave me a look.

  “If they’re willing to stand in the rain to see me, I should at least return the favor,” I told him, with a grin.

  And so we rode, open-topped, through Manchester. The people seemed to love it. And Kamanin, in turn, appreciated that.

  Still, it was bizarre. That was a highlight, but there were many, many more lights. A maelstrom of publicity. The strange dislocation of unexpected trip after unexpected trip. This type of travel produces envy in those who observe it but anxiety for those who are doing it, those who cannot escape. For I was truly caught in the whirlwind.

  •••

  Enough reminiscing. I should focus on the present. It is, at least, more calm.

  During this first night there are periods of sleep and wakefulness replacing one another in turn, all while the spacecraft spins about the solar axis. I do my best not to look at the instruments too often; at the beginning of my sleep period, the flywheels of my mind had been spinning at too great a rate, and I certainly don’t want to impart them with any additional momentum.

  After what feels like a longer bit of sleep, I wake and know I might as well get going. (Well, relatively speaking. In this situation, every function of every bit of furniture is merged into one: my form-fitting couch is bed and workchair and dining room place setting. So there’s no place to go, relatively speaking.)

  I retrieve the binder with the mission parameters from next to my chair. Compare the counter with the mission-elapsed time to the printed tables and values. It is not quite time for the next communication period, so I eat, slowly, my mind as empty as the vacuum outside the porthole glass.

  This evening will be the mid-course correction, which will keep us on track to go around the moon and hit the reentry corridor back at earth. If there are absolutely no errors, all of that will happen on its own, but I am eager to make sure we’re on course to get back for a proper reentry.

  The reentry is a serious business and I should discuss it in detail now; it’s more complicated than the one on East-1, and that one was problematic on its own, so among the mission phases, this one has been foremost in my mind.

  Imagine throwing a stone into a pond. If you throw it in directly, there will be a violent splash. But with the right shape of stone, thrown at the right speed and angle, you can skip it and it will slip gently beneath the surface. This is what we’re trying to do: at return speeds very close to the second cosmic velocity, there’s more energy to be dissipated, and plunging directly into the atmosphere with no letup would make for a difficult time. (It can be done: a ballistic reentry, it’s called. But the stresses can be tremendous: at best, it will subject me to 8 to 10 gs, which I’ve done before. If it’s steeper, it will cause greater strain on the heat shield, which might lead to a catastrophic burn-through. And even if the heat shield holds, the deceleration will go up, possibly to 20 gs or more. In short, a ballistic entry that isn’t shallow enough will not be survivable.) But of course a skip must be a very precise maneuver: a single skip, so as to bleed off exactly the right amount of energy and come back into the atmosphere so as to land at precisely the right spot.

  Now imagine throwing the stone, and the pond is small. If you throw very hard, you could easily skip it in such a manner that the stone bounces off the water once and then lands on the opposite bank. And so it is with this. If we don’t dig deep enough into the atmosphere on the first skip, the craft will go caroming off into space; it could conceivably end up back in orbit, with no retrorockets and no way to return; it could also end up skipping high and then plunging back down into an unsurvivable ballistic reentry.

  We do at least have options for controlling the skip. Thrusters on the descent module can fire to rotate the ship during its reentry; it’s shaped like an automobile headlamp, with the heat shield where the front of the lamp would be, and the craft is weighted such that the shield will hit the atmosphere at an angle and either lift the craft up or dig it deeper into the air, depending on the rotation. So there’s more to the skip than just hitting the reentry corridor. But we do have to hit it.

  Which means tonight’s burn is important, not so much for getting to the moon, as for getting back safely. I do not like to dwell negatively on the future. But there is nothing else of importance today, so my thoughts are being pulled in that direction.

  •••

  A lot of what I’ve told you about my past is already in the history books.

  I have not talked in detail about the end of East-1 before now, at least not openly. Of course I reported everything in detail to the State Commission. They needed to attempt a fix of the umbilical cord before Titov’s mission. But to talk in public about that? At the time it served no purpose. We were first. That’s what mattered. There’s no use looking sloppy on the world stage.

  As for the parachute landing…well, the story is that I came down in my craft. You can blame the Americans for that. When it was becoming apparent we were competing to be first with a man in space, the aeronautical federation that sets the rules for such things was dominated by Americans. And—like children who know they can’t win a game fairly—they made sure the rules favored themselves. Those guidelines said that the man who went into space had to land with his craft. And since everyone knew they’d be landing their capsules in water, and since
we’d presumably be recovering ours on land, it was clearly a biased rule, for it’s obviously harder to do a soft landing on land. (Not that it really matters. Is someone in Africa or Asia going to say, “No, you cheated, your accomplishment doesn’t count” because of such a trifle?)

  I knew what was expected of me.

  The journalists from the West were eager to talk to me. In England they had arranged a press conference: me behind a table, with microphones and cameras waiting to pounce on any misstep or misstatement. (It was not my first—there had been one in every country—but certainly it was the one with the greatest potential for disaster.) And of course, Kamanin was there in the corner, watching it all. So I could not veer off course in either direction—neither too few words, nor too many.

  “Where did your flight begin?” someone asked. (Was it a planted question? Nobody in the West even knew the name Tyura-Tam. To throw off their spies, we’d started referring to the firing range as the Baikonur Cosmodrome, even though Baikonur was hundreds of kilometers away. Surely they wanted to know where to send their spy planes!)

  “Where did it begin? At the launch facility,” I told them, and there was general laughter.

  “After your orbit, you reentered. Where did you land?”

  “In the planned spot,” I told them. True, we were a few hundred kilometers off course. But everything had gone well. That was the important thing.

  “And how did you land?”

  “I came down in my craft. Everything functioned perfectly, and I landed, and there were peasants about, and of course they were curious, but the rescue team was on hand very shortly to pick me up.” And it was true. I came down in my craft until I ejected. But they didn’t need to know that part.

  Someone pressed for clarification. “You landed by parachute, or you landed in the spacecraft?” Were they fishing? Did they know the truth? Did they think they could discount my accomplishment based on some absurd rules?