Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight

by Brennan, Gerald

  I could feel Kamanin’s eyes on my back. I repeated myself: “I came down in my craft.”

  There was a moment of silence, but too many others had too many other questions. “What was the selection process like? How long before the flight were you picked?” one asked.

  “In a timely fashion,” I smiled, and the people laughed.

  “And do you earn a lot of money as a cosmonaut?” another inquired. “How much do they pay you?”

  “Enough!” I smiled, and again they laughed.

  So I was perhaps a little reticent to go into details in that setting. And I gave some answers that were perhaps evasive. And it’s human nature to assume that someone who is honest in one situation will be honest in another, and that a liar will remain a liar. So are you wondering if you can trust me? It’s natural, I suppose. But you can, I assure you.

  •••

  The path to the moon already feels like routine. And routine does not make for good stories. But I do want to keep things interesting, and to show you that I can talk about unpleasant things. So I should at least describe my morning urine dump.

  I grew up a bit shy when it comes to bodily functions and things of that sort, but when you’ve been in the company of men, you see that they prey on the hesitant and the reticent. So I’ve gotten used to feigning a certain boldness in such matters. (You may have heard the story that, before East-1, I took a piss on the front wheel of the transfer bus that drove Titov and I to the launch site. As to whether or not it actually happened, you’ll have to watch the footage for yourself, but I’ve stopped contradicting people who tell my story a little differently. And it has become another part of the prelaunch custom, another bit of ceremony for those who want to imitate me. Just as when someone wishes you good luck in our line of work, you have to immediately say, “Go to hell!”) And the urine dump is worth describing. I must say it was one of those absolutely brilliant and indescribable sights: a spray of yellow that crystallizes and sublimates in a few short seconds in the cold vacuum of space, catching the sun’s rays gorgeously before it dissipates, grotesque and strangely beautiful and all too fleeting.

  And soon, of course, it is back to business. I am maneuvering to photograph the sun’s corona. When the portholes are aligned just so, the disc is blocked out and the hazy streaks of light around the edges look fuller and clearer. I shoot picture after picture.

  The moon is growing larger, and there’s a roundness to it now. The craters show shadows; they’re defined in ways I’ve never seen. My goal has shape and form: it is real.

  I look back towards earth. It’s smaller now, perhaps a little bigger than a hockey puck. And yet somehow the distance has made it more beautiful, more alluring; it’s clear out here that it’s the only thing around. There are three physical components that define every trip: the starting point, the destination, and the space between the two. I’m in that in-between place, and so situated that both starting point and destination look preferable.

  “Cedar, this is Dawn-2, Cedar, this is Dawn-2.” Blondie’s voice. A welcome break in my isolation.

  “Dawn-2, this is Cedar. You’re looking beautiful down there!”

  “Just another day on planet earth.”

  “Well, it’s nothing to take for granted. If you could see what I see, you’d be a bit more excited.”

  “Understood, Cedar. Not to dampen your enthusiasm, but the ballistics center believes there is an error in your trajectory. It may have been an alignment issue. We should be able to correct it with our midcourse firing.”

  “Understood, Dawn-2. How much of a correction?”

  “50 meters per second.”

  “Understood.” 50 meters per second: a considerable error.

  “We need to do an automatic align with the 100-K to verify that it’s working properly.”

  “Automatic align with the 100-K. Understood.” I press the glowing buttons in sequence. The spacecraft swings about. But there is something amiss. After a longer-than-expected period of cycling, the thrusters stop, and a button flashes on my console.

  I consult my binder with the codes and procedures and checklists.

  “Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Stellar alignment has failed. Stellar alignment has failed.” I am not nervous, but I’m hardly pleased. “We were apparently unable to get a lock on Sirius.”

  “Understood, Cedar. Please confirm with us your filter settings. Also, how long ago was your most recent urine dump?”

  “Medium setting for the filters. And the dump was forty-five minutes ago. It seems to have dissipated.”

  “Some of it may have remained in shadow without sublimating.”

  “Dawn-2, if it was picking up light and tricking the 100-K, it would start sublimating and disappear.”

  “It could be the filter, too. Rotate the filter to the lighter one and we’ll try again after lunch.”

  “Understood, Dawn-2.”

  I eat lunch and then do some housekeeping, and then we give it another go. Still nothing.

  Academician Mishin comes on to tell me they are looking through reasons for the alignment failure. The most likely cause is contamination of the optics during launch. But he wants to try again before the midcourse correction.

  Once all this is done, I give a quick pulse of the controllers to reorient the craft. I am not sure if Dawn-2 would approve, but they don’t have a say in the matter. Now I look out again. The shadows and the phases of the earth and the moon are always opposite of one another when you’re travelling between them. My goal is gibbous, waxing, a dead world growing bigger before me, revealing itself to be vaster and more desolate than one could imagine. Meanwhile the little ball of icy blue is waning beautifully, drawing my gaze more than I’d have ever thought.

  Blondie has been talking to me about descriptions. Impressions. The colors and shapes of things that are. After East-1, everyone asked me about my flight, and I said it was amazing, and described the colors and shapes and sights. And they could see in my eyes that I had been excited, and they were excited, too. But their excitement was flatter. A reflection. I was excited to have gone into space, and they were excited to be talking to someone who’d been in space.

  Telling them how I felt is not the same as getting them to see what I saw. Getting them to feel what I felt.

  Blondie is an artist and that’s the artist’s job, he says. For a simple artist it is to recreate an image. And this is a path to unhappiness. The very best the simple artist can hope for is to create something that looks exactly like the original. And often the simple artist will fall short even of that. For a better artist, he says, the goal is to transform it so it means something. To create an image in a way that also shares a feeling. The yawning mouth of the air lock. The wide eyes of wonder. The smallness of the planet against the emptiness of space.

  I unstow the camera and snap several photographs of the earth. If everyone back there could see what I saw…well, surely it would change some thinking. I pay close attention to filter settings, taking comfort in work and artistry. This at least is something I can do well.

  •••

  I suppose I should talk more about this, in case you don’t already know: I do truly love photography. I know—you’re probably laughing. I can imagine you thinking: “What does that say? Everyone loves photography. That’s like saying you love sunshine.” I know, I know. I suppose I should clarify that there are two types of photographers: those who spend time in the darkroom—who invest the time to learn the chemicals and the master the processes—and pretenders. And I’m no pretender. I don’t mean to give offense! It’s just that there are levels to these things.

  It’s a bit funny, of course—I, who love taking pictures, ended up on the other end of the lens more often than anyone. I’m not trying to boast here! If anything, I’m trying to offer some friendly advice, to warn you: be careful of what you love. I don’t know if you believe in God or not, and I’ll leave it to your imagination how I really feel on such mat
ters, but I suppose I’ll say that whatever your beliefs, whether you believe in scientific causes or divine retribution or fate, you should at least appreciate the circularity and the irony of certain things. So be careful of what you love. It will be your undoing.

  And perhaps you want to know more about me? I can say this. Venyamin and Alexei, the KGB agents who keep tabs on me during my various appearances: they are my best friends. You might find it sad, or shameful, depending on your beliefs. Then again, you may feel it’s patriotically appropriate! Is it because I don’t want them telling other people what I’m doing—to keep them keeping my secrets? Is it a normal human reaction to close proximity over a long period of time in a variety of stressful situations? Is it because I’m simply that innocent and that naïve? You can make of it what you will.

  (I will say this: the greatest shrewdness of all is to appear to be innocent. To seem blameless, humble—even ignorant, at times. People are comfortable with ignorance and simplicity. It may annoy them, but there’s some satisfaction in that—it also lets them feel superior, and who doesn’t like to feel superior? At any rate, it never threatens.)

  My favorite book is actually American. I suppose I can say that now. Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Granted, nobody who reads can really have a favorite—it’s like asking a person to name their favorite breath of fresh air, or telling a parent to pick their favorite child. Indeed, I’m partial to a lot of books. Jack London, H. G. Wells. And of course Polevoi, The Story of a Real Man, which was my introduction to Maresyev. This is the book I always tell people is my favorite. How can you not be impressed with a story like that? Such sacrifice, such courage. Surely everyone of my generation—myself included, of course—must feel humbled by such a hero. And of course, it was a handy answer in many conversations. Relatively predictable, certainly nothing that would rock the boat or cause anyone to revise their opinion of me downward. A safe pick. But there’s something I love about that Hemingway. A real man, too, a hero, and yet not triumphant, for few heroes are. There is struggle everywhere in life, not just in epic battles with fascists, but also in an ordinary battle with a fish. There’s struggle everywhere, and nobility in the struggle. (Although perhaps I don’t believe that, after all. Perhaps that’s one of those unchallenged assumptions, the things we think we believe until we actually examine the contradictory facts. For if I really believed in the nobility of the ordinary, I would still be in Klushino, tending the soil! I would not have learned to fly, I would not have been the first man in space, I would not now be heading for the moon.)

  Still…Hemingway. There’s an openness, a space in that book. Something that so many other authors fill in, out of fear you won’t understand what they’re getting at. With Hemingway there is this space, and the book is like a vessel. You can pour yourself into it and make it yours. That’s something Blondie and I talked about, the very first time we met, in fact.

  So I’ve misled people about the end of East-1. And I’ve even misled people about something as trifling as a favorite book. So, again, perhaps you’re wondering how you can believe me now? Perhaps you’re thinking: “How do I know he’s even on a solo mission? Perhaps there’s a second cosmonaut in there with him.” Well, I’m the only one telling this story.

  People don’t want truth, anyway. They say they want it, of course: it sounds good. But what they really want is reliability. Stories are trimmed and sanded and shaped to fit some purpose. Surely they lose some truth in the process. But before that happens, they are shapeless and without form. And how can something without form have a function?

  And of course, this is a type of war, and in war there is deception. During the Great Patriotic War, there were charades on all sides. The British and Americans built fake armies of plywood tanks, used actors playing Churchill and Montgomery so as to throw the Germans off about their true whereabouts, sent corpses washing ashore with false papers. Nobody has a problem with such lying, as long as it’s done by their side. There is a certain eagerness to see it all revealed at the end, to have someone say, “This, at last, is the truth. It was too dangerous to tell it before, but now it can be revealed.” But it’s like the thrill of seeing a conjuror’s tricks: the early deception is forgiven. And that’s what I can say, regarding my earlier evasions: This, at last, is the truth.

  •••

  My chronometer tells me it’s 5:45 p.m. in Moscow—early in the evening of October 27th, 1967. But I’m 246,000 kilometers from Moscow, in a place where absolute time has little meaning, other than as a scheduling convenience. What really matters up here is relative time, mission elapsed time. Man/hours of oxygen consumed, time remaining until reaching the moon, and so forth. And it is at last time for the midcourse firing.

  Pavel Popovich was manning the radio for a spell around lunchtime, but now Blondie is back on the control panel. “Well, you haven’t made the papers yet, Yura,” he says. “White Tass says the English have picked up some transmissions from a Soviet craft headed for the moon. But they’re speculating that it’s another exercise. Taped transmissions from a mannequin.”

  I chuckle. “I’m not that boring, am I?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’m a bit biased.”

  “If only they knew we’re actually talking via radio relay,” I say, for the benefit of anonymous Western ears. “I’m back in Star City, transmitting to the spacecraft, which then transmits back to you in Yevpatoriya. It’s all an elaborate communications exercise.”

  Blondie chuckles. “That must be it. You’re far too funny to be a mannequin.”

  (I imagine them listening in: Englishmen and Americans, snooping all over the globe. Am I resentful of their hypocrisy? Am I jealous because we don’t have their resources? I’ll leave that to your imagination.)

  “Well, there will be more to talk about anyway, soon enough,” I reply.

  “We are going to have you try the 100-K again prior to the burn,” Blondie says. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll do a sun-earth alignment.”

  “Very well.”

  I strap myself in to the launch couch. It’s not like I can get that far away from it—again, the ship isn’t all that roomy—but I have been floating during my waking and working hours.

  “Confirm you are on the lowest filter setting,” Blondie says.

  “Confirmed.”

  The stars are, relatively speaking, fixed in their courses—at least from our perspective. Singular points, far away—exactly what you’d want to use to determine your orientation in three-dimensional space.

  Again I press the buttons. Again the spacecraft swings about. Again: nothing.

  Since this business started with the 100-K, my unease has been growing. I know I should be on a free-return trajectory, but given the error figure they mentioned, I have my doubts. And even if I am headed back towards earth, the reentry corridor’s just thirteen kilometers wide; at lunar distances, that’s rather small, indeed.

  But it’s also a long way off. We need to do this first.

  “We’ll go ahead and do a solar align, then,” Blondie says.

  I page through the binder. A different sequence of buttons: the checklist will keep me straight. I press them in order and the craft swings about. With the sun and earth and moon, it’s less precise: on such a large body, you need to agree on where you’re sighting and taking measurements, or accept a certain level of error. Still, it works.

  “Alignment successful,” I say.

  “And now we will transmit the burn sequence. We will start at mission elapsed time 2 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes. Burn duration: 29 seconds.”

  I pluck my pencil from the air and write the figures down in the checklist logbook. The burn will happen via ground control, but I need to be prepared to cut off the engine manually.

  “I copy 2 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes. 29 seconds of burn. Confirm you will execute on that mark.”

  “Confirmed.”

  The timer climbs.

  The engine fires and I settle into my couch briefly, bu
t the spacecraft shakes violently. After three seconds, the engine stops.

  In my stomach there is a tightness. I force myself to take a deep breath. The worst thing a pilot can do is panic. We will work through this.

  “We do not have a full burn. We do not have a full burn.”

  “Cedar, this is Dawn-2. Confirmed. Incomplete burn.” Blondie sounds cool and professional.

  “It lasted three seconds, and there was a lot of shaking before the engine shut off.”

  “Understood. Please check all switch settings, Cedar.”

  I recheck the lighted pushbuttons to see if some incorrect switch up here could have terminated the burn. But I can’t see anything wrong. Everything is as it’s supposed to be.

  “Dawn-2, Cedar. I have confirmed all my switches. How do you want to proceed?”

  There is a delay. Presumably they are conferring. Then: “Cedar, we will attempt another burn in 2 minutes. Same duration.”

  The time passes slowly. As the saying goes, there is nothing worse than chasing or waiting. After the interval is up, I ready the stopwatch and the engine fires again. Again comes the vibration. This time it shuts down after two seconds.

  “Incomplete burn, incomplete burn,” I radio.

  The engine, the S5.53, is a simple device. Another hypergolic contraption, with plain valves controlled by redundant electrical relays. There are no ignitors, even. When the valves are opened and the Devil’s Venom is mixed, it explodes. There is no logical reason why it should have stopped. But it stopped.

  Still, I am confident we can correct our trajectory.

  “Dawn-2, this is Cedar, do you have a plan to do another burn?”

  A delay. Then: “Sorry, I’ve been speaking to Mishin. They’ll spend the night looking at the data and we’ll try a burn tomorrow morning when we’re back within relay range,” Blondie says. “In the meantime, get some rest and conserve your thrusters.”

  “Very well.”

  In the meantime I wait. Again, I am confident. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. There is no point in getting worked up.