Starman

by Jamie Doran

  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

  7

  COMING HOME

  Korolev, Mazzhorin and the trajectory mappers at OKB-1 knew precisely the direction that Gagarin’s ball would adopt as it plunged through the atmosphere and fell to the ground. What they did not know was exactly how far along that direction it would travel before coming to rest. The trajectory calculations from Mtislav Keldysh’s computers were good to an accuracy of just a few kilometres. In the vastness of outer space this was more than acceptable. For a homecoming Vostok ball it could have meant the difference between landing harmlessly in an empty field and crashing through a roof, killing all the people beneath. With great care, Vostok’s incoming route was selected to place as few houses as possible in the path of danger. All the descent scenarios favoured large meadowlands, scrublands and fields.

  Today, Russian capsules come down onto the vast (and supposedly uninhabited) steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from where they lifted off in the first place. A well-rehearsed procedure for capsule location and crew retrieval has operated for three decades. Back in 1961, Korolev and his mission planners were not quite so ready to dump their very first cosmonaut into the middle of nowhere. Gagarin fell to earth only a short distance from where he had first flown an old Yak-18 at the Saratov AeroClub six years earlier. The exact location of his touchdown was twenty-six kilometres south-west of the town of Engels in the Saratov region, on the outskirts of a village called Smelkovka.

  From ground level there was no possibility of observing the ball’s hatch flying away, or the sudden jolt of Gagarin’s ejection seat. At seven kilometres’ altitude, this was all happening too high up to be seen. But tractor driver Yakov Lysenko heard a distinct crack in the skies above his head. Naturally he looked up. The faint echo of the hatchway’s explosive bolts took twenty seconds to reach him. By that time Gagarin and his craft had fallen three kilometres closer to the ground, and their parachutes had opened. They were just about visible now to the naked eye. In fact, it is probable that Lysenko heard a different bang closer to the ground, when the ball’s parachute hatch was blown off at just four kilometres’ altitude to deploy the folded canopy from within. ‘You can hear an explosion if it’s a plane or something like that, but I saw there was no plane,’ says Lysenko. ‘There was no engine roar. I was standing and watching, and I saw a ball in the air. Well, not a ball, but something landing with a parachute. A pilot from a plane, I thought.’

  Lysenko ran back to Smelkovka village to raise the alarm. He gathered together a reassuring group of friends, and they all tramped across the fields to the spot where he had seen the ‘pilot’ come down. Gagarin seemed very happy to encounter ordinary folk like them. ‘We came to the place, and he was coming towards us. He was very lively and happy, especially after he landed successfully. He was wearing a jump-suit or whatever it’s called, and he said, “Boys, let’s be acquainted. I am the first space man in the world, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.” He shook hands with everyone. I introduced myself, and he said, “Boys, don’t leave. All the bosses will be here any minute now. They’ll come by car, lots of people, but don’t leave. Let’s take a picture so we’ll remember this.” But of course everyone forgot about us. They came from a city or a military garrison. They took him into a car straight away. He told us not to leave, but they drove him away, and we’ve never seen him since.’

  The official reception party arrived with terrifying speed, as if out of nowhere. General Stuchenko (his head still at risk) had been monitoring the skies all morning with close-range radar. Gagarin and his re-entry capsule were located long before they hit the ground, and Stuchenko disbursed his forces accordingly. ‘The military came by plane. Some of them were even landing by parachute,’ Lysenko recalls. ‘It was a complete invasion force. They didn’t allow us to get too close. They’re very strange people, you know.’

  Lysenko may not be a sophisticated man – he’s just a simple tractor driver – but his grasp of the geopolitical significance of what he saw that day makes for a fine summary. ‘The Soviet Union announced a spaceship, the first in the world, with Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin. The whole country was rejoicing. You know, it was a shame to the foreign countries. America is a mighty country, but they didn’t quite make it to be first. As they say, “It’s important who crosses the bog first.” That’s how I understand it.’

  Lysenko and his friends were not the only people to see the cosmonaut come down, as Gagarin’s sanctioned account of his landing makes clear:

  Stepping onto firm ground again, I caught sight of a woman and a little girl standing near a dappled calf and looking curiously at me. I was still in my bright-orange spacesuit, and they were a bit frightened by its strangeness. ‘I’m a friend, comrades! A friend!’ I shouted, taking off my helmet and feeling a slight shiver of nervousness. ‘Can it be that you have come from outer space?’ the woman asked. ‘As a matter of fact, I have!’ I replied.1

  A slight shiver of nervousness. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the American spy Gary Powers, who had been shot down over Russian territory the previous May. Maybe this orange-clad pilot was yet another foreign spy parachuting from his stricken aircraft? A number of Western aerospace historians believe that some of the farm workers came at Gagarin with raised pitchforks, only standing down their weapons when they caught sight of the big red letters ‘CCCP’ emblazoned on the upper front of his white space helmet. Today the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov is prepared to admit that ‘when they saw Gagarin’s orange protective suit, the women became frightened, because there was all this business about Powers only a year before. They said, “Where are you going? Where are you off to?” They thought maybe he was a spy.’

  TASS radio announcements of the flight had been broadcast well in time for Gagarin’s actual descent. In all likelihood the farm workers greeted him with nervousness at first, but not with outright hostility. It may be that some of them had left their houses early that morning to go to work in the fields and may not have heard the radio bulletins about the space flight . . .

  So who exactly had the opportunity to greet the cosmonaut first? Was it Lysenko and his pals, or the woman and child whom Gagarin spoke of? ‘Oh, I forgot about that,’ says Lysenko. ‘Yes, when we went to where he landed, Takhtarova, the local forest warden’s wife, was weeding potatoes with her grand-daughter. They had a small piece of cultivated land nearby. When he landed, we were not there. She was scared, and wanted to run away. Then he saw us.’

  Later that day a simple signpost was erected at this site, more or less where Gagarin’s feet had touched the ground:

  DO NOT REMOVE!

  12.04.1961

  10.55 MOSCOW TIME

  Two days later a more permanent stone obelisk was erected bearing a plaque: ‘Y.A. Gagarin Landed Here.’ No similar marker identified the place where his empty spaceship came down. Gagarin’s ejection at high altitude had caused him and his capsule to drift apart by more than two kilometres by the time they hit the ground. Contemporary documentation blurs the whole issue. Recording the capsule’s landing site would have meant admitting the forbidden secret of the First Cosmonaut’s separate descent under his own parachute. However, the exact site is known – unofficially at least – because a group of children playing in a meadow near the banks of a tributary of the River Volga saw the empty ball come down, alarmingly close to a ditch. It mad
e a dent in the soft ground. Today that hollow looks like a thousand similar indentations in the gentle surrounding grasslands.

  Two schoolgirls, Tamara Kuchalayeva and Tatiana Makaricheva, ran over to see this amazing object. ‘We were supposed to be in a lesson at school, but all the boys ran off. They saw a ball flying,’ says Tatiana. ‘It was huge. It fell down, then bounced and fell down again, settling on its side. There was a large hole [in the ground] where it fell for the first time. The boys ran to it and climbed inside. They picked up many small tubes of cosmonauts’ food and brought them back to school, and they told us the ball had landed.’ The two fit, handsome women are mildly surprised that their nostalgic hike across the hillocks and furrows to see the landing place now makes for quite a sturdy walk. ‘Today we come here and are already tired, but at that time you can imagine how fast we children ran!’ says Tamara. ‘We’d heard the radio announcement and we all ran with inspiration.’

  Proudly the boys handed out the tubes of space food they had found. ‘Some of us were lucky and got chocolate,’ Tatiana recalls. ‘The others got mashed potatoes. I remember tasting some and spitting it out.’

  Tamara says, dismissively, ‘If you offered it to us today, we wouldn’t eat it.’

  By now the children (and a good many adults besides) were clambering in and around the ball looking for souvenirs. The military security squad had arrived, though not yet in sufficient numbers. According to Tamara, ‘They tried to scare us off. “Go away, go away!” they said. “It could explode!” Their threats didn’t have the slightest effect on us.’

  Actually there were several opportunities for citizens of the Saratov region to collect souvenirs. Gagarin had cut loose from his parachute the moment he landed, because he was slightly worried that the wind might drag him off his feet. That parachute went missing soon afterwards, while the ball’s larger canopy was shredded by souvenir-hunters. The cabin’s heavy hatch came down somewhere, as did a detachable radio transceiver and other items of survival gear, and the second hatch covering the ball’s parachute compartment.

  All these components had some interesting adventures before they were recovered. For instance, there was the matter of the raft. If the ball had come down over the sea, Gagarin might have stayed with it until splashdown, because the impact on water would have been less severe than on the ground; but the ball was not guaranteed to stay afloat for an indefinite time, so he would have clambered with all due haste into an inflatable life-raft. In the event, he came down over Russia precisely according to plan, and the raft stayed packed inside his survival pack. Apparently someone removed it without authorization, and a day or so later he took it to the nearby Volga tributary to do some fishing. A large detachment of KGB officers arrived in the district and requested that all stolen equipment from the Vostok be surrendered, including the raft. They threatened the entire population of Smelkovka with detention if the missing equipment was not returned immediately. Tractor driver Lysenko remembers a certain degree of fuss about ‘something being torn, or going missing. Perhaps it’s better not to say . . . Some of our boys, the younger ones, found a boat. The special police came and said, “It belongs to the State. We must have it.” They visited all the houses and put pressure on various people.’

  Yaroslav Golovanov adds his contribution to the story. ‘Eventually the KGB recovered their prize, and the unhappy fisherman could only fidget and say, “I’m sorry, but the boat is dilapidated, ripped apart.” The KGB officers wanted to correct the fisherman’s false ideas. “The boat is fine. Nothing has been torn,” they said.’

  Apparently the KGB officers did not want to tell their superiors that various historic items from the First Cosmonaut’s equipment had been tampered with, before they could collect them all.

  Gagarin’s social responsibilities began the instant his feet touched the ground. The old woman and the little girl needed reassuring that he was not an enemy spy. He really wanted the farm lads from Smelkovka to be rememembered, because they had been so friendly. Now the military was all over the place, and the officer on the scene, Major Gasiev, came up to him. Gagarin saluted smartly and said, ‘Comrade Major! USSR Cosmonaut Senior Lieutenant Gagarin reporting!’

  ‘Listen, you’re a Major too. Don’t you know? You were promoted during your flight,’ said Gasiev with a big grin. They embraced amicably, officers of equal rank, and of course Gasiev had a hundred questions.2

  Then there was the question of the Altitude Record. The sports official Ivan Borisenko needed Gagarin to sign some documents. In a 1978 account Borisenko described ‘dashing up to the descent module, next to which stood a smiling Gagarin’. This seems unlikely because the capsule was at least two kilometres away, and Borisenko must have rendezvoused with the cosmonaut at his separate touchdown site, or else in another field on the outskirts of Smelkovka, where a large helicopter was sitting ready to take Gagarin to the nearby Engels airbase. Some time very soon after his landing, the First Cosmonaut blithely put his signature to a sheaf of Borisenko’s off-white lies.3

  In the helicopter, Gagarin politely and enthusiastically answered all the questions that his military escorts threw at him. What was the earth like? The weightlessness? He was learning that all the questions would be similar, wherever he went. But at one point he went quiet for a moment. According to Golovanov, he said, ‘You know, I never got to see the moon through my porthole . . . Never mind, I’ll see it next time.’ With that, he brightened up and took more questions.

  General Stuchenko, his career resting safe for today, met Gagarin on the tarmac at Engels and immediately posed another complex social challenge for the space traveller, as witnessed by Golovanov. ‘Yuri Alexeyevich, in the battles to liberate the Gzhatsk district, there was only one commander. You must remember me?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ This was not such a good reply. Stuchenko looked absolutely crestfallen, and Gagarin had to think fast. ‘I mean, I don’t remember your face. But I remember there was a commander. So that was you? How wonderful! You must be my double godfather. Once you rescued me from the Nazis, and now you’re meeting me on my return from space!’4

  This response proved more satisfactory. Then Stuchenko asked, ‘How would you like it if we sent a plane to Moscow to fetch your wife? Valentina could come here and then you could fly home together.’

  Another awkward problem: how to refuse such a kind offer from a superior officer, and a General, no less. ‘Thank you very much for the thought, Comrade General, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do. Valya’s nursing our newly born daughter at the moment.’

  Stuchenko escorted Gagarin into the airbase’s officer’s quarters, where he had an opportunity to call his family and report his success to the First Secretary on a secure phone link. Gagarin spoke carefully, knowing full well that his every word would be written down for posterity.5

  ‘I’m glad to hear your voice, Gagarin Alexeyevich.’

  ‘Nikita Sergeyevich, I’m glad to report that the first space flight has been successfully completed.’

  Khrushchev continued in an official vein for a while, but he could not long resist the ordinary questions. ‘Tell me, how did you feel in flight? What’s space like?’

  ‘I felt fine. I saw the earth from a great altitude. I could see seas, mountains, big cities, rivers and forests.’

  Now, for Khrushchev, the real fun. ‘We shall celebrate together with all the Soviet people. Let the world look on and see what our country is capable of, the things our great people and our Soviet science can do.’

  Gagarin dutifully echoed the sentiment. ‘Now let the other countries try and overtake us.’

  ‘Exactly! Let the capitalist countries try to overtake us!’

  According to his senior aide Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev was deeply impressed by Gagarin’s cheerfulness and the enthusiastic nature of all his replies. He genuinely looked forward to seeing the young man in Moscow for a splendid and very public celebration in two days’ time.

  ‘Thank you, Nikita Serg
eyevich,’ Gagarin signed off. ‘Thank you again for the confidence placed in me, and I assure you I’m willing to carry out any further assignment for our country.’

  He was thinking about the moon, perhaps. After all, Korolev had pressed a replica of a lunar spaceship’s plaque into his hand just before he took off and said that one day he might pick up the original . . .

  The halt at Engels was little more than a rest-stop, a chance to make those necessary phone calls and switch to a more powerful aircraft. Gagarin boarded an Ilyushin-14 for Kuibishev (today called Samara), another large town on the Volga about 350 kilometres north-east of Saratov. Here he would rest for a day or so, before heading for Moscow early on April 14.

  An hour after Gagarin’s rocket had left the launch pad, Titov, Gallai, Kamanin and a substantial delegation from Baikonur boarded an Antonov-12 plane bound for Kuibishev. Korolev was the most notable absentee from the Antonov’s passenger list. He was still monitoring the communications from distant radio ground stations and listening ships, which were tracking the final phase of Vostok’s orbit and descent. (He and Ivanovsky flew out later to supervise the ball’s recovery from the Saratov region.)

  Titov’s mood was strange, perhaps rather surly. ‘We landed at Kuibishev airbase, which was also a big factory facility for making passenger aircraft. Then Yura arrived by Ilyushin-14. He was brought from the Saratov area. He was surrounded by Generals, and I was just a Senior Lieutenant with very small shoulder-straps, as they say. But I was interested to know: what was the weightlessness like? Yura was walking down the gangway, and I pushed everyone aside. All of them looked at me. “Who’s this lunatic Lieutenant?” they said. We other cosmonauts were top-secret [unknown] people, so to say. But I reached Yura. “How was the weightlessness?” I asked. “It’s all right,” he said. That was our first meeting after his flight.’