Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (10 page)

With Sunrise-1, they realized
that they could cram three men in a capsule originally sized for one, provided
nobody wore a pressure suit. It was dangerous, it was reckless, and there was
much unpleasant deliberation by the State Commission. But it worked.

For Sunrise-2, they realized that
they could build a collapsible rubberized airlock—an inflatable airlock—and
mount it
outside
the craft, and have one cosmonaut use it to exit the
ship and float freely in space. Objectively speaking (I can say this now!) this
was beyond reckless. The Americans had designed their spacecraft to open up in
space and allow their men to enter and exit safely. We had made no such
provisions.

But of course in our profession,
nobody wants to be second. And if you fret too much, they will find someone
else, someone better at hiding their fears.

Blondie was selected for this
mission. Like me, he was personally chosen by Korolev. Pavel Belayev was flying
the spacecraft, but Blondie was the one chosen to walk in space. He had gone
through a rigorous training regimen of calisthenics and parachute jumps and
weightless trips in the Tupolevs to practice opening the hatches.

When he went into the airlock,
everything was going according to plan. There was a television camera mounted
outside the ship, and they did a live broadcast on state television of the
historic adventure. Everyone could see him, his face hidden behind the smooth
glassy visor, and the large letters on his helmet: C.C.C.P. Floating free, an
umbilical cord connecting him back to the ship. A man in a puffed-up spacesuit
swimming above a sea of clouds.

But the puffed-up spacesuit was
not part of the plan.

There are always unforeseen
effects when one’s doing something for the first time. Blondie’s spacesuit had
swollen in the vacuum of space, but of course Blondie was the same size, so his
fingers were no longer in the gloves. And he needed to grab on to handles, to
pull and manipulate himself to get back to the craft, but he could only move
with the greatest of exertion. His breathing grew extremely labored, and he
came very near to passing out from the effort.

I was in the control room,
monitoring all this. We knew he had to get back inside on his own. There were
no provisions for the spacecraft commander to come out and rescue him. If
Blondie hadn’t been able to get back in the airlock
and
back in the
craft, Belayev would have eventually had to cut him loose so as to survive the
reentry.

We cut the camera feed to the
state television network and told them we were having technical difficulties.
Nobody wanted to air his death on national television.

When Blondie tried to climb back
inside the airlock, he couldn’t make it. He seemed to be having a hard time
getting back in.

“Wait one minute,” he told us.

We knew something else was wrong.
We didn’t know what it was. As it turned out, his suit was too wide, now that
it had expanded. He was letting air out of his own spacesuit so he could fit
back in the airlock. He had to reduce the pressure all the way down to .27
atmospheres. He didn’t tell us what he was doing, though. He didn’t want us to
worry, given that we couldn’t have helped him.

Finally he squeezed inside, head
first, which was backwards. He had to laboriously turn around inside the
airlock so as to get back inside the ship itself.

State television, I found out
later, had cut to somber music. Mozart’s “Requiem.” The same piece they play
when a prominent national figure is dead and they are waiting on a public
announcement.

And it turned out the troubles
were not over for Blondie and Pavel Belayev. They needed to reenter soon after
the conclusion of the spacewalk, but they were having difficulties orienting
their craft. The automatic system wasn’t working. They had to orient themselves
manually and fire the retrorockets on their own.

Seconds make a tremendous
difference when you’re travelling at first cosmic velocity. They had to perform
the manual orientation while unseated, then scramble back into their couches
for the retrorocket firing. So they were a few seconds off in timing their
burn, and they came down far off course. Their capsule landed in a snowy forest
in the Urals, and they were wedged between two trees, and the snow was two
meters deep. The hatch blew open, and it was freezing, and Blondie’s spacesuit
was filled with sweat, all the way up to his knees.

For hours, our rescue helicopters
had no idea where they were.

Blondie and Belayev had to spend
the night in the capsule, warding off wolves, using the parachute to stay warm.

Finally the next day the rescue
helicopters arrived, and they were flown to safety. State television was able
to announce the successful conclusion of Sunrise-2. The crisis was forgotten,
unmentioned in public. No one was the wiser.

That was our last flight before
my voyage to the moon.

•••

The sun rises again over a bleak
panorama, stark and beautiful and sharp in a way earthly landscapes can never
be.

I am the first human to see a
sunrise over the moon. It is every bit as abrupt as its opposite had been—more
so, for the interior lights are still off. I am more alone than any human in
history.

I am flying just over 1200
kilometers above an alien world. One of our earliest probes photographed the
far side back in 1959, but as usual the real scene’s incredibly sharper and
more detailed. There are more craters than I can comprehend, small ones barely
visible and large ones sending streaks for hundreds of kilometers. And none of
the smooth dark
mare
—there are some darker and lighter areas, but far
less variety of appearance than one sees from the earth, even. Still, it’s
mesmerizing, like the sea on a sunny windy day. Themes repeating, a common
pattern copied endlessly with infinite small variations. For a few precious
moments, everything falls away—my uneven past and my uncertain future are now
both as remote and invisible as earth. The only thing real is the unreal scene
beneath me, and for that brief precious time I am alive and aware in a way that
I’m struggling to put into words. An exalted sense of pure existence. Living in
the grandest possible sense.

I do have scientific observations
to make—I’m looking for volcanoes. It was not the first priority during my
training; I only had time for a few hasty hours of instruction crammed into 12-
and 14- and 16-hour workdays. But I at least want to discover something and
pass it on. I have to do more than just being here.

The camera is floating next to
me. I reload it and start snapping away again, shooting pictures of sharply
shadowed holes in countless shades of gray. Flying over earth, one sees that
land is so often shaped by water: folds assemble into ravines, and those in
turn open into valleys as streambeds accumulate to make rivers. But here of
course there are no such processes. And I can’t see any volcanoes. Only
countless impact craters, holes on top of holes on top of holes, old deep
craters whose outlines are disrupted by newer and sharper and smaller craters.
A sphere covered with circles and sections of circles. A mottled and pitted
surface, like an old cannonball somehow turned from rusty iron to dusty stone.

I have been floating, nose
pressed almost to the glass. We are still rolling slowly, so after a while I
must switch to the other porthole. Once I’ve snapped two more rolls of film, I
snatch up my logbook and make a few notes. (I have to work under the assumption
I’ll get home, that I’ll someday be helping someone make sense of all these
pictures, that all my efforts mean something.) Then I drop the camera and
stare, really concentrate on the scene in front of me, the sunlit highlights of
innumerable circles. However long I live, I want to remember this as sharply as
I see it now.

After a few minutes, I look back
at the panel. The timer tells me my communications blackout should soon be
over. I settle back into my couch.

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar, come in.”

Nothing.

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar.”

The radio crackles. “…edar, I am
glad to hear you.”

“Dawn-2, we are coming back
around. All environmental systems nominal. The buffer batteries worked as
expected.”

“Understood, Cedar. How’s the
view?”

“You won’t need many colored
pencils when you’re up here, Blondie.”

Another delay. He doesn’t get the
joke. “Please repeat your last, Yura.”

“You won’t need many colored
pencils! Black, grey, white. Maybe tan. You can save weight and leave the rest
at home.”

“Can you see us, Yura?”

There is another pang—I realize I
may have missed the earth rising over the moon! I strain at the porthole
closest to the horizon; it’s on the far edge and still close to the horizon,
but I can’t quite make it out, so I give a quick guilty pulse of the thrusters
to bring it into view.

Such a magnificent sight!

I want to just stay there and
watch, but I know this is too good a picture to miss, and this will be my only
chance to get it. And I know even before I look through the viewfinder that
this will be a perfect picture, perhaps the best I can ever hope to take.
There’s something most people don’t get about photographic composition. God loves
trinity, as the saying goes, and it holds for photographs, too: forefront,
middle, backdrop. If you see something magnificent but don’t have anything in
the scene to give it perspective, it looks far flatter when it’s photographed.
But here is everything a good picture needs: a dead foreground, a living
backdrop, and the vast space between. The earth is blue and white and green,
all streaks and swirls, and vibrantly colorful behind the monochromatic
moonscape; although the distance is great, it looks as detailed as an object in
one’s hand. And I feel a swelling in my heart thinking that everyone I’ve ever
met and everyone I ever will meet is all the way back there.

I take picture after picture. I
know that even a well-composed picture cannot fully capture this feeling, but I
know they will be magnificent photographs all the same. And I can imagine
people asking me about them, and I can imagine myself saying, “Ahh, yes, but of
course, you don’t see what’s outside the frame. Imagine seeing this, so small,
but the only thing with any real color in this vast empty space!”

“Are you still there, Yura?”
Blondie asks, but with humor, for he knows the answer.

“This is the most incredible
sight. Earth above the moon. I’ve never seen anything like it, Blondie.”

“I talked to Kamanin. He gave
permission for you to record a brief message. We still cannot do a live
broadcast, of course, but we can at least do this, and the State Commission can
decide what to do with it later.”

“Understood.” I am indescribably
grateful.

It occurs to me that he could
have lied and told me it was a live transmission. But he has been true. Then
again, I expect nothing less of Blondie.

“Let me know when you’re ready,”
he says.

I turn on the light and activate
the camera. Stare at the smooth slick eye. “I am ready to transmit, Blondie.”

“One moment,” he says, then: “You
are looking good. We are ready to receive your transmission.”

I smile. “Greetings fellow Soviet
citizens and peace-loving people of all mankind. I am speaking to you from
hundreds of thousands of kilometers away after becoming the first man to fly
around the moon. I am incredibly grateful to once again represent the Soviet
people, and indeed all mankind, on a bold feat of exploration. And I’m
particularly humbled by all the hard work of many thousands that made this
possible—the wisdom of our Chief Designer, the helpful guidance of his many
able deputies, and the skilled labor of many more working under their
direction. The legacy of our forefathers, of Marx and Lenin and Stalin, is a
legacy of untiring effort and unlimited progress, and an endless expansion of
human potential. I know they’d be proud to see the hammer and sickle rounding
the moon, to know that the workers and peasants have triumphed again, and that
the first manned spacecraft to go here was piloted by a real Soviet man.”

“From here I can see the whole
planet, as small as a child’s ball. I don’t know if I can give you a view, but
I hope to bring some pictures back so you all can see what I see. It is not
like on earth where distant things appear blurry: here there is of course no
atmosphere, so everything is sharp and clear. I am grateful beyond words to
have this perspective, to see things so clearly. For I can see no national
boundaries, no distinctions. The only ones that exist are the ones in our mind,
the artificial ones created by those who want to rob and plunder and oppress
and divide.” (Perhaps I am thinking of the Americans here, thinking of their
war in Vietnam.) “Like many of my countrymen, I survived the Great Patriotic
War, and I saw the hellish destruction that this can lead to. But when we get
away from that, we can see that our planet is truly a beautiful place. It is my
deepest hope that one day everyone can see that there are no divisions, and
that all the peoples of earth can join together in peace and prosperity to
advance the cause of human potential.”

I can’t think of anything more to
say, and I don’t want to start babbling, so I stop and turn the camera off. To Blondie
I speak: “Did you get all of that?”

I wait.

And at last, his voice: “Yes,
Yura. It was perfect.”

•••

Because I need to conserve the
thrusters, I do not turn the moon ship to get a better view after we have flown
past. I do not get to watch the moon growing smaller behind me.

I suppose it’s normal after
leaving some monumental destination to want to turn and look back, particularly
if you’re far from home; I suppose it’s even more normal when you know you’ll
never be back. Surely you’ve observed this in your own life! I don’t have to
know you to know that.