Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (2 page)

It may disappoint you to learn
that nobody really flies a rocket into orbit. The gyroscopes and fuel pumps and
ignition timers are calibrated to do nearly everything, so we are reduced to
monitoring the systems. My fragile life is perched precariously atop a flaming
pedestal which at any moment could topple, crush and incinerate me, send my
shattered blackened bones falling to the Kazakh steppe. I may have a second or
two to avoid that fate by pulling the handle on the escape tower, which will
pull my spacecraft free from the presumably exploding booster. So I must keep
my eyes on the gauges. Other than reporting on my status, this is my only task:
to be prepared. To be, in general, rather than to do.

My body shakes as the rocket
rumbles beneath me. But soon there is a pleasant smoothness. Steady
acceleration. Less buffeting. The atmosphere is getting thinner.

Then comes a whoosh as the escape
tower pulls away. The launch shroud falls off and I can see my first glimpses
outside: the arc of clouds and the darkening sky.

•••

Before I continue, I should at
least ask: who are you?

In the isolation chamber, before
East-1, I prided myself on knowing who I was talking to. They sent me in for
two weeks. Two weeks locked behind a giant steel door in front of a one-way
mirror, with them keeping an eye on my every move, and me just sitting there in
a chair. (Oh, there were tasks—panels and buttons. And meals—squeezable tubes
of meat and cheese paste. But it was tremendously boring. Again, just sitting
there
being.
)

Kamanin, the director of our
flight training, had orchestrated these intense periods of observation. He was
(and of course still is) a general, an accomplished aviator, the very first
Hero of the Soviet Union—and an unrepentant Stalinist, with the consequent
obsession to keep an eye on people. Public loneliness, the watchers called it.
They wanted to watch you without you watching them.

So I was stuck in there, observed
and isolated, with little to do but go on about my duties. And I found myself
singing—composing odes to my tubes of food, little ditties to keep my spirits
up. Yes, singing to my food!

Tubes of glorious socialist cheese!

You empty yourselves to fill us up!

You must have read what Marx once said:

To each according to his need!

New Soviet cheese!

So nourishing to me!

You must have heeded Kamanin’s words:

To Yuri according to his need!

I pretended to be lost in my
isolation, but I heard a chuckle—a stifled little transmitted laugh—before they
cut the microphone. And it seemed like something that would put me in good
standing—just the right mix of political ardor and political humor.

More importantly, I knew I could
get away with it, for I knew who was in the control room! I had memorized the
names of all the watchers! I had procured a work schedule—never you mind
how!—and studied it, hard-wired it into the circuitry of my brain along with
all the rocket specifications and capsule diagrams we also had to learn. And I
was able to call them out at every shift change, with name and patronymic.
Greetings, Ivan Pavlovich! Greetings, Pavel Ivanovich! And—well, it certainly
didn’t hurt. In fact, how could they not be impressed? This always gets
people’s attention—when they think they have arranged a certain number of
outcomes, and they seem to believe they have the power to compel you to pick
from among those outcomes, and you instead engineer something else through
naked determination.

Which is what I’ve done again,
with this moon mission. I’ve clawed my way out of the spotlight and back into
the cockpit. I’m a different man: not the perfect Soviet specimen I once was.
Thinner hair, thicker waist. A scar on my eyebrow—never mind how it got there.
What matters is where I am now. Despite the petty jealousies of nameless
adversaries, I’ve made it back to where I wanted to be all along.

I trust you’re happy for me. Do
you feel a certain kinship with me, a certain bond? Perhaps you’ve been
studying facts of my life, everything you don’t know about Yuri Gagarin: where
I was born, where I went to school, and so forth. You might be looking for
similarities between yourself and me—a shared birthday, or even just a Zodiac
sign, if you believe in that sort of thing. Maybe you’re trying to analyze my
name—Yuri, derived from George, like Georgy and Yegor—to see if my birthday is
your name-day, or vice versa. You could even be looking at political and
religious issues: looking for proof that I’m a committed atheist, or a closet
Christian; a good Russian son of the soil, or a secret admirer of the West; a
sincere Soviet, or one who quietly questions the regime. Or perhaps you’re just
looking at certain traits of mine and telling yourself they’re yours as well:
intelligence, courage, determination, humor under pressure.

If so, I can certainly understand
it—I’m not trying to criticize you! To be human—there is always that longing
for connection. And especially with someone like me, someone who’s done some
remarkable thing, there is that hope for something shared. (Unless you’re sure
we have nothing in common, in which case you’re perhaps looking to downplay my
accomplishments, to find proof that I’m not worthy of the praises I’ve been
given.) I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth or thoughts in your head!
I’m not trying to be rude or make assumptions, just speculate for a bit. You’re
perhaps looking for these connections, so that you can see a bit of you in me,
and by association, a bit of me in you. It’s quite all right! I’ve done the
same thing with my heroes: Heroes of the Soviet Union like Alexey Maresyev,
Nikolai Gastello and Alexander Matrosov; pioneers of rocketry like Korolev and
Tsiolkovsky; even literary heroes, particularly the various characters from
Tolstoy.

I am eager to tell some
stories—not just about this flight, but also about my life. (Yes, I’ve already
written my autobiography, but there are always certain strictures to be
observed in such a setting. And I of course was hoping for another flight, so I
had no interest in saying absolutely everything. Is that dishonest? I don’t
think so. It’s normal to present the best side of yourself when you’re trying
to gain favor. You surely do the same thing when you’re getting to know someone
and you don’t quite know if you can trust them—on a date, perhaps, or while
trying to secure employment.)

Still, you have me at a
disadvantage. You know who I am—everyone does. I’m a real man. A Soviet man, a Russian.
But I have no idea whether you are communist or capitalist, atheist or
Christian or Moslem or Jew. How can I know what stories to tell if I don’t know
who you
are?              

But perhaps it doesn’t matter. If
you’re even remotely curious about what it means to be a real man, surely this
story will interest you.

•••

When the Block-D stage finishes I
feel a familiar shift in my body against the straps. Again I am weightless.
There is no time to get unstrapped—we have less than one orbit to prepare
before the Block-D will reignite for the next firing, the big one, the one that
will send me moonward. But on that three-day trip there will at least be time
to enjoy the feeling at last.

The solar panels deploy
automatically, which then clears the way for the stellar alignment system to
work. Everything unfolding in sequence like a mechanical flower.

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Dawn-2,
this is Cedar.” Now that we’ve launched, I’m no longer talking to Tyura-Tam but
instead communicating via relay with the new control center. (Yevpatoriya, in
the Crimea.)

“Go ahead, Cedar.” Blondie’s
voice! Just like before! I was delighted and now I’m overjoyed.

“Dawn-2…Blondie…We have first
cosmic velocity.” The spacecraft’s most important instruments are simple
gauges, not unlike a car speedometer. Except if the needles are moving,
something’s wrong. But everything’s steady. “All temperature and pressure
readings are normal. Both panels are deployed. We are drawing electricity at 27
volts, 25 amps.”

“Very good. Verify functioning of
the ionic and attitude systems.”

“Ionic system is working
properly. I am oriented 20 degrees relative to the orbital path.” I give a
quick pulse of the peroxide thrusters. Quick movements with the right-hand
controller—a pulse back and forth in each axis. This is the first time I’ve
actually controlled a spacecraft. It is sluggish with the Block-D stage
attached. But working as expected. “DO system is responsive.”

“Very good, Yura.” (Yura’s my
nickname. No shorter, so you can’t really call it a diminutive. But I guess at
157 centimeters I’m diminutive enough on my own.) “The ballistics center is
verifying your orbit.”

“Very well. I am turning control
of the craft over to the 100-K system so it can initiate a roll about the solar
axis.” On East-1, the spacecraft oriented itself using optical sensors that
found the horizon on every side. Here we also have star sensors and can direct
the ship to point itself at the sun and the moon, so we know it knows where it
is. But in this mode, the solar axis rotation, the system puts the spacecraft
in a constant roll. (In the vacuum of space, of course, temperatures vary by
hundreds of degrees depending on whether one is in the sun or in the shade. So
if the craft isn’t rotating steadily, the hot side will get too hot, and the
cold side will get too cold, and liquids in pipes and tanks may boil or freeze,
depending on how well they’re insulated.)

From Blondie: “Tracking your
orbital parameters as follows. Perigee 191.3 kilometers. Apogee 221 kilometers.
Inclination is 51 degrees, 44 minutes. Period is 88 minutes. All within normal
limits. How’s the view, Yura?”

“Not as good as you had, I’m
sure!” (Blondie was the first man to leave his ship and float freely in space,
back on Sunrise-2 with Pavel Belayev. In case you don’t know, it was a
dangerous mission. A truly heroic flight, far more demanding than mine was.)

“You’ll get to go outside up
there someday, Yura.”

“I’ll settle for the moon,
Blondie.”

He laughs. We both know he may
get to go outside there, too. It’s looking like he’ll be leading the contingent
of cosmonauts training for lunar landings. Assuming the N-1/L-3 combo comes
together, he should be set to captain the first mission. And I do hope it
happens. I’d love to land myself, but seeing such a good friend accomplish such
a feat is surely the next best thing.

Still, we’ve said enough over the
open channel. My orbit has me skimming over the top of Mongolia and cutting
through Manchuria, then back over our land. But that will be brief; the globe
indicator shows I’ll soon be crossing the coast near Vladivostok. And we all
know the C.I.A. has ships prowling the waters of the East Sea. They’ll know I’m
up here, and depending on their monitoring on the other side of the globe, they
may soon know where I’m going. Will they make it public before we do? Trumpet
our triumph, and their shame? That’s the great uncontrollable factor in all
this. We’ll find out soon enough.

There is a lot to be done before
this orbit is complete. We must make sure the buffer batteries are providing a
constant electrical current, even when the ship and the solar panels are
rotating, and even when we’re in earth’s shadow. And after this morning’s
issues, we must carefully monitor the pressure in the Block-D stage. We don’t
want to head for the moon if there are problems. Still I can’t help stealing
glimpses of the wondrous view out my portholes. The sky looks overcast (or
undercast for me, I suppose) and so I can’t tell exactly where I cross the
coast. But the weather starts to break apart, and soon I can see the beautiful
blue sea far below.

(Back in 1961, Sergei Pavlovich
penned an article under an assumed name for the newspaper
Truth
that
said: “Soviet soil is now the shoreline of the universe.” A grandiose
statement, perhaps; a triumph of socialist realist rhetoric. I don’t know that
he’d have praised the system that fervently in private—as the old joke goes,
there is no truth in
Truth
. Still, I think of it now, and how it’s
coming true, and how I wish he were here to see it.)

Now below I can see the shadowed
outlines of the lingering clouds. Then Honshu, turning autumn brown. And before
long I am heading into darkness. Since we can maneuver in orbit now, I’m
tempted to reorient myself, but I don’t want to waste fuel on unnecessary
maneuvers. Still I do crane my neck to see something I’ve been missing these
last few years: the orbital sunset.

And now, heading southeast across
the Pacific, it is upon me. There is darkness above and below: two oceans, one
infinitely vast. And out the window behind me, a few brilliant arcs of light,
split by an atmospheric prism into reds and salmons and oranges. I watch until
the sun winks out.

•••

It’s perhaps natural to think
back to my first flight. Surely you want to know about that.

Again, I spent that fateful April
night in Sergei Pavlovich’s cottage. The bare room with the metal frame bed.
Nothing special. After my flight it was invested with meaning. It became the
room where everyone had to spend the night before their flight. In the absence
of God, the state makes its own rituals.

In the morning I woke and ate
breakfast from tubes: meat and marmalade. Getting my stomach used to what I’d
be eating up there. Then they drove me to the center. I remember Sergei
Pavlovich’s wide face, exhausted but beaming. His dark intelligent eyes, so
often sad, now were joyful. (He chose me first, before Khrushchev. And by then
we knew that our fates and our names would be forever linked, even though his
wouldn’t be public for a while.) I put on the blue pressure garment, and then
the orange coverall that everyone remembers, and the white helmet with the red
letters, freshly painted: C.C.C.P. I remember grinning at my reflection.
Everything looked sharp.