Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (6 page)

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?

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.