Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (9 page)

“Good morning, Cedar,” Blondie
says, somewhat crackly. “How did you sleep?”

“Not well, Blondie.”

There is a noticeable delay. For
a moment I wonder if it’s a problem with the transmitter, on top of everything
else. Then I remember: at these distances, it takes time for my words to get to
him and his words to get back to me. More than anything, this tells me how
great a void lies between me and home: even the radio waves cannot sprint
across it.

Then at last: “Ahh, yes. If it
makes you feel any better, the engineers haven’t slept at all. So compared to
them, you’re well-rested. ”

“Yes. And it’s a bright and sunny
day, at least. Not a cloud in the sky.” I’m tired enough that this seems funny
in my mind. But out loud it falls flat.

“That’s the spirit,” he says at
last.

“What do we know so far?”

At last, Blondie comes back on:
“The alignment issue and the engine problem appear to be unrelated. As we
discussed, the 100-K…” (His voice crackles.) “…failing in stellar alignment
mode due to optical contamination issues discussed yesterday. As for the engine…”
(Crackles.) “…analyzed the firing data. It appears the engine is shutting off
the fuel flow due to…” (There is a final blizzard of static.)

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Say again
your last.”

I breathe. I wait. For my fate,
or just instructions on what to do next.

“Yura, the engine is shutting off
its own fuel flow due to low pressure readings in the combustion chamber.”

“Understood. Low pressure
readings in the combustion chamber. Do we know why?”

Again I wait.

Another voice. Mishin: “The
shutdown is by design, Yuri. To prevent flooding the engine with fuel if the
engine is defective. You could have a manufacturing defect in the combustion
chamber which is preventing normal firing of the engine.”

“Could it be a faulty sensor?”

I scan the instruments before they
reply. Then: “It is possible, Yuri. We will try again manually, but if it
doesn’t work, we will need another plan.”

“Understood. Please let me know
the parameters of my burn.”

A pause. If nothing else, the
delays in receiving transmissions are forcing an extra level of calmness into
our conversation. “We will attempt a burn in fifteen minutes. We’ll have you do
a solar alignment beforehand. Start time for the burn: Mission elapsed time of
3 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes. Burn duration: 31 seconds.”

I pluck my pencil from the air
and copy everything down. Then I repeat it: “I have: 3 days, 2 hours, 37
minutes mission elapsed time, manual burn duration of 31 seconds.” These are
the things you write down, the things you double- and triple-check.

“Good luck, Yura,” Blondie says.

“Go to hell, Blondie.”

I strap myself back in. Run
through the alignment procedures again.

When at last it is time for the
burn, I watch the seconds count down. I bring my hand up to the panel five
seconds early, as if it might get delayed along the way.

I stab the button. Nothing.

If there was a burn, I would have
settled back into my seat. But nothing has happened.

“We do not have a burn,” I
transmit. “We do not have a burn.”

Now there is a delay not caused
by the distance alone, but by the gravity of the situation. “No burn.” Blondie
says at last. “Understood, Cedar.” And there is another delay and a muffled
conversation and he comes back on. “We’re going to walk back through the
switches and attempt it again. Please reset everything to the initial settings.
We will attempt it again at 3 days, 2 hours, 43 minutes. Burn duration still 31
seconds.”

Again the countdown. Again I
press the button, harder this time. Again, nothing.

As I wait for an answer, I should
point out that I’ve spent time down there during such crises, so I know the
techniques we use. There are six rules; they might serve you well:

1)
     
Calm discussions only. (Order and reason will solve our problems. Chaos
is the enemy. And few things are more chaotic than a noisy discussion among
intelligent people who are proud of their intelligence.)

2)
     
Everyone is guilty until they prove themselves innocent. (There are many
possible reasons for failure, and the tendency is to point fingers. Which is
acceptable here, because it’s best to cast a wide net when looking for the
causes of problems in complicated systems. So if you are responsible for a
system, or a part, it is up to you to prove that it didn’t cause problems with
the whole.)

3)
     
Between larger meetings, everyone will work in a small group with a
specific task—studying telemetry, for instance, or getting answers about
factory testing procedures, or looking at design drawings.

4)
     
Any hypotheses must be tested at the factory using the next spacecraft
awaiting flight to see if the problem can be reproduced.

5)
     
Members not under suspicion must not busy themselves with observing
these discussions, but must continue to provide normal flight support for the
craft.

6)
     
A group must also be formed to start writing up the findings of the
various committees.

So I can almost picture how
everything’s been at Yevpatoriya: tense, poring over schematics and memos,
choking on the bitterness of yesterday’s wrong decisions, or savoring the thin
satisfaction of someone else’s mistakes.

At last, Blondie’s back. “Yura,
Mishin believes there may be a problem with the fuel tanks because of the
vibrations during the failed firing,” Blondie says. We both know what all of
this means. If the vibrations during the failed engine firing caused a leak,
the fuel is gone. So regardless of whether the vibrations were caused by a
combustion chamber defect or a faulty sensor, the engine is useless. “We are
going to have to work out an alternate plan.”

Popovich comes on around
lunchtime so Blondie can get a break. He is ordinarily a jovial man, but there
is a hesitancy now. Nobody quite knows what to say to someone in my situation.

I am doing some housekeeping and
getting the cabin straight after lunch when Mishin breaks in. Even he is not his
normal self. He is quieter and more circumspect.

“How is my trajectory?” I ask.

“We will know more once you round
the moon tomorrow. Given the mass concentrations, there is some uncertainty.
But we believe you are currently not on track for a free return.”

This is serious. They think I
will miss earth on my current trajectory. I will round the moon and come back
towards the earth, but unless they can adjust my trajectory, I will not reenter
the atmosphere, and the earth will sling me off into some new direction.

Mishin and I both know he is no
Sergei Pavlovich. In fact, we’ve had heated words in the past. But now all that
feels far away. In the midst of such seriousness, all personal feuds seem
temporary, insignificant. We are united in shared crisis.

“Understood,” I say.

“We are working on an alternate
course of action,” he says. “We will have more details tomorrow.”

I don’t know if he has a serious
and credible plan, or if he is just telling me what he thinks I want to hear.

“Understood,” I repeat.

I am exhausted. I eat a few
packages for dinner—chicken and potato paste. I clean up and take care of my
business and turn off the interior lights.

I fall asleep. A deep, hard,
heavy sleep.

•••

I wake up.

In the night I had dreams I
barely remember, dreams about the war.

We suffered greatly back then, of
course. And like all great tragedies, it has given all of us who survived it a
sense of identity and purpose and meaning. I used to think it was a sign of
particular national greatness that we had gone, in the course of two decades,
from having fascists at the gates of our capital to launching a man into space.
And I am still proud of all we’ve done, but my take on it now is less
triumphal, more mature: when you have gone through such misery on earth, you are
going to try all the harder to escape. The Americans are fat and full; they do
not have the same urgency to go elsewhere.

In my dream we had been occupied
again. It was one of those dreams where you somehow know and accept certain
facts which don’t make logical sense. I was still me, still in my 30s, still a
cosmonaut, but we had been occupied by the Germans. An awful, helpless feeling.
After such dreams, I am always grateful to wake up. Even now, in a crippled
spacecraft, on a mission whose outcome seems dubious, life feels preferable to
those dark days. My family spent the war living in an earthen dugout in our
backyard because the fascists had kicked us out of our home. Only by watching
the skies could I imagine freedom: the brave Soviet pilots doing battle above
always gave us hope. But life on earth was hell. I saw the fascists hang my
brother to within an inch of his life. Even this uncertain trip feels better
than that.

And I am well-rested, for the
first time all mission. Sleep makes all the difference. One’s situation doesn’t
change, but one’s attitude does.

I enjoy my morning meal. Whatever
else happens, today I am going to be the first man to go around the moon.
Nothing is going to stop that. Everything else may be in doubt, but this is
certain.

The ship is travelling faster
now. We’re close enough to the moon that its gravity reigns supreme. Earth’s
pull is ineffectual.

I haven’t even finished putting
away my empty breakfast containers when I glance out the window and see a thick
swath of grey and tan, mottled craters and mountain shadows and the smoother
dark lowlands, the
mare
, what old Italians thought were lunar seas. I
unstow the camera and snap frame after frame.

We are approaching along the darkened
side, so beneath the shrinking bright stretch of moon there is a vast void
yawning, a dead space lit dimly blue with earthlight. And my arms go to
gooseflesh. I am really at the moon, and it is impossibly huge and round and
real, and so close that it’s blocking out a large segment of my field of view.
I stretch to watch for as long as possible while the spacecraft continues its
solar roll. This is truly something.

“Cedar, this is Dawn-2.”
Blondie’s on again. I calculate it out, and I can tell he’s working far longer
than the normal shift, even with the middle breaks.

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Are you
in trouble, Blondie?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“They certainly have you working
long hours.”

“I’m in trouble with myself,
Yura. I’m punishing myself. I don’t want to miss this, though. Not for the
whole world.”

“Neither do I.” A pang in my
heart. If we cannot correct my trajectory, I am perhaps going to miss the whole
world for this. Is it worth it? I don’t know that anyone can give an honest
answer to such a question.

“We have the estimated
communications blackout time, Yura. It will begin at 12:34 Moscow time. 3 days,
6 hours, 31 minutes total mission time. It should last forty-seven minutes.”

“Very well.” We will, of course,
be out of radio contact as I round the moon. A different kind of loneliness
than anyone’s ever experienced. “It’s quite the sight so far. I’m sure I’ll
have plenty of descriptions when I come back around. Do we have a start time
for the broadcast?”

And now there is another long
delay, long enough that my transmission probably had time to go to Mars. “Yura,
the State Commission met to discuss your situation following the rocket failure
yesterday. Kamanin insisted that there will be no live broadcast.”

“Understood, Blondie.” Kamanin. I
could feign outrage, but I’m not entirely surprised. My situation puts everyone
involved in a difficult spot when it comes to publicity. And there are plenty
of times, after all, where Kamanin and I are of the same mind. So this is just
another piece of information. Something that’s no longer on my task list.

Now the slice of sunlit moon has
disappeared completely. I pass into shadow and the light streaming through the
porthole cuts off abruptly. But I want to make it darker still, so I cut the
interior lights. Now there is only the soft glow of the pushbutton panel and
the melancholy yellow of the voltmeter. And outside, all the stars, and beneath
them the last earthlit piece of moon is giving way to an immense emptiness,
like when flying over water at night. And yet this is unlike anything any human
being has ever experienced. How is it that I have been chosen, not once but
twice, to be the first human being to do such monumental things? It is amazing
to be so unique, so alone. And yet I would be a stingy man indeed if I didn’t
want everyone, every man and woman, to see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m
feeling.

“I’m can see the dark side now,
Blondie. There’s not much to photograph, but finally this is a scene I could
paint as well as you.”

There’s a delayed chuckle, like
he’s slow getting the joke. (Which he is, of course, but through no fault of
his own.) And: “Very good, Yura.”

Then it’s back to business for
the last few minutes before we lose contact. Recording cabin temperature and
pressure in the logbook, and monitoring voltage and amperage and the
performance of the buffer batteries now that the solar panels have nothing to
do. Listening to my friend until the radio signal cuts out.

•••

I was in the control room for
Sunrise-2, two years ago. There was some doubt about the outcome there as well,
so I know how Blondie must be feeling.

After so many public successes—at
least in the area of human spaceflight—our leaders became addicted to triumph.
And they knew the Gemini program was getting ready for launches, and they knew
Union wouldn’t be ready for some time, so they stretched the capabilities of
the East spacecraft far past its safe limits. That’s what Sunrise-1 and
Sunrise-2 really were—the same spacecraft, with a different name! I can tell
you that now, at least.