This new ocean, p.48
This New Ocean, page 48
“Poyekhali!”
With Korolyov, Glushko, Keldysh, and others watching through a periscope in a nearby bunker, the modified R-7 carrying Yuri Gagarin ignited and began its slow climb at a little after nine o’clock on the morning of April 12, 1961. With that word—“Here we go!”—Gagarin began feeling the big rocket’s acceleration build slowly at first, then faster, as he arced out over the Kazakh steppe and into the pages of history.
The twenty-seven-year-old test pilot felt exhilarated as he sped into orbit, strapped securely onto his specially contoured couch, while he tried to stay in radio contact with the ground. For Korolyov, who was more than twice his age, the flight of the first human into space was a nerve-racking ordeal that further strained an already weakened heart. The chief designer had fallen asleep, medicated and exhausted, in a specially built wooden cabin not far from Gagarin’s rocket early on the previous night. But he had awakened at 3 A.M. and spent the hours until dawn talking with a colleague who also had trouble sleeping. (Both Gagarin and Titov, his backup, had slept soundly, as would be expected of men who routinely risked their physical hides but who did not have a political stake in the mission.)
Then, during Gagarin’s ascent, the telemetry abruptly broke off. The telemetry operator’s steady “Five … five … five …,” meaning that everything was perfect, suddenly turned to “Three … three … three …” Korolyov, fearing that catastrophe had struck, tore into the room demanding to know what had gone wrong. Moments later, with the radio link reestablished, he was relieved to hear “Five … five … five …” once again. Eight minutes after launch, its E-rocket upper stage having fallen away, the silent Vostok streaked over Siberia and on toward the north Pacific and Alaska. The CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitored the flight from start to finish by eavesdropping on the telemetry and breaking into the television transmission sent from the Vostok capsule to Earth, saw that the total burn time to get the spacecraft to orbit was twelve minutes, eight seconds, and that the last stage itself fired for 423 seconds out of the total. The pressure on the cosmonaut himself as he slid into orbit, they also saw, was less than 1 g.
Gagarin, now weightless, reported his and his spacecraft’s condition to Kaliningrad, practiced eating and drinking from tubes, took notes on a pad that floated in front of him, broadcast revolutionary greetings to the oppressed peoples of the world, and admired the view. Free of gravity, he experienced the physical freedom for which Tsiolkovsky had yearned. “I felt wonderful when the gravity pull began to disappear,” he would recall. “I suddenly found I could do things much more easily than before. And it seemed as though my hands and legs and my whole body did not belong to me. They did not weigh anything. You neither sit nor lie, but just keep floating in the cabin. All the loose objects likewise float in the air and you watch them as in a dream.”
He also watched Earth. “On the horizon I could see the sharp, contrasting change from the light surface of the earth to the inky blackness of the sky,” he went on. “The earth was gay with a lavish palette of colors. It had a pale blue halo around it. Then this band gradually darkened, becoming turquoise, blue, violet and then coal-black” as he plunged into the night at nearly 18,000 miles an hour.
What Gagarin did not do was control his spaceship because the manual control override was kept under a combination lock. In yet another parallel to the Mercury program, a number of Soviet scientists feared that psychological stress would not only incapacitate cosmonauts, but could actually cause them to interfere with the spacecraft’s operation. And like their American counterparts, the cosmonauts had objected. But unlike the Americans, it had been to no avail, even though the Vostok’s autopilot had failed on two tests. Finally, as a concession, it had been decided to put the combination to the lock in an envelope that was accessible to the cosmonaut. On the occasion of the first manned flight into space, however, the autopilot cooperated by working perfectly. Yuri Gagarin therefore flew the single-orbit, 108-minute flight as a man in a can.
The Russians who tracked Gagarin on land and sea were ordered to establish the fact that he was actually in orbit within ten minutes of engine cutoff for reasons that were more political than technical. In the event that the flight went well, Khrushchev and his advisers wanted to get news of it on the air twenty-five minutes after liftoff so other governments could track it and listen for themselves. No one was going to accuse the Soviet Union of fabricating the story.
The sensitivity was understandable. By the spring of 1961, stories were circulating in the West that cosmonauts were dying in space; that the Reds were sacrificing pilots to win at any cost. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a disillusioned Soviet soldier who provided some otherwise excellent information to the United States before he was executed, sent out one report claiming that a dozen cosmonauts had preceded Gagarin. Because it was following all Soviet launches with utmost care, the U.S. intelligence community knew that he was making it up. But the idea that the Communists were sacrificing young pilots probably soothed some Americans, knowing as they did that they had been humbled by an obsessively secretive and repressive regime. Glennan himself struggled with the issue of killing cosmonauts, noting in his diary that he didn’t think “they could stand the horrified criticism of the rest of the world were they to do this. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that they have not already put a man into space and left him there. There seems to be some evidence that the May 15 [1960] shot was just such a shot.” He referred to Korabl Sputnik 1, which had carried Ivan Ivanovich, the dummy, and which had indeed gotten marooned in space for five years.
The administrator’s attitude, widely shared by those of his countrymen with fresh recollections of Stalin’s renowned brutality, was understandable. But it was wrong. Khrushchev was no Stalin. More to the point, Korolyov was no fool. He was immensely protective of his “little eagles,” as he called the cosmonauts, and usually took every precaution to ensure their safety.7 All Korabl Sputnik flights transmitted live television pictures and sent continuous radio reports, both of which were routinely intercepted by U.S. intelligence.* There was absolutely no truth to the rumor, however comforting it was to frustrated Americans, that their enemy was using its best pilots as space fodder because life under communism was cheap.8 Korolyov would not knowingly flirt with disaster until he tried to squeeze three men into one gutted Vostok that was renamed Voskhod.
The Kremlin was so sensitive to charges of lying that it ordered Gagarin’s landing method be kept secret. The possibility of fire on the launchpad or some other accident soon after liftoff had compelled Vostok’s designers to make the seat on which the cosmonaut was strapped ejectable so it could be shot away from the spacecraft and come down by parachute. Furthermore, the spherical capsule itself was supposed to parachute onto Soviet territory after it released its equipment module for a hard landing that could have hurt or killed its occupant. Gagarin and his seat would therefore be ejected at an altitude of about 21,000 feet, and he would float down on his own chute. But fear that a cosmonaut coming down like that would lead to charges that there had been an emergency or that he had jumped out of an airplane, nullifying the glorious deed, convinced the leadership to avoid all mention of the bailout and maintain that he descended in his spaceship. All cosmonauts would be credited with riding their ships down in a charade that would go on for years.
Contrary to what Soviet space officials and Gagarin himself told the world, however, the “can” almost killed the man. Toward the end of the flight, the spacecraft went into a potentially deadly spin when the equipment module failed to separate from the sphere that held Gagarin. The module contained the braking rocket that was supposed to slow Vostok as it re-entered the atmosphere and was designed to fall away as soon as the retro-rocket turned off. But it did not jettison completely because all of the “umbilical cord” of wires and electrical cables connecting it to the sphere did not fully disconnect. With some cables and wires still holding the re-entry and equipment modules together, the dangling equipment module started to swing wildly behind Gagarin, thrashing from side to side like an out-of-control kite in a stiff wind. This quickly sent him into an end-over-end lurching spin at 17,000 miles an hour for ten terrifying minutes until the sphere and the conical pod finally broke free of each other.
“Everything was spinning around,” Gagarin would note in his report the next day. “The rotation speed was about thirty degrees per second.… I was performing a kind of ballet: head-legs, legs-head with a very high rotation speed.… I had time only to hide my eyes from the sun to avoid its rays.… I felt that too much time passed, but there was no separation.… ‘Descending 1’ doesn’t go on the display, ‘Get ready for ejection’ doesn’t turn on. There is no separation. The ballet goes on.” His commander, Colonel Yevgeni A. Karpov, frantically scrawled “Malfunction!!!” and “Don’t panic”11 on a pad in the mission control room, though it is unclear whether he did so during the flight or immediately afterward. Even after separation, the three-ton cannonball in which Gagarin was strapped wobbled as it continued its fiery plunge back into the atmosphere. Since the capsule’s heat shield was between it and the equipment module, it probably would have been useless if the module hadn’t finally broken away. The cosmonaut and his Vostok would have been incinerated.
At 9:59 A.M. local time (1:59 A.M. Cape Canaveral time), Moscow Radio crackled onto the air with yet another historic announcement: “Today, 12 April 1961, the first cosmic ship named Vostok, with a man on board, was orbited around the Earth from the Soviet Union. He is an airman, Major Yuri Gagarin.” Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, and the others were awakened and given the news. Not far away the Mercury-Redstone that Shepard was scheduled to ride down the Atlantic test range in only sixteen days stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry, grounded in the night.
Meanwhile, Vostok 1’s retro-rocket fired on schedule over West Africa, knocking some three hundred miles an hour off its speed and sending it into a long descent toward home. Radio contact was again broken, this time because of a normal blackout caused by ionized plasma that enveloped the spacecraft as it plunged back into the atmosphere. Minutes later Gagarin’s billowing parachute dropped him, resplendent in his bright orange space suit and shiny white visored helmet, onto a collective farm near the Volga. The cosmonaut had hardly climbed out of his space suit when the premier, never one to be reticent, set Gagarin’s feat in perspective. “You have made yourself immortal,” proclaimed Nikita Khrushchev.13
Two days later, a military transport escorted by seven MiGs landed Gagarin at Moscow’s Vnukuvo Airport, where he marched on a thick orange carpet at the end of which stood a beaming Khrushchev, members of the Council of Ministers, and other notables. There were kisses and bear hugs, saluting and applause, and effusive patriotic greetings, followed by a limousine parade into the capital, where millions lined the streets and cheered. Flowers and red banners sprouted everywhere. The parents of the first human being to rocket around the world were on hand, too: he in his carpenter’s cap, she in her shawl. The European Broadcasting Union carried the ceremonies live on television. There had been nothing to match the celebration since the end of the Great Patriotic War.
Under a headline that spanned four of the paper’s eight columns—“RUSSIAN ORBITED THE EARTH ONCE, OBSERVING IT THROUGH PORTHOLES; SPACE FLIGHT LASTED 108 MINUTES”—The New York Times on April 13 ran a photo of jubilant youngsters outside the Moscow Planetarium and another of their hero hinting at a smile like a cosmic Mona Lisa in a leather flight cap. The newspaper of record (as it called itself) ran a hastily assembled spate of sidebars that described the flight with maps and diagrams, provided background on the preparations for the mission, and even a transcript of some of the hero’s radio chatter with Kaliningrad. It also carried congratulations from Kennedy. Werhner von Braun offered congratulations, while Edward Teller offered only sour grapes. He blamed the Communist triumph on the same sort of “unimaginative, materialistic thinking” in his adopted country that had led to the Sputnik disaster. This new and devastating blow had occurred, in other words, because of the near-subversive combination of the lamentable Dwight Eisenhower, who had pitched insouciance, and Ed Herlihy, a narrator of newsreels, whose Horn & Hardart Automat commercials pitched “less work for mother.” Less work, indeed. A Man-in-the-News profile of Gagarin showed him beside Valentina, who was reading to their two-year-old daughter (indicating that Valentina Gagarina, for one, knew how to work). The article noted that “Gagarin” derived from “wild duck.” And there was a cartoon from Baltimore’s Sun that showed Khrushchev holding a red star in space with one hand and banging a likeness of Kennedy over the head with a shoe in the other.
The Times also carried a roundup of congratulations from other nations. And, notably, Kennedy was quoted as promising to increase Eisenhower’s space budget by 11.8 percent and ordering an acceleration of work on von Braun’s huge Saturn booster. But, the new president cautioned, the United States would continue to trail its rival for some time.
And there was the full text of the victor’s statement, in which the party’s Central Committee indulged in the sort of excessive self-congratulation that had long since become a parody of itself and a source of material for comedians beyond the Kremlin’s reach. “The first man to penetrate space was a Soviet man, a citizen of the U.S.S.R.… This is an unparalleled victory of man over the forces of nature.… In this achievement, which will pass into history, are embodied the genius of the Soviet people and the powerful force of socialism.… Our country has surpassed all other states in the world and has been the first to blaze the trail into space.”
There was more to the exorbitant chest pounding than politics, economics, and the dialectic of history. It had a psychological dimension as well. The Central Committee’s statement reflected a cultural inferiority complex that had gnawed at the Russian soul at least since the sixteenth century, when a feudal Russia had begun to look in awe at a Europe that was developing centralized states and an urban, industrialized bourgeoisie that in turn spawned standing armies, new techniques of state administration, communication and monetary policy, advances in the arts and sciences, and merchant fleets that brought back riches from around the known world. “The Western influence gained ground as we realized our material and spiritual poverty,” Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevsky noted even before the Soviet Union was born. Russia had no part in those achievements. As a result, a pervasive “moral and spiritual subordination” and a belief in Russian backwardness spread across the land, Kliuchevsky maintained, and it led directly to the wholesale (and humiliating) importation of the sort of Western culture that fills the pages of War and Peace.
Khrushchev, whose father had been a miner and who himself had been a shepherd as a youngster, was eminently aware of all that. He also knew that a cultural condescension persisted; so many Westerners dismissed the Russians as Asians that Russians themselves had accepted the ethnologically incorrect notion. Looking back on Sputnik a quarter century later, Simon Ramo, a founder of the aerospace giant TRW, would be explicit on that score: “We knew the Russians excelled in ballet and caviar, but when the proper time came to launch an artificial moon, we Americans expected to be the ones to do it.”
“Bourgeois statesmen used to poke fun at us, saying that we Russians were running around in bark sandals and lapping up cabbage soup with those sandals,” Nikita Khrushchev would tell a Polish audience two years after Gagarin’s flight. “They used to make fun of our culture, the culture of a people considered, so to say, to be the last among the civilized Western countries. Then suddenly, you understand, those who they thought lapped up the cabbage soup with bark sandals got into outer space earlier than the so-called civilized ones.” Like six-guns in the American West, rockets and missiles were the new equalizers, at least in the eyes of those who saw themselves as history’s underdogs.
Ham in a Can
Gagarin had in fact been beaten to space by an American primate. It just happened to be a chimp. On January 2, a contingent of six “astrochimps,” accompanied by twenty handlers and medical specialists, arrived at Canaveral from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Their assignment was to learn how to pull certain levers. In addition, their pulse, respiration rate, and other vital signs were to be studied while they were weightless and under high g forces before the first astronaut flew. Pulling the correct lever was rewarded with a banana pellet; pulling the wrong one triggered a mild shock. Three weeks after they arrived at Cape Canaveral, all six were bored, well-fed experts at their assigned tasks.
Just before noon on January 31, a particularly frisky chimp named Ham (for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center) that was strapped onto a special “biopack” couch blasted off in a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone. A minute later, those who were monitoring the flight in the new Mercury Control Center saw that the rocket was climbing at least one degree higher than its intended trajectory and that the worrisome angle was increasing. The Redstone had developed a “hot engine” that sucked in all of the fuel five seconds faster than called for by the flight plan. The higher angle meant that Ham, now furiously trying to avoid shocks to his feet by pulling levers with both hands every time a white or blue light flashed, was pulling more than 7 gs. Two minutes and eighteen seconds after liftoff, the cabin pressure suddenly dropped because of a malfunctioning air inlet valve that had been loosened by vibration. Then the liquid oxygen ran out, causing the Redstone’s engine to shut down.
Sensing that the flight was going awry, the Mercury’s emergency abort system kicked in, firing three rockets mounted on a tower on the capsule’s nose. That abruptly pulled the capsule off the Redstone. Meanwhile, the retro-rockets that were supposed to have slowed the capsule as it came down dropped off prematurely, meaning that the hapless primate plunged back into the atmosphere at 5,857 miles an hour, or more than 1,400 miles an hour faster than planned. Ham therefore pulled almost 15 gs, which was three more than expected. The higher speed also meant that he overshot the recovery area, complicating efforts to retrieve him. Worse, the spacecraft’s electrical system went haywire. At one point, as the ape drifted weightlessly, he pulled the right levers, but instead of being rewarded with banana pellets, he got the shock treatment.
With Korolyov, Glushko, Keldysh, and others watching through a periscope in a nearby bunker, the modified R-7 carrying Yuri Gagarin ignited and began its slow climb at a little after nine o’clock on the morning of April 12, 1961. With that word—“Here we go!”—Gagarin began feeling the big rocket’s acceleration build slowly at first, then faster, as he arced out over the Kazakh steppe and into the pages of history.
The twenty-seven-year-old test pilot felt exhilarated as he sped into orbit, strapped securely onto his specially contoured couch, while he tried to stay in radio contact with the ground. For Korolyov, who was more than twice his age, the flight of the first human into space was a nerve-racking ordeal that further strained an already weakened heart. The chief designer had fallen asleep, medicated and exhausted, in a specially built wooden cabin not far from Gagarin’s rocket early on the previous night. But he had awakened at 3 A.M. and spent the hours until dawn talking with a colleague who also had trouble sleeping. (Both Gagarin and Titov, his backup, had slept soundly, as would be expected of men who routinely risked their physical hides but who did not have a political stake in the mission.)
Then, during Gagarin’s ascent, the telemetry abruptly broke off. The telemetry operator’s steady “Five … five … five …,” meaning that everything was perfect, suddenly turned to “Three … three … three …” Korolyov, fearing that catastrophe had struck, tore into the room demanding to know what had gone wrong. Moments later, with the radio link reestablished, he was relieved to hear “Five … five … five …” once again. Eight minutes after launch, its E-rocket upper stage having fallen away, the silent Vostok streaked over Siberia and on toward the north Pacific and Alaska. The CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitored the flight from start to finish by eavesdropping on the telemetry and breaking into the television transmission sent from the Vostok capsule to Earth, saw that the total burn time to get the spacecraft to orbit was twelve minutes, eight seconds, and that the last stage itself fired for 423 seconds out of the total. The pressure on the cosmonaut himself as he slid into orbit, they also saw, was less than 1 g.
Gagarin, now weightless, reported his and his spacecraft’s condition to Kaliningrad, practiced eating and drinking from tubes, took notes on a pad that floated in front of him, broadcast revolutionary greetings to the oppressed peoples of the world, and admired the view. Free of gravity, he experienced the physical freedom for which Tsiolkovsky had yearned. “I felt wonderful when the gravity pull began to disappear,” he would recall. “I suddenly found I could do things much more easily than before. And it seemed as though my hands and legs and my whole body did not belong to me. They did not weigh anything. You neither sit nor lie, but just keep floating in the cabin. All the loose objects likewise float in the air and you watch them as in a dream.”
He also watched Earth. “On the horizon I could see the sharp, contrasting change from the light surface of the earth to the inky blackness of the sky,” he went on. “The earth was gay with a lavish palette of colors. It had a pale blue halo around it. Then this band gradually darkened, becoming turquoise, blue, violet and then coal-black” as he plunged into the night at nearly 18,000 miles an hour.
What Gagarin did not do was control his spaceship because the manual control override was kept under a combination lock. In yet another parallel to the Mercury program, a number of Soviet scientists feared that psychological stress would not only incapacitate cosmonauts, but could actually cause them to interfere with the spacecraft’s operation. And like their American counterparts, the cosmonauts had objected. But unlike the Americans, it had been to no avail, even though the Vostok’s autopilot had failed on two tests. Finally, as a concession, it had been decided to put the combination to the lock in an envelope that was accessible to the cosmonaut. On the occasion of the first manned flight into space, however, the autopilot cooperated by working perfectly. Yuri Gagarin therefore flew the single-orbit, 108-minute flight as a man in a can.
The Russians who tracked Gagarin on land and sea were ordered to establish the fact that he was actually in orbit within ten minutes of engine cutoff for reasons that were more political than technical. In the event that the flight went well, Khrushchev and his advisers wanted to get news of it on the air twenty-five minutes after liftoff so other governments could track it and listen for themselves. No one was going to accuse the Soviet Union of fabricating the story.
The sensitivity was understandable. By the spring of 1961, stories were circulating in the West that cosmonauts were dying in space; that the Reds were sacrificing pilots to win at any cost. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a disillusioned Soviet soldier who provided some otherwise excellent information to the United States before he was executed, sent out one report claiming that a dozen cosmonauts had preceded Gagarin. Because it was following all Soviet launches with utmost care, the U.S. intelligence community knew that he was making it up. But the idea that the Communists were sacrificing young pilots probably soothed some Americans, knowing as they did that they had been humbled by an obsessively secretive and repressive regime. Glennan himself struggled with the issue of killing cosmonauts, noting in his diary that he didn’t think “they could stand the horrified criticism of the rest of the world were they to do this. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that they have not already put a man into space and left him there. There seems to be some evidence that the May 15 [1960] shot was just such a shot.” He referred to Korabl Sputnik 1, which had carried Ivan Ivanovich, the dummy, and which had indeed gotten marooned in space for five years.
The administrator’s attitude, widely shared by those of his countrymen with fresh recollections of Stalin’s renowned brutality, was understandable. But it was wrong. Khrushchev was no Stalin. More to the point, Korolyov was no fool. He was immensely protective of his “little eagles,” as he called the cosmonauts, and usually took every precaution to ensure their safety.7 All Korabl Sputnik flights transmitted live television pictures and sent continuous radio reports, both of which were routinely intercepted by U.S. intelligence.* There was absolutely no truth to the rumor, however comforting it was to frustrated Americans, that their enemy was using its best pilots as space fodder because life under communism was cheap.8 Korolyov would not knowingly flirt with disaster until he tried to squeeze three men into one gutted Vostok that was renamed Voskhod.
The Kremlin was so sensitive to charges of lying that it ordered Gagarin’s landing method be kept secret. The possibility of fire on the launchpad or some other accident soon after liftoff had compelled Vostok’s designers to make the seat on which the cosmonaut was strapped ejectable so it could be shot away from the spacecraft and come down by parachute. Furthermore, the spherical capsule itself was supposed to parachute onto Soviet territory after it released its equipment module for a hard landing that could have hurt or killed its occupant. Gagarin and his seat would therefore be ejected at an altitude of about 21,000 feet, and he would float down on his own chute. But fear that a cosmonaut coming down like that would lead to charges that there had been an emergency or that he had jumped out of an airplane, nullifying the glorious deed, convinced the leadership to avoid all mention of the bailout and maintain that he descended in his spaceship. All cosmonauts would be credited with riding their ships down in a charade that would go on for years.
Contrary to what Soviet space officials and Gagarin himself told the world, however, the “can” almost killed the man. Toward the end of the flight, the spacecraft went into a potentially deadly spin when the equipment module failed to separate from the sphere that held Gagarin. The module contained the braking rocket that was supposed to slow Vostok as it re-entered the atmosphere and was designed to fall away as soon as the retro-rocket turned off. But it did not jettison completely because all of the “umbilical cord” of wires and electrical cables connecting it to the sphere did not fully disconnect. With some cables and wires still holding the re-entry and equipment modules together, the dangling equipment module started to swing wildly behind Gagarin, thrashing from side to side like an out-of-control kite in a stiff wind. This quickly sent him into an end-over-end lurching spin at 17,000 miles an hour for ten terrifying minutes until the sphere and the conical pod finally broke free of each other.
“Everything was spinning around,” Gagarin would note in his report the next day. “The rotation speed was about thirty degrees per second.… I was performing a kind of ballet: head-legs, legs-head with a very high rotation speed.… I had time only to hide my eyes from the sun to avoid its rays.… I felt that too much time passed, but there was no separation.… ‘Descending 1’ doesn’t go on the display, ‘Get ready for ejection’ doesn’t turn on. There is no separation. The ballet goes on.” His commander, Colonel Yevgeni A. Karpov, frantically scrawled “Malfunction!!!” and “Don’t panic”11 on a pad in the mission control room, though it is unclear whether he did so during the flight or immediately afterward. Even after separation, the three-ton cannonball in which Gagarin was strapped wobbled as it continued its fiery plunge back into the atmosphere. Since the capsule’s heat shield was between it and the equipment module, it probably would have been useless if the module hadn’t finally broken away. The cosmonaut and his Vostok would have been incinerated.
At 9:59 A.M. local time (1:59 A.M. Cape Canaveral time), Moscow Radio crackled onto the air with yet another historic announcement: “Today, 12 April 1961, the first cosmic ship named Vostok, with a man on board, was orbited around the Earth from the Soviet Union. He is an airman, Major Yuri Gagarin.” Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, and the others were awakened and given the news. Not far away the Mercury-Redstone that Shepard was scheduled to ride down the Atlantic test range in only sixteen days stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry, grounded in the night.
Meanwhile, Vostok 1’s retro-rocket fired on schedule over West Africa, knocking some three hundred miles an hour off its speed and sending it into a long descent toward home. Radio contact was again broken, this time because of a normal blackout caused by ionized plasma that enveloped the spacecraft as it plunged back into the atmosphere. Minutes later Gagarin’s billowing parachute dropped him, resplendent in his bright orange space suit and shiny white visored helmet, onto a collective farm near the Volga. The cosmonaut had hardly climbed out of his space suit when the premier, never one to be reticent, set Gagarin’s feat in perspective. “You have made yourself immortal,” proclaimed Nikita Khrushchev.13
Two days later, a military transport escorted by seven MiGs landed Gagarin at Moscow’s Vnukuvo Airport, where he marched on a thick orange carpet at the end of which stood a beaming Khrushchev, members of the Council of Ministers, and other notables. There were kisses and bear hugs, saluting and applause, and effusive patriotic greetings, followed by a limousine parade into the capital, where millions lined the streets and cheered. Flowers and red banners sprouted everywhere. The parents of the first human being to rocket around the world were on hand, too: he in his carpenter’s cap, she in her shawl. The European Broadcasting Union carried the ceremonies live on television. There had been nothing to match the celebration since the end of the Great Patriotic War.
Under a headline that spanned four of the paper’s eight columns—“RUSSIAN ORBITED THE EARTH ONCE, OBSERVING IT THROUGH PORTHOLES; SPACE FLIGHT LASTED 108 MINUTES”—The New York Times on April 13 ran a photo of jubilant youngsters outside the Moscow Planetarium and another of their hero hinting at a smile like a cosmic Mona Lisa in a leather flight cap. The newspaper of record (as it called itself) ran a hastily assembled spate of sidebars that described the flight with maps and diagrams, provided background on the preparations for the mission, and even a transcript of some of the hero’s radio chatter with Kaliningrad. It also carried congratulations from Kennedy. Werhner von Braun offered congratulations, while Edward Teller offered only sour grapes. He blamed the Communist triumph on the same sort of “unimaginative, materialistic thinking” in his adopted country that had led to the Sputnik disaster. This new and devastating blow had occurred, in other words, because of the near-subversive combination of the lamentable Dwight Eisenhower, who had pitched insouciance, and Ed Herlihy, a narrator of newsreels, whose Horn & Hardart Automat commercials pitched “less work for mother.” Less work, indeed. A Man-in-the-News profile of Gagarin showed him beside Valentina, who was reading to their two-year-old daughter (indicating that Valentina Gagarina, for one, knew how to work). The article noted that “Gagarin” derived from “wild duck.” And there was a cartoon from Baltimore’s Sun that showed Khrushchev holding a red star in space with one hand and banging a likeness of Kennedy over the head with a shoe in the other.
The Times also carried a roundup of congratulations from other nations. And, notably, Kennedy was quoted as promising to increase Eisenhower’s space budget by 11.8 percent and ordering an acceleration of work on von Braun’s huge Saturn booster. But, the new president cautioned, the United States would continue to trail its rival for some time.
And there was the full text of the victor’s statement, in which the party’s Central Committee indulged in the sort of excessive self-congratulation that had long since become a parody of itself and a source of material for comedians beyond the Kremlin’s reach. “The first man to penetrate space was a Soviet man, a citizen of the U.S.S.R.… This is an unparalleled victory of man over the forces of nature.… In this achievement, which will pass into history, are embodied the genius of the Soviet people and the powerful force of socialism.… Our country has surpassed all other states in the world and has been the first to blaze the trail into space.”
There was more to the exorbitant chest pounding than politics, economics, and the dialectic of history. It had a psychological dimension as well. The Central Committee’s statement reflected a cultural inferiority complex that had gnawed at the Russian soul at least since the sixteenth century, when a feudal Russia had begun to look in awe at a Europe that was developing centralized states and an urban, industrialized bourgeoisie that in turn spawned standing armies, new techniques of state administration, communication and monetary policy, advances in the arts and sciences, and merchant fleets that brought back riches from around the known world. “The Western influence gained ground as we realized our material and spiritual poverty,” Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevsky noted even before the Soviet Union was born. Russia had no part in those achievements. As a result, a pervasive “moral and spiritual subordination” and a belief in Russian backwardness spread across the land, Kliuchevsky maintained, and it led directly to the wholesale (and humiliating) importation of the sort of Western culture that fills the pages of War and Peace.
Khrushchev, whose father had been a miner and who himself had been a shepherd as a youngster, was eminently aware of all that. He also knew that a cultural condescension persisted; so many Westerners dismissed the Russians as Asians that Russians themselves had accepted the ethnologically incorrect notion. Looking back on Sputnik a quarter century later, Simon Ramo, a founder of the aerospace giant TRW, would be explicit on that score: “We knew the Russians excelled in ballet and caviar, but when the proper time came to launch an artificial moon, we Americans expected to be the ones to do it.”
“Bourgeois statesmen used to poke fun at us, saying that we Russians were running around in bark sandals and lapping up cabbage soup with those sandals,” Nikita Khrushchev would tell a Polish audience two years after Gagarin’s flight. “They used to make fun of our culture, the culture of a people considered, so to say, to be the last among the civilized Western countries. Then suddenly, you understand, those who they thought lapped up the cabbage soup with bark sandals got into outer space earlier than the so-called civilized ones.” Like six-guns in the American West, rockets and missiles were the new equalizers, at least in the eyes of those who saw themselves as history’s underdogs.
Ham in a Can
Gagarin had in fact been beaten to space by an American primate. It just happened to be a chimp. On January 2, a contingent of six “astrochimps,” accompanied by twenty handlers and medical specialists, arrived at Canaveral from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Their assignment was to learn how to pull certain levers. In addition, their pulse, respiration rate, and other vital signs were to be studied while they were weightless and under high g forces before the first astronaut flew. Pulling the correct lever was rewarded with a banana pellet; pulling the wrong one triggered a mild shock. Three weeks after they arrived at Cape Canaveral, all six were bored, well-fed experts at their assigned tasks.
Just before noon on January 31, a particularly frisky chimp named Ham (for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center) that was strapped onto a special “biopack” couch blasted off in a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone. A minute later, those who were monitoring the flight in the new Mercury Control Center saw that the rocket was climbing at least one degree higher than its intended trajectory and that the worrisome angle was increasing. The Redstone had developed a “hot engine” that sucked in all of the fuel five seconds faster than called for by the flight plan. The higher angle meant that Ham, now furiously trying to avoid shocks to his feet by pulling levers with both hands every time a white or blue light flashed, was pulling more than 7 gs. Two minutes and eighteen seconds after liftoff, the cabin pressure suddenly dropped because of a malfunctioning air inlet valve that had been loosened by vibration. Then the liquid oxygen ran out, causing the Redstone’s engine to shut down.
Sensing that the flight was going awry, the Mercury’s emergency abort system kicked in, firing three rockets mounted on a tower on the capsule’s nose. That abruptly pulled the capsule off the Redstone. Meanwhile, the retro-rockets that were supposed to have slowed the capsule as it came down dropped off prematurely, meaning that the hapless primate plunged back into the atmosphere at 5,857 miles an hour, or more than 1,400 miles an hour faster than planned. Ham therefore pulled almost 15 gs, which was three more than expected. The higher speed also meant that he overshot the recovery area, complicating efforts to retrieve him. Worse, the spacecraft’s electrical system went haywire. At one point, as the ape drifted weightlessly, he pulled the right levers, but instead of being rewarded with banana pellets, he got the shock treatment.
