The “space race” of the 1950s and ’60s conjures up images of gleaming Sputnik satellites, Soviet scientists in crisp lab coats, and blazing rockets soaring into the sky. But the reality of the Soviet space program, which narrowly beat out the United States in delivering the first human spaceflight, was much more down-to-earth, writes John Strausbaugh in a new book. “What went wrong: How the Soviet space program went awry” (Available now from PublicAffairs.) Strausbaugh paints a humorous portrait of rockets and spacecraft sustained only by bubble gum, shoelaces, and tight-lipped advertising campaigns. In this excerpt, he writes about Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut sent into space.
On the morning of April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin fell from the sky onto a vast wheat and rye farmland in the Russian village of Smelovka. He detached his parachute and walked away, waving to a woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter who were weeding their potato field.
“Are you from outer space?” the woman asked him.
“Actually, I do!” he replied with a grin, then asked where the nearest phone was because his radio was broken and he needed to report it.
The first man in space was unable to report his achievement because he couldn’t find his cell phone.
In 1959, the Soviet Union’s chief rocket technologist Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov cleverly proposed building a dual-role spacecraft with a pressurized cabin that could carry either humans or spy cameras and return safely to Earth.
The first cosmonauts would mostly be passengers during the mission, and all of the candidates initially selected for the program were Russian Air Force pilots, who had proven dexterity and eyesight and were expected to have some experience with space-like conditions, including G-forces, hypoxia, and even ejection seats.
26-year-old MiG pilot Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin was one of the few selected to train for the early missions. Proud of his service and eager to please, Gagarin was a small, 157cm tall young man with bright blue eyes and a constant smile despite his difficult upbringing. He was born in 1934 in the old village of Klushino in Russia’s Smolensk region.
Part of the training was similar to that given to US astronauts on the Mercury program.
Gagarin endured high G-forces in a centrifuge (which once spun out of control and nearly killed another trainee), experienced momentary weightlessness on a parabolic flight, and trained in a mock capsule (though there wasn’t much to practice on).
He undertook wilderness training because there was a good chance he would miss his target during re-entry and fall far enough away that if he landed in an isolated area of forest or mountain, he would have to return to civilization under his own power.
The rigorous parachute training, enduring the “vibrating seats” that vibrated the eye sockets, and worst of all, the isolation room, also known as the silence room or the horror room, which my American colleagues who were training in the US to go into space on the Mercury also hated.
It was a soundproof box mounted on shock absorbers in the middle of the lab. The walls were 16 inches thick. It was equipped with a replica of the Vostok seat, a small bed and a table, and an electric stove for heating food. When the door closed, there was complete silence.
The purpose was to test whether the trainees could withstand the total isolation of a long-term space flight, such as a trip to the moon and back — the longest period of confinement and terrifying solitude. 15 daysAll while knowing that they are under 24-hour surveillance.
For a long time they endured complete and profound silence, their hearts pounding like cannons, and then suddenly they had to solve complex math problems while lights flashed, music blared, and wrong answers blared in an amplified voice.
But the worst part of all was the oxygen deprivation test, in which the air supply was gradually reduced while the trainees repeatedly wrote their names on a pad.
Gagarin survived by maintaining a positive attitude and appearance, engaging in cheerful, one-sided conversations with silent observers and singing little songs he made up about objects in the spacecraft, including a hot plate, a tube of cheese, and even the electrodes that monitored him.
At 9:07 a.m. on April 12, Gagarin felt the engines start and cried out: “Poyekari!“Let’s go!” He took off smoothly into the warm, cloudless blue sky. Everyone in the control bunker began to breathe again.
But soon the first trouble arose: the rocket did not shut off when it should have, launching Gagarin to an altitude of 203 miles instead of the planned 143. But he soon settled into a 108-minute solo orbit.
The astronauts were not even allowed to talk to their families about the upcoming mission, so there was a fear that a catastrophic failure would be covered up. At one point, engineers on the ground slowed the retrorockets for re-entry. The rocket burned up as planned, but then problems arose again.
“As soon as the rocket brakes let go, there was a violent bang and the spacecraft began to spin very quickly on its axis,” Gagarin explained the next day. “Everything was spinning.”
At the rear of the Vostok sphere carrying Gagarin was an equipment module containing brake rockets, oxygen tanks and batteries that was meant to detach when the retrorockets stopped moving, but this did not happen.
Thick electrical wires bound them “like carelessly tied boots,” write Jamie Dolan and Piers Bizony. Starmana biography of Gagarin. “The entire spacecraft hurtled toward Earth and flipped over.” If the two modules had crashed into each other, Gagarin would likely have died.
Then, a stroke of luck came: the cables burned and the capsule detached from the rocket pack. Unfortunately, the capsule began to spin violently, nearly causing Gagarin to lose consciousness.
“The indicators on the instrument panel became blurred and everything seemed to go grey,” he later reported.
As the capsule fell through the dense air, the fire died down, the rotation slowed somewhat, and Gagarin could look out at the blue sky through a scorched porthole. The ejection mechanism was supposed to activate automatically at the seven kilometer mark, but Gagarin seemed determined to stop waiting.
Apparently he manually blew open the hatch and escaped early, although there were rumors that he panicked, but perhaps he just made the logical decision not to trust the malfunctioning hatch and risk his life on the automatic escape system working properly while being hurled through a ball of superheated metal.
During his parachute descent, Gagarin had no idea how lucky he was that his parachute opened. It was later revealed that the engineers in charge of testing the cosmonauts’ parachutes had neither reported nor fixed an issue that caused the parachute to get caught on the antenna during deployment.
Two kilometers from where Gagarin landed, village children saw the Vostok ball hit the ground, bounce a little, roll a little and come to a halt lying on its side near the river.
Blackened and charred by the heat of re-entry, its hatch gaping open, it looked less like a historic victory and more like an old, damaged object that’d been scraped out of a disastrous fire and then discarded.
Gagarin went down in history as the first man to orbit the Earth, although his actual landing was just a little less than a full circle. The real first man to orbit the Earth was Gherman Titov, who was Gagarin’s follower throughout his life.
The whole world celebrated the Soviet achievement — the whole world except the United States. For NASA, Gagarin’s victory was even more demoralizing than Sputnik’s: NASA was just weeks away from sending Project Mercury astronauts into space, only to be outdone again by the Soviets.
However, the Soviets concealed the fact that Gagarin had separated from the capsule and landed about 500 kilometers away from the target launch site. Baikonur Cosmodrome Kazakhstan also covered up the fact that Gagarin nearly died on his return to Earth.
Hints and rumors spread, but the facts were not widely known in the West until 1996, when, curiously, they were exposed at an auction of Soviet memorabilia at Sotheby’s in New York.
“The wrong one: How the Soviet space program failed“The Book of the Year” by John Strausbaugh. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, a publication of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
