spaceship. It consisted of two modules: a metal sphere, which shrouded Gagarin, and an instrument module, fixed to the base of Gagarin’s sphere by tensioning bands.
The instrument module looked like two great pie dishes welded together, bristling with thermal-radiation louvres. It was crammed with water, tanks of oxygen and nitrogen, and chemical air scrubbers – equipment which would keep Gagarin alive during his brief flight in space. And beneath that was the big TDU-1 retrorocket system which would be used to return the craft from Earth orbit.
Gagarin’s cabin was a cosy spherical nest, lined with green fabric. His ejection seat occupied much of the space. During the descent to Earth inside the sphere, small rockets would hurl Gagarin in his seat out of the craft, and, from seven kilometres above the ground, he would fall by parachute. In case he fell in some uninhabited part of the Earth, the seat contained emergency rations of food and water, radio equipment, and an inflatable dinghy; thus he was cocooned from danger, from the moment he left the pad to the moment he set foot once more on Earth.
There were three small viewing ports recessed into the walls of the cabin, now filled with pure daylight.
At Gagarin’s left hand was a console with instruments to regulate temperature and air humidity, and radio equipment. On the wall opposite his face, TV and film cameras peered at him. Below the cameras was a porthole mounted with Gagarin’s Vzor optical orientation device, a system of mirrors and optical lattices which would enable him to navigate by the stars, if need be …
‘Three minutes. There is a faulty valve. It will be fixed. Be patient, Major Gagarin.’
Gagarin smiled. He felt no impatience, or fear.
He reached for his controls, wrapped his gloved hands around them. There was a simple hand controller to his right, which he could use in space to orient the capsule, if need be. To his left there was an abort switch, which would enable him to be hurled from the capsule if there were some mishap during launch. The controls were solid in his hands, good Soviet engineering. But he was confident he would need neither of these controls, during the launch or his single orbit of Earth.
The systems would work as they should, and his body would not betray him, nor would his mind; his sphere was as snug as a womb, and in less than two hours the adventure would be over, and he would settle like thistledown under his white parachute to the rich soil of Asia. How satisfying it would be, to fall all but naked from the sky, to return to Earth on his own two feet! …
‘Everything is correct. Two minutes more.’
‘I understand,’ he said.
At last, he heard motors whining. The elevator gantry was leaning away from the rocket, power cables were ejected from their sockets in the booster’s metal flanks, and the access arms were falling back, unfolding around the rocket like the petals of a flower.
Gagarin settled in his contoured seat, and ordered himself to relax.
‘Ignition!’
He thought he heard a sigh – of wonder, or anticipation. Perhaps it was the controllers. Perhaps it was himself.
Perhaps not.
Far below him, sound erupted. No less than thirty-two rockets had ignited together: twenty main thrust chambers, a dozen vernier control engines. Hold-down bolts exploded, and Gagarin felt the ship jerk under him.
He could feel vibration but no acceleration; he knew that the rocket had left the ground and was in momentary stasis, balanced on its thrust.
Already, he had left the Earth.
Gagarin whooped. He said: ‘Poyekhali!’ – ‘Off we go!’
He heard an exultant reply from the control centre, but could make out no words.
Now the rockets’ roar engulfed him. Acceleration settled on his chest, mounting rapidly.
Already, he knew, strapped to this ICBM, he was travelling faster than any human in history.
He felt the booster pitch over as it climbed. After two minutes there was a clatter of explosive bolts, a dip in the acceleration. Staging: the four strap-on liquid rocket boosters had been discarded.
He was already more than fifty kilometres high.
Now the main core of the A-1 burned under him, and as the mass of the ship decreased the acceleration built up, to four, five, six times gravity. But Gagarin was just twenty-seven, fit as an ox, and he could feel how his taut muscles absorbed the punishment easily. He maintained steady reports, and he was proud of the control in his voice.
Cocooned in the artificial light of his cabin, exhilarated and in control, he grinned through the mounting pain.
Swallow’s protective shroud cracked open. He could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow.
At five minutes the acceleration died, and Gagarin was hurled forward against his restraints. He heard rattles as the main booster core was discarded. Then came the crisp surge of the ‘half stage’ which would, at last, carry him to space.
Gagarin felt his speed mount, impossibly rapidly.
Then the final stage died. He was thrown forward again, and he grunted.
The automatic orientation system switched on. Swallow locked its sensor on the sun, and swivelled in space; he could feel the movement, as gentle and assured as if he was a child in the womb, carried by his mother’s strong muscles, and he knew he was in orbit.
It was done. And, as the ship turned, he could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath him like a glowing carpet.
‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘Oh my. What a beautiful sight.’
That was when the voices started.
… Much was made of the fact that Yuri Gagarin was an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union. He was born in the Gzhatsk District of Smolensk and entered secondary school in 1941. But his studies were interrupted by the German invasion. After the Second World War Gagarin’s family moved to Gzhatsk, where Yuri resumed his studies. In 1951 he graduated with honours from a vocational school in the town of Lyubersy, near Moscow. He received a foundryman’s certificate. He then studied at an industrial technical school in Saratov, on the Volga, from which he graduated with honours in 1955. It was while attending the industrial school that the man who would be the first to fly in space took his first steps in aviation, when he commenced a course of training at the Saratov Aero Club in 1955 …
Voices – chattering and whispering around the capsule – as if he was dreaming. Was this some artefact of weightlessness, of the radiations of space?
The voices faded.
… And yet this was dream-like, voices or no voices. Here he was falling around the Earth, at a height nobody had approached before. And objects were drifting around him in the cabin: papers, a pencil, a small notebook, comical in their ordinariness, pushed this way and that by tugs of air from his life-support fans. This was weightlessness, a sensation no human had experienced before.
Briefly, he was
