“Sometimes people are saying that God is out there. I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God” – Gherman Stepanovich Titov(1935-2000), 2nd man in orbit, with a derisive smirk when in 1962 on a visit to the US he was asked by a reporter how it felt to be in space.

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Six years before he was killed, (probably poisoned on the command of powerful slave cartels of Macedonia for causing a glut in the market with so many slaves that he was scooping up in his epic eastward march of conquest), Alexander the Great and his mighty armies reached the shores of a great inland salt water lake, now known as the Aral Sea, that sat on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Before 1960, the lake covered around 24,000 square miles.

Then in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union, with it’s ham-handed 5-year plans, began large scale diversions of the water toward irrigation projects and the Aral Sea began shrinking until it was a piddly little lake less than 5% of its original size.

By 2014, the Aral Sea had turned into the Aralkum Desert and all that remains today is a 1000-sq.mile ultra-high salt concentration lake devoid of marine life of any kind, a man-made environmental catastrophe of epic proportions. While regular sea water has a salinity of 35 grams/litre, today’s Aral Sea’s salinity is 380 grams/litre.

The tiny remnant of the Aral Sea is deader than Israel’s Dead Sea.

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120 miles east of the Aral Sea, covering 7800 sq miles in the southern regions of the Kazakh Steppe, is the Russian space launch site, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Soviets chose the name “Baikonur” to mislead western intelligence into mistaking it for a small mining town with the same name, situated 200 miles to the north-east.

Today’s Russia, as the official successor state to the Soviet Union, has forcibly retained control over the facility since 1991. In 2005, Putin made the Kazakhs sign on the dotted line, ratifying an agreement that allowed it to lease the spaceport, on paper until 2050, but with Putin around, we all know it is going to be permanent.

The Baikonur launch site is jointly managed by Roscosmos and the Russian Aerospace Forces.

All of Russia’s crewed space missions launch from Baikonur.

This is the story of the first one……….

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See what I did there? I am like the American MSNBC anchor, Rachel Maddow. When she wants to talk about any topic, she’ll usually start with an entirely different subject that retains a thin ambiguous indirect connection to her main subject. Then, beginning with that other thing, she very gradually comes to the point that she wants to make. She literally weaves a narrative, a very compelling one at that.

I started with Alex the Great, skipped twennie three centuries and arrived at the Russian space programme, the tenuous connection between the two – the Aral Sea.

Did you see my awesomeness there? Oh my God, they should toatly make me a TV anchor.

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Baikonur, Kazakhstan

April 12, 1961

6:07am

The pre-launch preparations had started well before sunrise, beginning with an inspection of the state of his health and a determination of the reliability of the sensors which were attached the previous evening to record his physiological functions.

One last recording was done at 4:50am and a final medical examination conducted. In the opinion of the doctors who viewed the data, the state of his health was good. He had had a good night’s sleep and felt great. That he could sleep at all spoke to his general mental make-up, his ice-cold nerves. The perfect astronaut psyche.

A week prior, the Soviet Air Force psychologist had evaluated his personality and state of mind as follows :-

… “Has a high degree of intellectual development. Distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp sense of attention to his surroundings and a fantastic memory. Has a well-developed imagination and quick reactions. Persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease, excels in higher mathematics as well. Does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right. Appears to understand life better than a lot of his colleagues.

Otherwise, modest. Lets his humour get a bit racy at times.….”

How could a psychologist confirm that the man was exceptional at higher math?? Did the doctor have a degree in math too? I think not.

The psychological assessment sounded less like a dispassionate, professionally written report and more like the 2016 medical evaluation of Donald Trump, prepared for public consumption by the White House physician, Ronny Jackson, who reported Trump to have “incredibly good genes” and “if he had had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.”

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Be that as it may, the psychologist was spot on in the assessment of the man’s character. Disciplined, adaptable, cool, quick on his feet and charismatic, Major Yuriy Alexeyeich Gagarin had the goods to be Russia’s first cosmonaut, there was no doubt on anyone’s mind.

According to the Soviet version of Gagarin’s early life, he was born in 1934, the third of four children of a carpenter father and a collective dairy farm worker mother in Klushino, a tiny village 230kms west of Moscow. A huge reason why Gagarin gained such fame was his parents, honest decent hard working folk who inculcated in him a sense of duty and perseverance.

I said “Soviet version” since the Soviets were known for making night look like day. Gagarin’s may well have been a family of entitlement with connections to the Supreme Soviet, living in a snazzy gated community reserved for the elite, being driven around in a Zil with tinted glasses, but we’ll never know that.

Look at the story that the Soviets fed the world about Gagarin’s professional carrier. A non-entity, born with zero connections all of a sudden gets to join a “flying club” as a teenager. They had flying clubs in 1950s’ USSR?? Come on. Maybe the term “pigs can fly” came from those so-called flying clubs. Then lo and behold, he is in technical university and from there it is a hop, skip and jump to the Soviet Air Force.

Look, I am not trying to belittle and snatch his glory away. Gagarin may well have lived through a childhood of scarcity and deprivation like the history books claim, who the fuck knows? I am simply exercising healthy skepticism, given the constant lies that the Soviet Union spun.

When Yuriy was still a tiny tot, the family moved to a nearby town called Ghzatsk. No prizes for anybody who can correctly guess the current name of Ghzatsk – Gagarinsky, of course.

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Getting back to the Air Force psychologist’s assessment that I detailed a few paragraphs back, Gagarin needed to have those character traits, given that he was about to do what no man had, before him – go into ‘orbit’ around the earth.

You’ll note that I placed the word ‘orbit’ in apostrophes. That’s because at that point in history, it was being used for the first time in the context of a human being.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discovered the concept of what is commonly known today as “orbiting”. He called it “an everlasting state of free fall”.

What could happen to a cannon ball fired horizontally in a vacuum, where there was no air to slow it down, Newton asked. If the earth was flat, he hypothesized, the time for the ball to reach the ground in free fall would depend only on the height of the muzzle above the ground and the muzzle velocity of the cannon.

Note the assumptions that Newton made – that the cannon was fired in a vacuum, horizontally and that the earth was flat. Only gravity would pull the ball down to earth. The higher the speed of the ball, the further it would go before falling back on earth.

From this, Newton deduced that since the earth wasn’t flat, but a sphere, it is possible that if the ball was fired at a certain calculated speed that was just high enough so that it reached the vacuum of space, it would theoretically keep falling but never actually hit the earth.

Later scientists would build on Newton’s basic concept and name the motion of the falling-but-not-landing ball an “orbit” and the threshold speed that an object has to cross in order to reach orbit as “escape velocity”.

Newton correctly estimated the escape velocity for any object, regardless of its weight, shape or volume, to be 21535 “French Feet” per second, a unit of distance now defunct, but equivalent to 7 miles/sec, or over 25000 miles per hour), varying slightly, depending upon where on earth the object is launching from.

The Hungarian aerospace engineer, Theodore von Kármán, designated an altitude that has turned out to be critical in space flight. It has been named the Kármán line in his honour, a line that is universally acknowledged as the boundary of the earth’s atmosphere, beyond which lies the vacuum that is known as “space”. Today, this line is set at 100km (62miles) above the Earth’s mean sea level by the Swiss-based international body, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).

In exactly four hours, Gagarin will go down in history as the first man ever to cross the Kármán line and go into orbit around the earth.

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Gagarin will be strapped inside a Volkswagen Beetle-sized space module that the Russians have named “Vostok-1”.

Mounted on a newly developed R7-Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that is powered by 4 liquid-fuelled booster rockets, the Vostok will lift Gagarin through the earth’s atmosphere, gradually attaining escape velocity as it climbs. Then, at an altitude of 30 nautical miles, the boosters will separate, momentarily creating the “Korolev Cross”, which is a visual phenomenon caused by the boosters falling away, creating a sort of cross in the sky.

Here’s a video of an actual Korolev Cross….

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The Vostok-1 will take Gagarin through one single orbit of the earth and reenter the atmosphere. He will wait until the spacecraft descends through 23000ft, then eject and land safely back on earth with a parachute. In all, the mission will be over in 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Gagarin’s mission has many firsts. The R-7 is the world’s first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). In a future nuclear war against the US, it will launch into sub-orbital space with a single 5-Megaton warhead in its nose, tip over and hurtle down to destroy a US city 8000 miles away.

On this day, however, the R-7’s mission is a peaceful one even though it fuels a bitter rivalry between two nations bent upon dominating the world.

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Medical over, now is the time to put on the suit by the flight crew, a procedure that takes close to an hour. Methodically, piece by piece, they put the spacesuit on him, adjusted and pressurized. Then they put him in a “technological” seat which goes through all the checks of the integrity of the external life support system, its ventilation and the communications gear.

Everything works well.

For a half second, Gagarin pauses and looks around him, at the nurses and the technicians. They stare back, forced smiles of reassurance hiding the stress. He smiles and a wave of relief sweeps over the room.

It is now time to move to the launch site on the bus. Another astronaut, Gherman Stepanovich Titov, a member of the “Vostok 6”, the first batch of cosmonauts, gets on the bus with him. Titov is his back-up, though the Soviets call him the “deputy”. In a few months, at the age of just 26, Titov will become the second human in orbit, on Vostok-2. Even though two Americans, Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard, will go before him, their flights shall be sub-orbital.

Titov holds the distinction of being the youngest human ever, to orbit the earth, most of us haven’t even heard of him. Everybody remembers only Gagarin. Same is the case with the first Apollo moon mission. Buzz Aldrin set foot on the surface of the moon just 19 minutes after Neil Armstrong but he was accorded not even a fraction of the adulation that Neil Armstrong received.

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Launch day has finally arrived, Gagarin is in the bus from the Cosmonaut Hotel where he had been staying. Seated in the bus with him are the heads of Roscosmos and the Soviet Aerospace Forces. It is a the 20-minute drive to the Cosmodrome (launchpad).

Suddenly, at a random spot down the road, Gagarin asks the driver to stop, he has to take a leak. He gets off and waddles over to the right rear tyre, unzips his suit and lets loose. He will later explain that he thought that the wait on the pad would be long and the next chance he would get to pee was a long time ahead. 

In later launches, cosmonauts (and in fact the Russian powers that be) will view that act of urinating as a good luck charm. It is now a ritual, performed by every single cosmonaut or astronaut who has ever blasted off from Baikonur. 

The risk of contamination, contagion, germs, dirt, etc if they open the suits outside the sterile environment of the prep room inside Building-254, is ignored in order to accommodate this ludicrous but funny ritual.

The pee-over-the-tyre thing is so rigidly practised that even female astronauts are not exempt. Only, in their case they can collect their pee in the privacy of the building-254 toilet and take it with them in a flask and sprinkle it over the poor tyre.

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At the launch site, Gagarin is taken to the “bitovoy otsek” (orbiter module) on an elevator and eased into his seat by the flight crew. All the attachments and connections are done, the last instrument checks carried out. Communications are bi-directional and stable.

They have a problem closing the hatch. Gagarin hears the wrenches clanking and then the hatch begins to open again. He turns to see that they have removed the hatch. The head of Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, the R-7’s designer (the dude after whom the ‘Korolev Cross’ is named), appears and he says to Gagarin, “Don’t worry, one contact wasn’t tightened. It’s going to be okay now.”

The panels on which the limit switches were installed are soon rearranged and the hatch cover closed once again. This time, everything looks good.

The Russians haven’t started using the countdown process yet. They plan to simply announce readiness from one hour before launch and then they will call out at 30-15-5-1 minutes before launch.

At 30 seconds, the arms of the launch mount, the metal structure that holds the space craft before launch, begin receding. The umbilical cables that were providing power detach and propellant top-up ceases.

Gagarin feels the rocket sway softly, now detached from its earthly moorings. Then the purging begins, the valves open and the module shudders.

Ignition.

Immediately the Vostok begins to shudder like it is going to break apart. The noise increases steadily until it is a full throated roar, quite apart from the high-pitched whine of the Mig-15’s single Klimov turbojet engine that he has been accustomed to.

Still shuddering violently, the R7 launch vehicle remains rooted on the launchpad for what to Gagarin seems like an eternity, though it is actually just five seconds.

And then it rises, very gradually at first, at an infinitesimal pace. The nature of the shuddering changes, each shudder coming more rapidly after the next. Gagarin, on his back facing up, has not noticed that the spacecraft has cleared the tower and is now 70 seconds into the flight, gaining altitude rapidly.

For a fleeting moment, the shuddering had made Gagarin consider aborting and ejecting but here’s where the difference between a true pioneer and the rest of humanity becomes evident.

The pioneer pushes ahead. And gets into the history books.

The G-forces begin to rise and 3 minutes from launch, the rapidly changing altimeter display shows Gagarin at 40 miles straight up.

The experience of seeing the curvature of the Earth, an object in the vastness of space, changes something in humans’ brains. It shifts our worldview, literally and metaphorically. 8 years in the future, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who will see the Earth from a much greater distance than Gagarin, will observe, “The thing that really surprised me was that [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling, it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.”

From a distance the planet, covered by a thin wisp of an atmosphere, looks relatively small against the immensity of space. It is a sight that shifts something in a person’s whole psyche. Gagarin, the son of poor peasants, is the first human to have that rush of emotion. For the next hour, he looks down on Earth from 170 kilometers above – a view no other person has ever seen. It is surreal.

By the time he comes back to earth, Yuriy Alexeyeich Gagarin will be a full colonel of the Soviet Air Forces, with the call sign : “Kedr” (Russian for Siberian cedar).

 

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Maybe I am being too pretentious but it will be nice if you come back to read Part-2 soon as I am done writing it.