[Today, Gagarin's first flight, aboard the Soviet spacecraft the Vostok 1, is the stuff of legend, a 108-minute trip that forever changed the world. But at the time, it was a shot across the American bow in one of the most visceral of Cold War battles, the space race.]
A reprint of a newspaper heralding the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human into space. That flight took place 50 years ago today.(Credit: NASA)
"They've got a man up there. It's Gagarin."
With those fictionalized words (see video below), spoken by actor Jeff Goldblum in Philip Kaufman's terrific 1983 screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," millions of viewers were ushered into the era of manned space flight.
Goldblum's harried alert to a roomful of top American policymakers represents just a little of the reaction in the United States to what happened 50 years ago today, on April 12, 1961, when 27-year-old Flight Major Yuri Gagarin, who was born on a collective farm west of Moscow and who was the son of a carpenter, became the first human to ever enter outer space.
Today, Gagarin's first flight, aboard the Soviet spacecraft the Vostok 1, is the stuff of legend, a 108-minute trip that forever changed the world. But at the time, it was a shot across the American bow in one of the most visceral of Cold War battles, the space race.
It wasn't the first time that the Soviets had beaten the Americans to space. One after another, the milestones were reached first by the Russians: with Sputnik 1 in 1957, the world's first Earth-orbiting satellite, and then with Belka and Strelka, the first living animals to survive an orbital trip.
But Gagarin's flight (see video below) was the tip of the iceberg and a major blow to an American space program that was trying desperately to get a man in space first, a feat that was seen at the time as a huge win in the increasingly tense Cold War.
And while the Americans were able to respond quickly and get astronaut Alan Shepard into space just a month after Gagarin--though it wouldn't be until 1962 that future U.S. Sen. John Glenn would make America's first orbital flight--some clearly felt a sense at the time that a big opportunity had been lost, particularly in the effort to keep a step ahead of the Soviets. As Glenn told the Huffington Post, "We look back now [at Gagarin's flight] and say, 'Oh, that was just a small incident,' but in those days there were serious writings about the future of communism around the world, whether it was going to be a dominant factor. We took this very seriously--the administration, President Kennedy and President Eisenhower after he came around to believe in the importance of it. At the time, we looked at this as representing our country in the Cold War."
No surprise
While Gagarin's flight clearly showed that the Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the race to space, one question is whether
"The degree of surprise depends on where you're asking," said Cathleen Lewis, curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. "The space community throughout the world, especially in the United States Soviet Union was headed for that. They'd been launching animals into space in the new prototype Vostok spacecraft...and in [early] 1961, Soviet scientists had declared that [that] was a success and it was the stepping stone to sending humans into space."
Further, said Lewis, it should have come as no surprise that the Americans were a beat behind. "People who followed those things knew that it was coming," she said, and "they suspected it was coming soon because for the previous four years, since 1957, since the launch of Sputnik, the Soviets had been good at pre-empting American plans, and [their] use of secrecy was very well documented."
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• In awe at D.C.'s Air and Space Museum
• Yuri's Night: Burning Man meets NASA
• Photos: Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight
Lewis said the Americans trailed the Soviets into space in large part because of how NASA planned its program. And though she argued that the American approach may well have paid bigger dividends over time--such as making it to the moon--it didn't serve Washington
Part of the Soviets' success that year had to do with being willing to send up a spacecraft without a global network of tracking and communications infrastructure. "The Soviet Union launched Gagarin only using ground stations in the USSR
By comparison, she added, NASA insisted on building out listening stations around the world so that the first American into space would be able to stay in touch with the ground throughout his journey. And Lewis said that while the Americans might well have chosen to forgo such a robust communications network, it would have been about little more than the public relations victory of putting a man in space first and would have necessitated leaving our first astronaut "in the dark" for parts of his voyage.
The 'father' of the Soviet space program
Even today, Gagarin is a household name, especially in the former
This is a man with a list of accomplishments that few in history can match. The major credit for Sputnik, Vostok, and the Soyuz programs belongs to Korolev, and according to the European Space Agency (ESA), after his death, "he became an icon of Russian rocketry and both his rocket and spaceship designs are still flying today."
But despite those successes, Korolev doesn't get the ink. There's no annual "Sergei's Night" celebrating humankind's advances into space. But there is, of course, "Yuri's Night," a collection of events held around the world each April that honors Gagarin's accomplishments and what they meant to the world.
Yet, according to Robin McKie, writing in "The Observer," Korolev might well have deserved the lion's share of the accolades. "Gagarin's flight was anything but a collective affair," McKie wrote. "In the years that have followed the USSR USSR
Gagarin's legacy
The real question about Gagarin might be about his legacy. As the European Space Agency's article on the matter puts it, "Until pictures of Gagarin appeared in the news, there were no real 'space heroes' for the public to identify with." Sure,
Gagarin graduated from the flight training program at Orenburg Military Pilots School
But Lewis said that Gagarin's size might have had something to do with his selection as well. A slight man, at about 5-foot, 4-inches tall, he may have gained an edge over his comrades because the interior of the Vostok 1 was very small, Lewis said. Still, he was obviously bright, having likely scored higher on his exams than anyone else, she said.
Having completed his space flight, Gagarin instantly became a celebrity on a scale that perhaps no other Soviet citizen ever reached. Indeed, his achievement may be the one that retains its glory the longest. In part, Lewis explains, that's because many Soviet accomplishments didn't survive the glare that came with the collapse of the USSR
Lewis said that had it not been for that corruption, Gagarin might well have been able to achieve even greater things, but even without that, his fame is everlasting. And despite the tarnishing of many of the Soviet-era icons, such as Lenin and KGB leaders, few other groups survived with their reputations as intact as the cosmonauts, she said. And the memorials to Gagarin are, of course, impressive. He has streets named after him and museums dedicated to him, and his remains are buried inside the wall of the Kremlin. Until recently, Lewis added, his final words before his launch--"let's go!"--could be heard each evening in the opening of a Russian nightly news program.
Death
In the aftermath of his famous flight, Gagarin took on the role of national hero. He began a stint in 1962 as deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the
It was a solemn moment for the Soviets. "It is officially announced here that Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Gagarin, the world's first cosmonaut, has perished during an air crash," read the Soviet press agency Tass at the time, according to "The New York Times." "Tass said the announcement of Colonel Gagarin's death had been made by the Communist party's Central Committee, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (Parliament), and the Soviet Council of Ministers."
But his fame didn't die with him. Though the Soviets were unequivocally outclassed by the American space program--though they wanted to, the Soviets never seem to have had the wherewithal to get to the Moon--Gagarin's place as the first man in space can never be taken away. And during the years after his flight, few people on Earth could have matched his star power, no matter where in the world he went.
"In these days of instant celebrity, you don't appreciate how amazing it was that these faces were recognized by everyone," Lewis said. "People came in throngs to visit Gagarin when he toured the world."
GAGARIN'S GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY: THE HIGH PRICE PAID BY THE FIRST MAN IN SPACE
By Jeffrey Kluger
Alan Shepard, the first American in space, famously relieved himself inside his silver pressure suit while waiting out the countdown in his tiny Mercury capsule — a far better solution than canceling the launch and pulling him out just because no one had thought he'd need the loo during a 15-minute suborbital mission, and his spacesuit thus had no collection bag built in. Apollo astronauts used a somewhat more elegant funnel-and-tube system; then they would gather at the window as their waste was vented into space, where it would explode into a shower of shimmery crystals that Apollo 7 commander Wally Schirra dubbed "the Constellation Urion." (See the 50 highs and lows of the space age.)
But it was Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human being in space 50 years ago today, who got the urinary tradition started. On his way to the launchpad, he stopped to relieve himself against the rear tire of his transport van — then climbed back inside and later rocketed off to fame and glory. There was surely no cause and effect between the voiding and the flying, but pilots can be a superstitious lot and all cosmonauts since — or the men at least — have observed the same tire-dousing ritual on their way to the pad.
The 27-year-old Gagarin was a hard guy not to love, and not just for coming up with so venerable a good-luck ritual. There was his apolitically sunny smile, his postage-stamp-ready face, his just-right mix of bravado and modesty, evident to Soviet psychologists who observed in a written report that he "embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy." (Read the cover story on Yuri Gagarin from 1961.)
Neither Gagarin's small stature — he stood just 5 ft. 2 in. (1.57 m), the better to fit inside the tiny pod that was the Vostok spacecraft — nor the brevity of his space career, which spanned just a single, 98-minute orbit, dimmed his radiance a whit. And when he died young — losing his life in a crash of his fighter jet during a routine training mission just seven years after his ride in space — he ensured himself the forever-beautiful icon status of James Dean, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe before him, and Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. after.
It's not for nothing that Russia U.S.
Just as inevitably, the 50th anniversary has gotten the revisionists going, questioning not only what the point of human space travel is when unmanned probes can go so much farther so much more cheaply (a fair, if spiritless, question) but also just how big a deal Gagarin's little joyride was in the first place — a wholly unfair one. Stipulate this: Gagarin was indeed mostly along for the ride: his Vostok capsule was controlled entirely by either preprogrammed commands or controllers on the ground. He was not even allowed the dignity of an attitude-control joystick, unlike John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit the Earth 10 months later and who could at least change the orientation of his little Mercury spacecraft, practicing a rudimentary form of the complex flying that later space travelers would have to master.
Stipulate too that even in the most modern, state-of-the-art spacecraft, orbiting any body — the Earth, the moon, Mars — is a largely passive act. Once you achieve the right speed and altitude, physics does all the flying. (See "The 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing.")
But consider too what it meant to go first — before Shepard, before Glenn, before any other human breached the boundary of space. Even serious scientists could not say for sure that sustained weightlessness wouldn't cause blood pressure to spike, the heart to lose its natural rhythms, the vestibular system to come completely unsprung, the eyes to swell and — yes — explode. The cosmonauts themselves could not say if they could survive the possible 10-G load they'd experience on re-entry — a force making the average 150-lb. (68 kg) man feel like he weighed 1,500 lb. (680 kg). What's more, nobody could say if the giant A-1 rocket with the four strap-on boosters that carried Gagarin to orbit wouldn't blow up along the way — something that rockets had a nasty tendency to do in the early days of the space program. Even in the later days, no launch vehicle was ever considered entirely trustworthy or safe.
Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, was also part of the crew of Apollo 8, which not only was the first manned mission to orbit the moon, but also — more relevant to the astronauts' immediate survival — the first to use the massive Saturn V rocket. For Lovell, the most striking moment of launch day occurred when he and crewmates Frank Borman and Bill Anders rode the elevator to the top of the 363-ft. (111 m) booster and looked down at the ground below, where nearly every other human being within a 1-mile (1.6 km) radius had been evacuated. NASA wanted as few people as possible anywhere near its infernal machine with its 6 million lb. (2.7 million kg) of explosive fuel, and yet Borman, Lovell and Anders were sitting directly on top of it. (See amazing photos of the sun.)
"I kept thinking, do they know something they're not telling us?" Lovell says, from the safe remove of 43 years.
But back in 1961, there was nothing not to tell because there was so little that was genuinely known. It was Gagarin who had the spine to go up and find out, and he would pay a high price for that. Like America's Glenn, he was officially — but quietly — grounded after his return from orbit, the space agencies of both countries deciding that they could not afford the risk of losing a national hero in a second mission when his first had gone so well. Gagarin's face would appear on coins and statues and posters and pennants — and later on T-shirts and tattoos and all the rest. But the man himself would forever be denied the thing he did — and loved — best. He would die at age 34, a terrestrial creature like the rest of us.
Think about that fact on Yuri's Night this year — and give a nod of thanks to the man who gave it all up to be first in line.
@ TIME
@ TIME
