Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight by Gerald Brennan Read Free Book Online Page A

more lights. A maelstrom of publicity. The
strange dislocation of unexpected trip after unexpected trip. This type of
travel produces envy in those who observe it but anxiety for those who are
doing it, those who cannot escape. For I was truly caught in the whirlwind.
    •••
    Enough reminiscing. I should
focus on the present. It is, at least, more calm.
    During this first night there are
periods of sleep and wakefulness replacing one another in turn, all while the
spacecraft spins about the solar axis. I do my best not to look at the
instruments too often; at the beginning of my sleep period, the flywheels of my
mind had been spinning at too great a rate, and I certainly don’t want to
impart them with any additional momentum.
    After what feels like a longer
bit of sleep, I wake and know I might as well get going. (Well, relatively
speaking. In this situation, every function of every bit of furniture is merged
into one: my form-fitting couch is bed and workchair and dining room place
setting. So there’s no place to go, relatively speaking.)
    I retrieve the binder with the
mission parameters from next to my chair. Compare the counter with the
mission-elapsed time to the printed tables and values. It is not quite time for
the next communication period, so I eat, slowly, my mind as empty as the vacuum
outside the porthole glass.
    This evening will be the
mid-course correction, which will keep us on track to go around the moon and
hit the reentry corridor back at earth. If there are absolutely no errors, all
of that will happen on its own, but I am eager to make sure we’re on course to
get back for a proper reentry.
    The reentry is a serious business
and I should discuss it in detail now; it’s more complicated than the one on
East-1, and that one was problematic on its own, so among the mission phases,
this one has been foremost in my mind.
    Imagine throwing a stone into a
pond. If you throw it in directly, there will be a violent splash. But with the
right shape of stone, thrown at the right speed and angle, you can skip it and
it will slip gently beneath the surface. This is what we’re trying to do: at
return speeds very close to the second cosmic velocity, there’s more energy to
be dissipated, and plunging directly into the atmosphere with no letup would
make for a difficult time. (It can be done: a ballistic reentry, it’s called.
But the stresses can be tremendous: at best, it will subject me to 8 to 10 gs,
which I’ve done before. If it’s steeper, it will cause greater strain on the
heat shield, which might lead to a catastrophic burn-through. And even if the
heat shield holds, the deceleration will go up, possibly to 20 gs or more. In
short, a ballistic entry that isn’t shallow enough will not be survivable.) But
of course a skip must be a very precise maneuver: a single skip, so as to bleed
off exactly the right amount of energy and come back into the atmosphere so as
to land at precisely the right spot.
    Now imagine throwing the stone,
and the pond is small. If you throw very hard, you could easily skip it in such
a manner that the stone bounces off the water once and then lands on the
opposite bank. And so it is with this. If we don’t dig deep enough into the
atmosphere on the first skip, the craft will go caroming off into space; it
could conceivably end up back in orbit, with no retrorockets and no way to
return; it could also end up skipping high and then plunging back down into an
unsurvivable ballistic reentry.
    We do at least have options for
controlling the skip. Thrusters on the descent module can fire to rotate the
ship during its reentry; it’s shaped like an automobile headlamp, with the heat
shield where the front of the lamp would be, and the craft is weighted such
that the shield will hit the atmosphere at an angle and either lift the craft
up or dig it deeper into the air, depending on the rotation. So there’s more to
the skip than just hitting the reentry corridor. But we do have