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

to hit it.
    Which means tonight’s burn is
important, not so much for getting to the moon, as for getting back safely. I
do not like to dwell negatively on the future. But there is nothing else of
importance today, so my thoughts are being pulled in that direction.
    •••
    A lot of what I’ve told you about
my past is already in the history books.
    I have not talked in detail about
the end of East-1 before now, at least not openly. Of course I reported
everything in detail to the State Commission. They needed to attempt a fix of
the umbilical cord before Titov’s mission. But to talk in public about that? At
the time it served no purpose. We were first. That’s what mattered. There’s no
use looking sloppy on the world stage.
    As for the parachute
landing…well, the story is that I came down in my craft. You can blame the
Americans for that. When it was becoming apparent we were competing to be first
with a man in space, the aeronautical federation that sets the rules for such
things was dominated by Americans. And—like children who know they can’t win a
game fairly—they made sure the rules favored themselves. Those guidelines said
that the man who went into space had to land with his craft. And since everyone
knew they’d be landing their capsules in water, and since we’d presumably be
recovering ours on land, it was clearly a biased rule, for it’s obviously
harder to do a soft landing on land. (Not that it really matters. Is someone in
Africa or Asia going to say, “No, you cheated, your accomplishment doesn’t
count” because of such a trifle?)
    I knew what was expected of me.
    The journalists from the West
were eager to talk to me. In England they had arranged a press conference: me
behind a table, with microphones and cameras waiting to pounce on any misstep
or misstatement. (It was not my first—there had been one in every country—but
certainly it was the one with the greatest potential for disaster.) And of
course, Kamanin was there in the corner, watching it all. So I could not veer
off course in either direction—neither too few words, nor too many.
    “Where did your flight begin?”
someone asked. (Was it a planted question? Nobody in the West even knew the
name Tyura-Tam. To throw off their spies, we’d started referring to the firing
range as the Baikonur Cosmodrome, even though Baikonur was hundreds of
kilometers away. Surely they wanted to know where to send their spy planes!)
    “Where did it begin? At the
launch facility,” I told them, and there was general laughter.
    “After your orbit, you reentered.
Where did you land?”
    “In the planned spot,” I told
them. True, we were a few hundred kilometers off course. But everything had
gone well. That was the important thing.
    “And how did you land?”
    “I came down in my craft.
Everything functioned perfectly, and I landed, and there were peasants about,
and of course they were curious, but the rescue team was on hand very shortly
to pick me up.” And it was true. I came down in my craft until I ejected. But
they didn’t need to know that part.
    Someone pressed for
clarification. “You landed by parachute, or you landed in the spacecraft?” Were
they fishing? Did they know the truth? Did they think they could discount my
accomplishment based on some absurd rules?
    I could feel Kamanin’s eyes on my
back. I repeated myself: “I came down in my craft.”
    There was a moment of silence,
but too many others had too many other questions. “What was the selection
process like? How long before the flight were you picked?” one asked.
    “In a timely fashion,” I smiled,
and the people laughed.
    “And do you earn a lot of money
as a cosmonaut?” another inquired. “How much do they pay you?”
    “Enough!” I smiled, and again
they laughed.
    So I was perhaps a little reticent
to go into details in that setting. And I gave some answers that were perhaps
evasive. And it’s human nature to assume that someone who is honest