<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We left The King – Part 1 just as the Russian and American space programs were preparing to attempt the first manned space flights.\u00a0 In his 2021 book, <\/span>BEYOND – The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space<\/span><\/i> (Harper-Collins), author Stephen Walker goes deep into the inner workings of both programs and the men training to be the first man in space.\u00a0 While comparing notes with my touchstone for the American program, former NASA education specialist Ralph Winrich, we concurred the book is well written but it contains one clinker.\u00a0 Based on an interview with Alan Sheperd\u2019s daughter, Walker states, \u201c[he] took his ten-year-old daughter Laura to the end of their drive on Brandon Road in the Bay Colony suburb of Virginia Beach and pointed to a brilliant star arcing slowly arcing across the sky. . . but with this particular star it was different.\u00a0 For one thing it was not even night-time;\u00a0 it was afternoon and yet the star was brilliantly visible.\u201d\u00a0 The \u2018star\u2019 in question was the first Earth orbiting satellite, Sputnik, launched by the Russians.\u00a0 While it was metallic and a little over two meters (7 feet) in diameter, it would not have been visible in daylight.\u00a0 Sputnik could be heard broadcasting a persistent \u2018beep\u2019 at frequencies intended to be heard by the people of Earth, but Ralph confirmed my suspicion that it would only have been visible at night. Other than this slip (we determined Laura had a \u2018fuzzy memory\u2019 moment when interviewed sixty years after the event in question), Walker gives an accurate and detailed accounting of this period.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Russian rocket csar Sergei Korolev was racking up one \u2018space spectacular\u2019 after another for his program.\u00a0 After the launch of the seven ton Venera 1 probe to Venus, the mission failed when the third stage exploded, leaving the craft in low Earth orbit.\u00a0 The western world didn\u2019t know it was supposed to reach Venus as the USSR did not advertise its failures,\u00a0 Instead, they crowed they had launched a seven ton satellite.\u00a0 Venera 2 was announced as a Venus probe only after it was well on the way.\u00a0 Khruschev and his military advisors were beginning to cool on the \u2018manned space\u2019 part of Korolev\u2019s rocket program.\u00a0 They wanted to see more progress on the \u2018missile\u2019 end of the business to the point where Korolev\u2019s nemesis Glushko began to find favor with the Kremlin.\u00a0 This was particularly galling as it was Glushko\u2019s \u2018evidence\u2019 that had sent Korolev to the Gulag during Stalin\u2019s purge of anyone he viewed with suspicion.\u00a0 Korolev was certainly aware of the danger Glushko presented to him as they both pushed for their own version of a rocket program.\u00a0 Sergei needed to beat the American\u2019s by putting the first man in space to retain his favored status.\u00a0 When a minor malfunction on the last Mercury-Redstone test flight sent a chimponaut named Ham higher and farther than intended, Korolev\u2019s American counterpart, Werhner von Braun, insisted on one more unmanned test flight.\u00a0 When the American paused their first manned flight for one more test between Ham\u2019s flight and Alan Shepard\u2019s, Korolev had the opportunity he needed to best the U.S. again.\u00a0 The Russian program picked up the pace to make sure the first man in space would not be wearing an American flag on his shoulder.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The biggest difference in the Mercury and Vostok craft was in the degree of control the pilots could exercise.\u00a0 The Mercury astronauts spent two years training to take over the controls if their automated systems failed.\u00a0 In fact, the Mercury astronauts used the popularity they had gained thanks to <\/span>Life<\/span><\/i> magazine to leverage NASA to include controls and a window.\u00a0 They hinted a general strike by the Mercury 7 could take place if they were only going to be \u2018spam in the can\u2019 – passengers with no active part in controlling their craft.\u00a0 The Russians had no such plan – the cosmonauts were along for the ride but were not going to be in control of the capsule.\u00a0 The Vostok Six cosmonauts were originally trained to operate little more than what an average airline passenger can these days.\u00a0 At the last minute, Korolev was convinced to allow a \u2018just in case\u2019 option in the event the totally automated Vostok systems failed.\u00a0 Cosmonauts Titov, Gagarin, and Nelyubov were in line for the first flight partly because they were the only ones whose space suits were finished.\u00a0 They were given a week to learn the critical actions that would be needed to properly align their craft for re-entry and fire the braking motor.\u00a0 It was an indication that Korolev\u2019s fondness for his \u2018little eagles\u2019 made him rethink the control issue at the last minute to give the cosmonaut chosen for the first flight every chance to return safely.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Commission of the Soviet Central Committee had great concerns about their craft landing anywhere outside of their own borders.\u00a0 All previous rocket launches (including those carrying dogs) were equipped with explosives so they could be destroyed if they strayed too far from the motherland.\u00a0 \u201cWhat if the cosmonaut takes control and ends up bringing the Vostok capsule down in a foriegn land?\u201d was one of the Commission\u2019s biggest concerns.\u00a0 Korolev adamantly nixed the idea of a \u2018bomb\u2019 on board a manned craft.\u00a0 Grudgingly, he had to settle on a way to keep the cosmonauts from taking control of the craft unless it was strictly a life or death situation.\u00a0 The solution was to lock the controls and only give the pilot the three digit code to unlock them if deemed necessary.\u00a0 Radio contact with the craft was not going to be a sure thing so the secret code was sealed in an envelope and stashed in the cabin.\u00a0 The commission reasoned that only a cosmonaut in sound mind would be able to remember to retrieve and open the envelope to take control, thus avoiding a \u2018space addled\u2019 one from mentally going off the rails and hijacking the craft.\u00a0 Today, the degree of paranoia this conveys speaks volumes about the political clout the Central Committee of the Great Soviet carried.\u00a0 The fact that at least three people in the program (including Korolev) shared the \u2018secret\u2019 code, 1-2-5, with Gagarin before the launch indicates they were concerned for his safety and ignored the Central Committee\u2019s over-thought policies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The cosmonauts were brought to the \u2018secret\u2019 launch facility known as the Tyuratam Cosmodrome in early April of 1961.\u00a0 The site was not as secret as they had hoped.\u00a0 It had\u00a0 previously been photographed by the high flying U-2 spy plane and the CIA had already built a scale model of it.\u00a0 The Russians were not aware of this when they built a fake wooden launch complex at a different site (and had to post guards to keep the locals from stealing the wood).\u00a0 When Yuri Gagarin was finally announced as the candidate chosen for the first flight, his back up Gherman Titov was disappointed.\u00a0 Titov was not aware why he was being held in reserve for the second flight. \u00a0 Korolev and Lieutenant General Nikolai Kamanin (who supervised the cosmonaut\u2019s training) felt Titov was the stronger of the two and would be better suited for the second flight, slated to be a multiple orbit affair.\u00a0 Fortunately for Walker, Kamanin kept a secret (and forbidden) journal of the events no one outside of the USSR would hear about until decades later (referenced throughout <\/span>BEYOND<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The official Russian account of the first manned flight tells a glorious tale of a perfectly planned and executed mission that put the western world to shame.\u00a0 In truth, it was hardly perfect and, as with any space venture, Gagarin\u2019s was very close to coming apart at the seams.\u00a0 On the day the Vostok capsule was mated with the R-7 rocket, Korolev was horrified to find it surrounded by piles of cables and connectors that had been removed from the craft.\u00a0 It was too heavy so the supervisor of this procedure, Oleg Ivanovsky, took it upon himself to remove 14 kilos of excess weight (like the electronics for the deactivated on-board bomb, the food warmer, and the gas analyser) to get it within guidelines.\u00a0 In their haste, no one noticed two sensors (temperature and pressure) had not been reconnected, but both had back-up systems that covered for this mistake.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Other short cuts came to light much later, clarifying the speed at which the Russians were\u00a0 moving to get their man in space first.\u00a0 Had the rocket malfunctioned on the launch pad, the escape plan was to have the cosmonaut\u2019s ejection seat blast him out of the capsule.\u00a0 Being too low to open his parachute, the cosmonaut would have to land in a net strung near the ground (picture a trapeze artist dismounting and landing in a safety net) and then get into a bathtub rigging that would be used to lower him to the ground.\u00a0 If the braking engine on the capsule failed to light (to return the cosmonaut to Earth after one orbit), he would end up staying in space for ten days while his orbit deteriorated enough for him to re-enter the atmosphere.\u00a0 The air handling system designed to remove excess moisture from the cabin did not work properly so any extension of this first flight would surely doom Gagarin before he could get back to Earth.\u00a0 Korolev was a nervous wreck as he pondered these scenarios, but it was the rocket\u2019s third stage that kept him up at night – it had a nasty habit of not performing up to expectations or exploding in flight.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The cosmonauts were kept in the dark about most of the problems.\u00a0 A short set of training sessions on how to use the manual controls to align the Vostok for re-entry were conducted just days before the flight.\u00a0 NASA\u2019s training for a similar event was carried out over a two year period.\u00a0 None-the-less, Gagarin and Titov\u2019s pre-flight preparations were done in tandem even though Titov knew it was Gagarin\u2019s flight unless something happened to him in the eleventh hour.\u00a0 The fact that the Vostok capsule had an ejection seat was also concealed from the western world.\u00a0 No one would know the system was designed to eject the cosmonaut in the final phase of the landing cycle.\u00a0 The Russians lied about this for decades, but in truth, when the capsule landed, the cosmonaut was no longer on board.\u00a0 At least Shepherd and his craft made the whole trip together.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was strapped into his Vostok capsule at the Tyuratam Cosmodrome.\u00a0 The inside of\u00a0 the seven foot diameter sphere was spartan compared to the smaller Mercury capsules.\u00a0 An instrument panel to his left held a few controls:\u00a0 a rotary dial to control the cabin temperature and switches to turn on the cabin and TV camera lights.\u00a0 A TV camera was pointed at his face and there was a tape recorder he would activate to record his experiences.\u00a0 The numeric keypad he would use to enter the secret 1-2-5 code to unlock the controls located by his right hand was also on this panel.\u00a0 Three small portholes were located above his head, to his left and a special one, the Vzor, was above his feet.\u00a0 The Vzor would be important if he had to manually align the craft for re-entry.\u00a0 The portholes would be covered until the nose cone fell away from the capsule two and a half minutes after launch.\u00a0 The first problem appeared seventy-three minutes before the launch and timing here was critical.\u00a0 If the automated systems were going to bring Gagarin back down on Russian soil, the launch would have to go when the so-called \u2018egg timer\u2019 system hit \u2018zero\u2019.\u00a0 \u201cNo KP-3,\u201d blared out of the speakers.\u00a0 One of the contact sensors indicating the hatch was properly sealed was not illuminated.\u00a0 Ivanovsky had supervised the hatch closure and now his blood ran cold.\u00a0 His team had no option other than removing all thirty bolts in the hatch and reseating it without disrupting the already ticking timer.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With only forty minutes to spare, the hatch was resealed and vacuum tested.\u00a0 The pad was cleared and Gagarin was essentially on his own.\u00a0 Twenty-two minutes before launch, he put on his gloves.\u00a0 At T minus ten minutes, he closed his faceplate and turned up the volume on his radio.\u00a0 When the control center reported his heart rate as normal, he joked, \u201cSo my heart is still beating?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A turn of a key in the control center was all it took to begin the final launch sequence.\u00a0 Gagarin could hear and feel the R-7 come alive.\u00a0 At ignition, the engines roared to life but the whole assembly remained suspended on the gantry\u2019s four arms.\u00a0 The rocket was too heavy to sit on the pad so it was suspended above the flame pit until sufficient thrust built up.\u00a0 Only then was the rocket released and sent skyward.\u00a0 The automated systems hit all the marks:\u00a0 the four strap-on boosters released on time, the nose cone panels separated and uncovered the portholes, and even the upper stage engine that worried Korolev so performed well.\u00a0 Eleven minutes after lift off, the Vostok capsule and its passenger were in orbit.\u00a0 The world wide communication network relied on for mission tracking today did not yet exist in 1961.\u00a0 Communications between the spacecraft and the control center ended when Gagarin sailed out over the Pacific Ocean toward the tip of Antarctica.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of Russia\u2019s most trusted broadcast voices, Yuri Levitan, began reading official reports about the time Gagarin was halfway across the Pacific.\u00a0 Gagarin\u2019s family knew nothing of his historic mission until friends and neighbors began to fill them in from the radio reports they heard.\u00a0 A quick promotion from Lieutenant to Major confused his father who insisted the cosmonaut could not be his son because he was not a Major.\u00a0 Russians were soon glued to their radios to hear the next bulletin.\u00a0 In the United States, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger was awakened with news of the flight at 1:20 AM but President Kennedy would not find out about the first manned flight until he read the morning papers.\u00a0 As secretive as the Russians had tried to be, the American papers accurately identified the flight\u2019s point of origin, the Tyuratam launch site.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Once the automatic system had the Vostok alined for re-entry, the braking motor fired to start the re-entry phase.\u00a0 A valve malfunctioned and the motor missed the 304 mile per hour decrease in speed needed by 9 mph.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a big difference, but it was enough to mislead the computer controlling the system. \u00a0 The lower section of the craft was not jettisoned because the extra speed\u00a0 misled the computer.\u00a0 Logically, it thought the craft was still on orbit.\u00a0 Fortunately, another sensor correctly read the temperature change caused by re-entry and took over.\u00a0 When separation finally occurred, the craft was rotating rapidly.\u00a0 The electrical cable connecting the two sections threatened to bash them together until it burned through and released Yuri\u2019s compartment from the service module.\u00a0 Gagarin\u2019s ride was not over yet.\u00a0 His ejection seat and parachute performed as expected.\u00a0 As he watched the capsule land, Yuri realized he was coming down near the Volga River, far from his anticipated landing zone.\u00a0 His survival gear (including an inflatable raft) was dangling twenty feet below him but was lost when the strap broke.\u00a0 He was fortunate he did not land in the Volga River.\u00a0 Anna Takhtarova and her granddaughter Rumia were planting potatoes in a field.\u00a0 When Gagarin touched down, they were startled and terrified.\u00a0 After Yuri convinced them he as a fellow Russian returning \u2018from the sky\u2019, they helped him find a horse pulled cart to bring him to the nearest phone.\u00a0 As word leaked out, a large crowd gathered about the Vostok craft, removing small parts of the heat shield and other loose equipment as keepsakes (in spite of the armed guards who were now there to put a tarp over it to try and keep the craft \u2018secret\u2019).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Large crowds and celebrations met Gagarin once he was debriefed.\u00a0 Returning to Moscow, he was given a hero\u2019s welcome by everyone except Sergei Korolev.\u00a0 The King could not get to Red Square due to the large crowd so he watched the welcoming ceremony on TV from his apartment.\u00a0 His daughter, Natalya, was a young doctor living in Moscow at that time and she summed up Sergei\u2019s life in an interview sixty years later:\u00a0 \u201c[The day Gagarin was honored] I walked with the crowd and one of my colleagues asked, \u2018I wonder who\u2019s the Chief Designer who launched Gagarin into space?\u2019\u00a0 I wanted so badly to say that this was my father.\u00a0 But I could not.\u00a0 He had absolutely forbidden me to tell anyone what he was doing . . . But of course my heart was bursting with pride.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It would be many years until The King would be recognized for his role in putting the first man into space, even in his own country.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top PieceVideo:\u00a0 Can not talk space flight with out Elton or David – so here goes . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We left The King – Part 1 just as the Russian and American space programs were preparing to attempt the first manned space flights.\u00a0 In his 2021 book, BEYOND – The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space (Harper-Collins), author Stephen Walker goes deep into the inner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2252,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250\/revisions\/2252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}