<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With all the talk about Elon Musk\u2019s desire to make humanity a \u2018multi-planet species\u2019, it makes me kind of wonder who, exactly, will be the first human to (as Musk\u2019s t-shirt proclaims), \u2018Occupy Mars\u2019.\u00a0 True, the first attempt to launch his massive Starship was a mixed success;\u00a0 the Super Heavy booster B7 did fly but Spaceship S24 did not make it to orbit.\u00a0 The blast from the B7\u2019s 33 powerful engines also destroyed the base of its launch pad resulting in an extensive re-engineering of the facility.\u00a0 Re-engineering the launch pad and FAA scrutiny of this failed attempt to orbit Starship has delayed the next planned attempt to reach orbit.\u00a0 While we await the next big Space-X event from the Boca Chica, Texas Starbase, I thought we could go back and remember Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who made the first orbital flight of a spacecraft with a human on board on April 12, 1961.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Stephen Walker\u2019s book <\/span>Beyond<\/span><\/i> came out in 2021 (HarperCollins Books), it made an excellent resource.\u00a0 I used <\/span>Beyond<\/span><\/i> for a two part article about the prime mover and shaker in the Soviet manned space program, Sergei Korolev.\u00a0 The King (as he was referred to by those who worked for him) became the prime subject of this two part article of the same name (<\/span>The King, 7-14-21 & 7-21-21<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0 When my wife recently spied the book on the Interlibrary Loan site, she ordered it for me again not realizing I had read it when it first came out.\u00a0 I took this as an omen that I should revisit the topic and give Gagarin his due.\u00a0 The King was a well kept secret in the USSR but Gagarin became the heroic public face of the Soviet\u2019s space program.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Mercury (USA) and Vostok (USSR) spacecraft differed 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 (the publication was given an exclusive contract to cover their story).\u00a0 The Mercury 7 used the <\/span>Life <\/span><\/i>features to leverage NASA to include manual controls and a window on their craft.\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 plans – 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 if the automated systems faltered.\u00a0 It was an indication that Korolev\u2019s fondness for his \u2018little eagles\u2019 made him rethink the control issue at the last minute.\u00a0 The King wanted 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 foreign 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 it was deemed necessary.\u00a0 With no world-wide radio network in place, contact with the craft was not going to be a sure thing.\u00a0 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\u00a0Yuri Gagarin was born in 1934 in the little village of Klushino which was little more than a cluster of small houses along the single road in the flat farmland region near Smolensk.\u00a0 His father Aleksey was a carpenter and handyman who built their family home with his own hands.\u00a0 The skill would come in handy when the German army burned most of the buildings and took over the Gagarin family home.\u00a0 Aleksey made the family a small dugout to house Yuri\u2019s mother, Anna, his older brother and sister Valentin and Zoya, and a younger brother Boris.\u00a0 During the German occupation, Gagarin\u2019s highly educated mother did her best to school the youngest boys.\u00a0 Valentin remembers that Yuri was a happy child whose demeanor changed;\u00a0 he became more sullen and withdrawn during the war.\u00a0 His older siblings were forced into slave labor and the family did not know they had survived until the arrived home sickly and emaciated when the war was finally over.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Besides the mere act of survival, the one positive thing Yuri took from the war was an interest in flying.\u00a0 Having seen a Soviet airplane crash near the village, he watched in amazement when a second plane landed to pick up his downed comrade.\u00a0 The pilot let Gagarin sit in the cockpit and showed him the various controls.\u00a0 Yuri learned to fly as a member of the Young Pioneers and his instructors noted he was, \u201cCrazy about flying, a hard worker, and fun-loving, too.\u201d\u00a0 When offered the choice between further training as a smelting specialist after university, he chose to train as a fast jet pilot instead.\u00a0 He was flying MIG-15s in the Arctic Circle when the cosmonaut candidates were picked in the fall of 1959.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Gagarin was a natural choice for the program – he was adept at both making a good first impression and new friends.\u00a0 His skills and leadership ability opened many doors for him after the war.\u00a0 His main rival for the first manned flight, Gherman Titov, was just as skilled and was actually the front runner to make that historic flight.\u00a0 Titov was told behind the scenes that the decision to fly Gagarin first was a practical one – they feared he might not have the stamina for a longer flight.\u00a0 If the first flight failed, the Soviet\u2019s were keeping perhaps their best pilot as an ace in the hole for the second attempt.\u00a0 The first flight would be nothing close to flawless and Gagarin needed a combination of skill and luck just to survive.\u00a0 Collecting the accolades due to the first man in space would depend on him completing a successful flight.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The cosmonauts were kept in the dark about most of the problems encountered during the development of their spacecraft and booster rocket.\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 Top Piece Video:\u00a0 The original musical man in space – Major Tom – as introduced in David Bowie’s\u00a0Space Oddity\u00a0<\/em>as performed by the Spiders from Mars<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With all the talk about Elon Musk\u2019s desire to make humanity a \u2018multi-planet species\u2019, it makes me kind of wonder who, exactly, will be the first human to (as Musk\u2019s t-shirt proclaims), \u2018Occupy Mars\u2019.\u00a0 True, the first attempt to launch his massive Starship was a mixed success;\u00a0 the Super Heavy booster B7 did fly […]<\/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-2957","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\/2957","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=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2961,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions\/2961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}