Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight

by Brennan, Gerald

  After a few minutes, I look back at the panel. The timer tells me my communications blackout should soon be over. I settle back into my couch.

  “Dawn-2, this is Cedar, come in.”

  Nothing.

  “Dawn-2, this is Cedar.”

  The radio crackles. “…edar, I am glad to hear you.”

  “Dawn-2, we are coming back around. All environmental systems nominal. The buffer batteries worked as expected.”

  “Understood, Cedar. How’s the view?”

  “You won’t need many colored pencils when you’re up here, Blondie.”

  Another delay. He doesn’t get the joke. “Please repeat your last, Yura.”

  “You won’t need many colored pencils! Black, grey, white. Maybe tan. You can save weight and leave the rest at home.”

  “Can you see us, Yura?”

  There is another pang—I realize I may have missed the earth rising over the moon! I strain at the porthole closest to the horizon; it’s on the far edge and still close to the horizon, but I can’t quite make it out, so I give a quick guilty pulse of the thrusters to bring it into view.

  Such a magnificent sight!

  I want to just stay there and watch, but I know this is too good a picture to miss, and this will be my only chance to get it. And I know even before I look through the viewfinder that this will be a perfect picture, perhaps the best I can ever hope to take. There’s something most people don’t get about photographic composition. God loves trinity, as the saying goes, and it holds for photographs, too: forefront, middle, backdrop. If you see something magnificent but don’t have anything in the scene to give it perspective, it looks far flatter when it’s photographed. But here is everything a good picture needs: a dead foreground, a living backdrop, and the vast space between. The earth is blue and white and green, all streaks and swirls, and vibrantly colorful behind the monochromatic moonscape; although the distance is great, it looks as detailed as an object in one’s hand. And I feel a swelling in my heart thinking that everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I ever will meet is all the way back there.

  I take picture after picture. I know that even a well-composed picture cannot fully capture this feeling, but I know they will be magnificent photographs all the same. And I can imagine people asking me about them, and I can imagine myself saying, “Ahh, yes, but of course, you don’t see what’s outside the frame. Imagine seeing this, so small, but the only thing with any real color in this vast empty space!”

  “Are you still there, Yura?” Blondie asks, but with humor, for he knows the answer.

  “This is the most incredible sight. Earth above the moon. I’ve never seen anything like it, Blondie.”

  “I talked to Kamanin. He gave permission for you to record a brief message. We still cannot do a live broadcast, of course, but we can at least do this, and the State Commission can decide what to do with it later.”

  “Understood.” I am indescribably grateful.

  It occurs to me that he could have lied and told me it was a live transmission. But he has been true. Then again, I expect nothing less of Blondie.

  “Let me know when you’re ready,” he says.

  I turn on the light and activate the camera. Stare at the smooth slick eye. “I am ready to transmit, Blondie.”

  “One moment,” he says, then: “You are looking good. We are ready to receive your transmission.”

  I smile. “Greetings fellow Soviet citizens and peace-loving people of all mankind. I am speaking to you from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away after becoming the first man to fly around the moon. I am incredibly grateful to once again represent the Soviet people, and indeed all mankind, on a bold feat of exploration. And I’m particularly humbled by all the hard work of many thousands that made this possible—the wisdom of our Chief Designer, the helpful guidance of his many able deputies, and the skilled labor of many more working under their direction. The legacy of our forefathers, of Marx and Lenin and Stalin, is a legacy of untiring effort and unlimited progress, and an endless expansion of human potential. I know they’d be proud to see the hammer and sickle rounding the moon, to know that the workers and peasants have triumphed again, and that the first manned spacecraft to go here was piloted by a real Soviet man.”

  “From here I can see the whole planet, as small as a child’s ball. I don’t know if I can give you a view, but I hope to bring some pictures back so you all can see what I see. It is not like on earth where distant things appear blurry: here there is of course no atmosphere, so everything is sharp and clear. I am grateful beyond words to have this perspective, to see things so clearly. For I can see no national boundaries, no distinctions. The only ones that exist are the ones in our mind, the artificial ones created by those who want to rob and plunder and oppress and divide.” (Perhaps I am thinking of the Americans here, thinking of their war in Vietnam.) “Like many of my countrymen, I survived the Great Patriotic War, and I saw the hellish destruction that this can lead to. But when we get away from that, we can see that our planet is truly a beautiful place. It is my deepest hope that one day everyone can see that there are no divisions, and that all the peoples of earth can join together in peace and prosperity to advance the cause of human potential.”

  I can’t think of anything more to say, and I don’t want to start babbling, so I stop and turn the camera off. To Blondie I speak: “Did you get all of that?”

  I wait.

  And at last, his voice: “Yes, Yura. It was perfect.”

  •••

  Because I need to conserve the thrusters, I do not turn the moon ship to get a better view after we have flown past. I do not get to watch the moon growing smaller behind me.

  I suppose it’s normal after leaving some monumental destination to want to turn and look back, particularly if you’re far from home; I suppose it’s even more normal when you know you’ll never be back. Surely you’ve observed this in your own life! I don’t have to know you to know that.

  So there’s a pang as I see the lunar horizon slip past the portholes before I’m all that far away. But we might need the thrusters to get home. Ordinarily they’re only for small movements—rotations about the spacecraft’s various axes. And in those instances, of course, the ones on opposite sides of the craft fire in opposite directions to impart some spin—which has to happen in reentry, for instance. But we can use them for translations, firing the opposing ones in the same direction. And if we fire them for long enough, we might be able to correct enough of our velocity error so as to make it home safely.

  “Dawn-2, come in. Dawn-2, this is Cedar, come in.”

  “Cedar, this is Dawn-2.” Komarov’s voice.

  “Old man Komarov!” He’s only seven years older than me, but that put him at the upper end of our cosmonaut class. He’s a veteran of Sunrise-1, a sharp engineer, talented and smart. (As I mentioned earlier, he was supposed to fly on the first Union this year. But the craft wasn’t ready, and I helped delay that flight. I suppose I’d be bitter in his place, but if he’s upset, he hasn’t mentioned it.) “What happened to Blondie? I thought he’d be coming back on.”

  “They ordered him off the console to get some rest, Yuri.”

  “Very well.” I miss Blondie, but I’m glad they’re making him take a break. We all have a tendency to drive ourselves too hard in this line of work, to get by with few breaks until we ourselves are at the breaking point. (Surely that, too, is part of being a real man.) So when you make someone like Blondie take a break, you are actually doing him a favor, because he won’t let himself have one otherwise.

  “What can we help you with, Cedar?”

  “Dawn-2, I want to know if there’s a plan to use the thrusters for the midcourse correction.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that, Cedar. We were discussing that while you were having your fun.”

  I chuckle. “Were you going to tell me?”

  He laughs. “Everything in its proper time, Yura.”

  Now I laugh a li
ttle. My spirits are good. They will figure out how to get me home. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends, looking forward to the parties and the fun—getting drunk, perhaps, yes, but more than that, the comradeship. And surely they will marvel at the photos I’ve taken; they will be amazed to see the earth as I have seen it, as it truly is, a precious sparkling gemstone against a dead backdrop of black and white and gray and tan.

  Komarov comes back on: “In all seriousness, the ballistics center has been monitoring your trajectory to see how the moon’s mass concentrations may have affected it. But once that’s in hand and they’ve run the numbers, we should be able to do a series of thruster firings tomorrow. In the meantime, have some dinner and get some sleep.”

  “Will do, my friend.”

  •••

  Mathematically, every orbital path can be described as a section of a cone.

  Say, for instance, you have a simple cone pointing downwards. If you slice it horizontally, you have a circle. (Slice further up or down the cone, and you will of course have circles of different sizes.)

  If you slice at an angle, you’ll have an ellipse, provided your slice passes through the central vertical axis of the cone, and at an angle less than the side of the cone. The ellipse may be extremely elongated, but it will be a closed loop; it will begin and end in the same spot. The small end of the cone is like the body you’re orbiting; the orbital path will be fast and quick in that tight section, and slow and lazy in the farther reaches. (This is what we’re doing with our Molinya satellites, for instance. Since the Soviet Union is north of the equator, we can’t have satellites in a geosynchronous orbit over our territory—because the orbits must be inclined, they will move north and south even if their orbital period is exactly one day, and if they are south, they will be below the horizon and therefore useless. But the Molinya satellites are in elliptical orbits. During the long slow period, they are over our territory, and capable of transmitting for long portions of the workday. And then they zip around while the sun is down and take their place again the next day.)

  Now say you take a slice of the cone that doesn’t pass through the central vertical axis. Since the cone is open-ended, the slice will be open-ended. A hyperbola.

  My path to and from the moon is constructed, mathematically speaking, of these various slices. Circles and sections of circles, and ellipses and sections thereof, and the same with hyperbolas. You start out with an orbit that’s circular, or perhaps slightly elliptical. Then second cosmic velocity puts you on a hyperbola, an open-ended path that will never come back to earth. Except it passes close enough to the moon that the moon slings you around, again on another hyperbola. And this, in turn, must intersect earth’s path—all while the earth is moving around the sun and the moon is moving around the earth.

  If it intersects earth’s path at a proper angle, then, fine, you will reenter. But if it doesn’t, you will be in trouble. You will perhaps be in an extremely elliptical orbit. And your orbit will only decay if the tighter faster end of the ellipse passes through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. If not, you might be up there for months or years. Decades, even. Or if you’re far enough from earth’s path on the return, you will perhaps be on yet another hyperbolic path. Open-ended. Going God knows where.

  My path should have been a free-return trajectory as soon as we left earth orbit, before we discarded the Block-D stage. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t. They were wrong in measuring my telemetry, perhaps. And the S5.53 can’t get me back on course. But we can fix it with the thrusters. I am confident. We will nudge the end of the hyperbola back into place.

  •••

  In the morning I eat, floating free, staring out at the heavens. It is still strange and disorienting to stargaze at breakfast. Since we are not in shadow, I cannot see many of them, but there are a few. How many of them have planets, little earths of their own? How many of those planets have sent voyagers into the cosmos? For all I have seen and done and learned, I will never know the answer.

  As for the planets I do know about, I can see Mars and Jupiter, but Venus is lost in the sun’s glare. We may visit these in my lifetime, but I’m less optimistic now that Sergei Pavlovich is gone. As for whether or not we’ll find life there, who can say?

  I feel melancholy, knowing I’ll be an observer at best for all of that, knowing that one way or another, I’ve reached my limits, and the best I can hope for is to come humbly home.

  I did not sleep terribly well. I am eager to get back to Valya and the children, to eat a real meal, to sleep in my own bed. I believe it will happen, but only if we work hard.

  Komarov is on the console again. We chat briefly. I miss Blondie, but old man Komarov is a good man, too. I know he will do all he can.

  I type in the commands for the solar alignment. We are going to do a 10-second burn and allow the ballistics center to compute our revised trajectory. We will then have to do additional burns until we’re back on track.

  When the timer counts down, I press the button and there is a gentle reassuring push from the thrusters.

  “Very good, Yura,” Komarov says.

  We cut the thrusters at the appointed time.

  After some minutes, the ballistics center has done their work. They have run the numbers through their giant computers and determined that I need an additional 30 meters per second of delta-v to get back on target for the reentry corridor. We will be tight on the propellant, but we should be able to do that. The second correction is scheduled for after lunch.

  My mealtime goes by rather peacefully. It occurs to me that I will miss these quiet times, this solitude. If past experience is any guide, I will not have any time to myself for some while. More press conferences and tours and foreign trips to tropical lands: perhaps they will at least be more forgiving in their scheduling this time.

  After everything is cleaned up, I strap myself back in. It is time to do another solar alignment. We always want to make sure we’re properly oriented before a course correction, especially since the stellar alignment isn’t working and our orientations are less precise and we burned up so much propellant already. I page through the binder and punch in the commands. As usual, the craft swings about.

  But this time it keeps moving.

  The sun slices lazily past the porthole, and then the moon, receding but still large, and then the distant earth, and then I see the sun coming around again.

  In my heart there is a pang. I take a deep breath. “Solar alignment has failed. Solar alignment has failed,” I transmit. I look at the instrument panel briefly, but it only confirms what I already know. “We are tumbling at a rate of approximately 30 degrees per second.”

  The delayed response: “Cedar, we understand,” Komarov says. “30 degrees per second.”

  And now the sun and moon move and earth are moving faster. “Dawn-2, my rate of yaw is increasing. We might have a stuck thruster. Switching to manual controls.”

  “Understood, Cedar.”

  I key in the commands to turn the spacecraft back over to manual control and I manipulate the thrusters. It is a yawing motion; the spacecraft is spinning like a skidding car.

  I apply thrusters in the direction opposite the rotation and it slows. I bring the earth into view. But when I take my hands off the controls, I see it moving again.

  “Dawn-2, the thruster is still stuck.”

  Again I start working the controls. By applying full opposite thruster, I am able to arrest the motion, but I can only bring it back to a stop. I cannot move back in the opposite direction. This tells me the thruster is still stuck and still firing, and when we are stopped, it is only because both yaw thrusters are firing in the opposite direction, counteracting one another. Which also means we’re wasting fuel.

  “Cedar, understand you are still rotating about the Y-axis.”

  I am in a bind. This needs to be stopped. And I cannot keep doing what I have been doing, because it isn’t working.

  Finally I move my hand controll
er with the direction of rotation and then back. And somehow this works, and the rotation stops. “Dawn-2, we have stopped rotating.”

  Of course, we are still back where we were before we attempted the solar alignment: we still need to do an alignment before we can fire the thrusters, and we still need to fire the thrusters to get home.

  I am waiting for an answer. I try again: “Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Rotation is stopped. How do you wish to proceed?”

  “Cedar, we will try the solar alignment once more using the backup thrusters.”

  Again I key in the commands. Again the spacecraft keeps rotating. This time I grab for the controllers quickly to arrest the motion.

  “Solar alignment has failed. Solar alignment has failed.” I take a few deep breaths.

  There is a period of deliberation down below. Bruised egos battling intellectually in the measured way we have described to keep human passions to a minimum. A competition of sorts, but with strict rules. Almost like a fencing match. All arguments and voices carefully kept in check. And I know that at the end, when all the points are tallied up and graded, they are going to give me their best advice.

  At last, I get it: “Yura, we believe it is a short in the controllers. We are going to deactivate the yaw thrusters. We will read up the coordinates and see if you can align manually using the other thrusters. Then we will isolate and fire the pitch thrusters only in translation mode. This should help us avoid further rotation.”

  “Understood, Dawn-2.”

  “Your peroxide levels are low. We do not want to waste fuel on further alignments. We are going to have you fire the thrusters until exhaustion. We believe this will still get you in the upper limit of the reentry corridor.”