Two years before, Gagarin had been selected as one of two thousand candidates for a job that did not yet exist—cosmonaut, the Russian term for astronaut. They’d all been prodded and tested, examined inside and out, and given fiendishly difficult tasks such as solving math problems while wearing headphones through which a friendly voice whispered incorrect answers.
The two thousand candidates were cut to twenty. Then the tests got hard.
How would cosmonauts handle the massive g-forces they’d face on top of an accelerating rocket? To find out, the men were belted into a centrifuge, a tiny capsule at the end of a long spinning arm. Like a carnival ride from hell, the capsule whipped the pilots around and around until they felt they were being crushed, until their field of vision shrank to a narrow tunnel, until they couldn’t move a muscle under the strain, couldn’t breathe or even blink.
How would men react to the weightlessness they would experience in orbit? To find out, they took turns riding a specially adapted elevator in Moscow’s tallest building. As the elevator car free-fell thirty stories, the candidates floated up from the floor for a moment. No one knew how a longer period of weightlessness would affect the human body.
What about the loneliness a cosmonaut might feel in space? Could a human handle such utter isolation without going insane? To test this, scientists locked the cosmonauts in isolation chambers for up to ten days at a time. After a short while inside, the candidates had no idea what time it was, whether it was day or night, whether anyone was listening to them when they talked.
Yuri Gagarin did everything well. He was competitive and cool-headed, focused and serious, but quick with a joke to cut the tension. That he could bend his athletic five-foot-three-inch frame into tight spaces was also a plus.
In the end, it came down to two candidates, Gagarin and Gherman Titov. Gagarin was selected to attempt the first space flight, with Titov as backup. They had the exact same training. Either could make the flight.
After a final day of preparation, the two cosmonauts had come back to their cottage by the launch pad ready to rest. But the doctors had been in their room. Wires snaked out of their mattresses and through a hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before. The doctors were obviously going to monitor them all night from the next room, seeing who tossed and turned, who got the better night of sleep.
Gagarin could still be replaced. That’s why he lay still in his bunk. If he fell asleep, he might move around, making the doctors think he wasn’t sleeping well. So he refused to nod off.
Gherman Titov, a few feet away, was doing the exact same thing.
Around 3:00 a.m., Sergei Korolev stepped into the cottage, gestured for the doctors to be silent, and tiptoed down the hall to the cosmonauts’ bedroom. He cracked open the door and peeked in.
A lovely sight. His handpicked boys seemed to be sleeping like babies.
* * *
Three hours later Gagarin, Titov, and Korolev sat together for a breakfast of Soviet space food—brown paste from a tube.
Gagarin said, “It’s been ages since I’ve had anything so tasty!”
The cosmonauts stripped to their underwear, and doctors attached sensors all over their bodies. A team of technicians helped both men into bright orange pressure suits and helmets. One team member held out a piece of paper for Gagarin to sign. Not an official form—he wanted the man’s autograph.
Gagarin and Titov were driven to the launch pad. Titov had held out hope that some last-second glitch with Gagarin’s equipment would let him, Titov, make the historic flight. Now all he could do was wish Gagarin luck. The two friends attempted to kiss each other on the cheek in the Russian tradition. Their helmets banged together.
Gagarin rode an elevator 150 feet up to the top of the launch pad. A small capsule, Vostok 1, sat atop the R-7 rocket. The crew helped him through the hatch. They strapped him into the seat and plugged in his oxygen and pressure hoses. The cramped cabin had three small portholes, radio equipment, and instrument panels. It was a lot simpler than the MiG fighter jet Gagarin was used to flying, and that was by design—he wasn’t supposed to touch the controls.
Scientists were genuinely worried about what they called “space madness.” Even after all the testing, they had no idea how a human would handle the stress of space flight, so they’d rigged everything to work automatically. Gagarin could take manual control only by typing in a special three-digit code—a code he wasn’t supposed to know. In case of emergency, the code would be radioed up from ground control.
One of the technicians, Oleg Ivanovsky, broke the rules at the last moment.
“Yura,” he whispered, using Gagarin’s nickname, “the numbers are three, two, five.”
Gagarin flashed that reassuring smile everyone had come to love. Korolev had already told him.
* * *
“Complete silence in the control room!” Anatoly Semyonov announced into his microphone. “Cease all conversations!”
He immediately felt like an idiot. No one was talking but him.
Semyonov, one of Korolev’s top rocket scientists, started the countdown. In their bombproof control bunker—protection against the very real possibility that the rocket would explode and land on them—Sergei Korolev and his team sat at consoles watching screens and gauges. Doctors could see that Gagarin’s blood pressure was normal. Temperature normal. His pulse, incredibly, was a steady sixty-four. Over the radio they could hear the man whistling a pop song. Whistling!
“One minute to takeoff!”
Sergei Korolev tried, without success, to hide the strain in his voice.
“One minute to takeoff,” he told Gagarin over the radio. “You heard?”
“I read you.”
Gagarin’s pulse rose to 109. He was human after all.
“During the launch you need not answer me,” Korolev said. “Answer when you can, though, as I’m going to be transmitting details.”
“I read you,” Gagarin responded. “I feel fine and am ready to go.”
“We’re boosting pressure, and the cable mast has been removed.”
“I felt it. I can hear the valves working.”
“Ignition beginning. Pre-stage … intermediate stage … main stage … Lift off!”
White flames burst from the base of the R-7. An almost musical blend of roars and rumbles filled the capsule as Gagarin felt the rocket beneath him trembling, fighting gravity, and lifting off the ground.
His pulse hit 157.
“Poyekhali!” he shouted—Russian for “Let’s go!”
OVER AMERICA
“T-PLUS SEVENTY,” SERGEI KOROLEV SAID into his microphone in the control room.
A thousand things had to go right to get seventy seconds into the launch without something blowing up. But no one was celebrating yet.
“I read you,” Gagarin answered. “I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing.”
“T-plus one hundred. How do you feel?”
“I feel fine. How about you?”
Typical Gagarin. Sitting atop 250 tons of burning kerosene and liquid oxygen, his face flattened by a g-load that would cause an ordinary human to pass out—and he asks how the other guy is doing.
The R-7’s four booster rockets fell away two minutes into the flight, their fuel spent. The central rocket burned another three minutes, then dropped off. Ten minutes after takeoff, Vostok blasted through the atmosphere and into space.
The team in the control bunker leaped from their seats, cheering, hugging, many with tears in their eyes.
Gagarin’s ship sped forward at about 18,000 miles per hour while also being pulled down by Earth’s gravity. This balance, perfectly calculated by Korolev’s team, caused the ship to follow a curved path around Earth—an orbit. Inside Vostok, Gagarin felt himself lifting up from his seat, held in only by the straps. He made a note in his flight log with a pencil, then opened his writing hand. The pencil floated beside him in the capsule.
“Weightlessness has begun,” he r
eported. “It’s not at all unpleasant.”
We can all picture astronauts floating in their ships, but the cause is surprising—it’s not a lack of gravity. At Vostok’s top altitude, 200 miles above Earth, the pull of gravity is about 90 percent as strong as it is on the planet’s surface. Weightlessness is caused by the fact that an object in orbit is essentially in a free fall. Vostok was free-falling—not toward Earth, but around it. Gagarin felt weightless because he and his ship were falling at the same speed.
“The flight continues well,” he said. “The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!”
* * *
His mother thought he was on a business trip.
Gagarin hadn’t wanted his mom to worry. A few days before the mission, he told her he’d be away for a while on a work trip.
“How far?” Anna Gagarina had asked her son.
“Very far.”
Now, at home, she was sweeping the floor. Her grown daughter was getting ready for work. Her grandson sat at the kitchen table doing homework.
The front door flew open. Her daughter-in-law Maria, Yuri’s brother’s wife, charged in, panting after the run from her house. “Why is the radio off? They’re talking about Yura!”
Anna froze. “Tell me, what is it,” she asked, her face draining of color. “Has he crashed?”
“Yura’s alive!” Maria shouted. “He’s in space!”
They turned on the radio, and there it was, a government announcement going out to the entire world: “The world’s first satellite ship, Vostok, with a human on board was launched into an orbit around the Earth from the Soviet Union. The pilot cosmonaut of the spaceship satellite Vostok is a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Major of Aviation Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.”
* * *
“Feeling cheerful,” Gagarin reported from orbit. “Am continuing flight, at present over America.”
He thought about the American astronauts, imagining their surprise—and envy. He thought about his mother, wondering if she knew yet where he was. Gagarin flew from daylight into darkness as he rounded the side of Earth opposite the sun. Then, as he completed the orbit, he became the first person ever to see a second sunrise on the same day.
It was time for reentry. Vostok’s braking rocket fired, a small rocket that slowed the ship down, allowing gravity to pull it back toward Earth. The next few minutes were second only to takeoff in terms of potential for disaster. Gagarin had to hit the layer of gases surrounding Earth at just the right angle. If he entered the atmosphere at too steep an angle, the friction caused by the ship speeding through the air would burn up both ship and passenger. If he came in at too shallow an angle, his ship would bounce off the atmosphere like a stone skipping off the surface of a pond.
Vostok hit the atmosphere at the correct angle—but Gagarin could tell that something was wrong. A small equipment capsule that was connected to Gagarin’s capsule by electrical cables had failed to separate. Still attached, the two capsules began spinning around each other. There was nothing Gagarin could do. He felt himself being pressed into his seat, the g-load rising beyond what he’d been trained to handle.
In the control room, Korolev had no idea this was happening. There was no way to communicate by radio with a ship speeding through the atmosphere.
Gagarin’s spinning capsule heated to a glowing red. He heard the sound of cracking metal. His vision went fuzzy. He fought to stay conscious.
And then, suddenly, the spinning stopped.
The heat of reentry had melted the cables to the equipment capsule. Gagarin’s craft stabilized and dropped smoothly into sunlight and blue sky. He ejected into the cold air. His parachute opened. He recognized the view from practice jumps. The Volga River. A railroad bridge. One hundred and eight minutes after takeoff, Yuri Gagarin’s feet touched down on the soft dirt of a recently plowed field.
A woman and a young girl stood beside a calf, staring at the stranger in the bright orange suit.
Gagarin pulled off his helmet. “I’m a friend, comrades! A friend!”
The woman had been listening to the radio earlier that morning. She asked, “Can it be that you have come from outer space?”
Gagarin smiled. “As a matter of fact, I have!”
* * *
The first American statement on one of the towering achievements in all of human history was this:
“It’s 3 in the morning, you jerk!”
A reporter had called NASA for a reaction to the big news from Russia. Annoyed to be woken from a cot in his office, the press officer John Powers pointed out the time.
The reporter pressed for a statement.
“If you’re wanting something from us,” the spokesman snapped, “the answer is we are all asleep.”
And he hung up.
All over the country, below headlines in massive type about Gagarin’s triumph, were brief articles with headlines such as “Puts Snooze Before News.”
* * *
Military helicopters arrived just moments after Gagarin landed. He was whisked to a nearby air base and handed a phone.
“Tell me, how did you feel in flight?” Nikita Khrushchev asked. “What’s space like?”
“I felt fine,” Gagarin reported. “I saw the earth from a great altitude. I could see seas, mountains, big cities, river and forests.”
“Let the world look on,” said a triumphant Khrushchev, “and see what our country is capable of, the things our great people and our Soviet science can do.”
Gagarin agreed. “Now let the other countries try and overtake us.”
“Exactly!”
* * *
John Kennedy paced in his office that morning, asking, “What can we do? How can we catch up?”
This was a man who could barely stand to lose a game of touch football. He’d been known to knock over the pieces of a board game that wasn’t going his way. Losing to Khrushchev, in front of the whole world, was infuriating. Besides, the space race was about a lot more than bragging rights. This was a technology race, a race to build machines capable of carrying heavy payloads at high speeds over long distances. A capsule into space one day. A bomb over the ocean the next. This was the Cold War.
Maybe the Americans should set their sights on beating the Russians to the moon, Kennedy suggested. But that was a problem for another day.
When the president talked to the press that afternoon, they seemed more interested in another pressing issue—Cuba. Whispers of a secret invasion force were getting louder, a reporter pointed out. How far was the United States prepared to go to help overthrow Fidel Castro?
“Well,” Kennedy began, “first I want to say that there will not, under any conditions, be an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces.”
This was misleading, at best. Yes, the soldiers about to invade the Bay of Pigs were not American. But it was an operation planned by the U.S. military and the CIA, and funded by American taxpayers. If the plan worked, Kennedy figured, all would be forgiven.
* * *
In Havana, Fidel Castro took careful note of Kennedy’s words. The American president was being very careful to say there would be no invasion by “United States armed forces.”
He did not say there would be no invasion.
THE BAY OF PIGS
AT PUERTO CABEZAS, NICARAGUA, FOURTEEN hundred men boarded six rusting ships and set out to sea.
Pepe San Román and Erneido Oliva, the brigade’s commanders, were professional soldiers—both in their late twenties, both ex-officers in the Cuban army. This was not typical of the group. The fourteen hundred volunteers ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-one. There were teachers, musicians, artists, mechanics, doctors, a few priests, and some experienced soldiers. Students made up the largest group.
Many of them had supported Fidel Castro at first.
Less than four years before, in Nov
ember 1956, Castro and a force of eighty-one rebels had sailed from Mexico to Cuba, determined to retake their homeland from a corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Castro waded onto land and stumbled through a swamp to a hut.
“Have no fear,” he declared. “I am Fidel Castro, and we came to liberate the Cuban people.”
Batista’s soldiers sped to the scene, and the ensuing firefight reduced Castro’s force to twenty-one. Twenty-one against the dictator’s force of forty thousand troops. Still, Castro was confident of success. And he had the rare ability to make others believe in his vision.
The rebels fled into the rugged Sierra Maestra and, very slowly, began to gather strength. In fiery speeches in forest clearings, Castro vowed to take control of Cuba and distribute the country’s riches to the people—a modern-day Robin Hood. For decades, Cuban elites and wealthy Americans had been exploiting the island, gobbling up the richest sugar farms, the most profitable utilities and casinos. Batista helped it all happen, while pocketing millions. Those days, Castro promised, would soon be over.
Thousands of men and women joined the movement over the next two years. In quick guerrilla strikes, they hit Batista’s forces, then slipped back into the mountains. The dictator panicked. In the first hours of 1959, he stuffed suitcases full of stolen cash and hopped on a plane to the Dominican Republic. Cheered on by massive crowds, Fidel Castro marched triumphantly into Havana.
Then, like all successful revolutionaries, Castro faced the harder challenge of improving life for the people. As promised, he built new schools and health clinics. As promised, he seized farmland owned by American companies and distributed the land to Cuban farmers. He seized American-owned businesses, putting them under control of his new government. The U.S. government struck back by imposing a trade embargo on Cuba, blocking the sale of Cuban sugar in the United States—a devastating blow to Cuba’s economy.
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