Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow
Fifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth.
Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation Street. Yuri was mobbed, the girls infatuated with the beaming Soviet pin-up Macmillan called ‘a delightful fellow’. And so he was by every account. Everyone loved him. But by 1968 he was dead, killed in a mysterious jet crash.
Last week, at a talk at the Royal Society, the British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers (who has logged over 559 hours in space) had a three-way discussion about the Soviet space achievement. With him were John Zarnecki, a professor of space studies, and the writer Rona Munro. She was there because the early Soviet space programme is being celebrated by a Royal Shakespeare Company production of her new play Little Eagles, soon to open at the Hampstead Theatre.
Gagarin, we learned, was picked because he was short enough to get in the rocket and also, rather endearingly, because he removed his shoes when first being shown the capsule. The son of a tractor driver (under a political regime that had a near-erotic obsession with tractors) he ticked every possible box with the belligerent peasant Nikita Krushchev, who saw in the handsome young cosmonaut some great PR potential for communism.
Gagarin was always a sideshow. He is not the star of the play. The Royal Society’s speakers were far more interested in the shadowy genius who put him in space, Sergei Korolyov, codenamed the Great Designer. He was the architect of everything the Russians achieved — humiliating the Americans time and again — and yet he remains unknown to non-astronauts. Munro was originally going to write about the American moonshot until she discovered the fascinating Soviet space story.
The story is that in 1938 Korolyov, a brilliant young rocket scientist, was denounced and sent to the Gulag. He was tortured and his health ruined. The war saved him. He was recalled to Moscow — a trip of sub-zero hell and near-fatal starvation — to work on the captured V2 rockets, Nazi technology that the US imported along with the much better-known rocket man Werner Von Braun.
Korolyov became the super-brain of the space race, designing the first intercontinental missile and the first satellite, Sputnik 1. He masterminded the launch of the first dog in space and the first woman in space (daughter of a tractor driver). He was responsible for the first space walk, created the Russian Soyuz launcher and oversaw numerous space shots. He did everything. Sellers pointed out that when a rocket’s four booster tanks peel off in the sky they form a pattern still called ‘the Korolyov cross’. The man was a titan.
Gagarin, brave and beaming, was the human face of the Soviet programme, fuelled as it was by the politics of the Cold War. But Koralyov’s premature death in 1966, during a botched operation, robbed the Soviets of any hope of maintaining their lead. It also proved that their space programme was not the work of a white-coated collective but of a tantrum-prone genius who looked like a smelly bear.
It was fascinating to hear from Professor Zarnecki that as a schoolboy he once stood a few feet from Gagarin when, as all good Soviets had to, he visited Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate. The now grown-up professor has just signed a contract to work with the Chinese — a sign of the times. Sellers spends his days talking brilliantly about space to enthralled schoolchildren and institutions.
As for the space race, the once-glittering future became dimmer over the decades. We have the space station up there, but by the predictions of the Sixties, man should have been playing golf on Mars a decade ago. Peaceful collaboration seemed to slow progress down. But the long game is everything. According to Sellers, we have irreversibly entered the epoch of space travel: whatever setbacks and retrenchments there have been, man has a destiny among the stars. Why? Quite apart from our hunger for more satellites, for space-based weapons and solar panels, because it is deep in our human nature, as he put it, ‘to pack up, go out there and take a look’.