Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [115]
As the shuttle programme closes down after 30 years, the jury is undecided on its legacy. NASA’s flagship was an adaptable and powerful machine that made possible our first permanent human settlement in orbit. It was also dangerously temperamental and alarmingly expensive to operate. Even so, its thunderous first ascent to orbit in 1981 was a moment of tremendous pride for America on that balmy morning at the Kennedy launch centre.
Exactly twenty years prior to that day, Soviet technicians, engineers and (while there were no politicians present) a good scattering of KGB chiefs felt ‘their breathing slow, their hearts thump, their muscles tighten’ as they watched events from a concrete bunker in Baikonur on the remote steppes of Kazakhstan. A young man sat in what might well be described as a tin can atop a volatile bomb, waiting to be shot into space – and he was laughing and joking with the men who turned the final bolts on his capsule and sealed him into place, before abandoning him to eternal fame or a sudden violent death. Yuri Gagarin’s destiny was decided by new and revolutionary pumps, pipes and turbines built by a society that was undergoing a similarly dangerous technocratic experiment on a far vaster scale.
A Space Foundation survey undertaken in 2010 ranked Gagarin joint sixth ‘most popular space hero of all time.’ Joint, that is, with Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. If Gagarin were alive today, we can be certain he would have been laughing once again – and this time at the very top of the heroic space pyramid. We all admire the Apollo lunar astronauts for their bravery and undoubted professional brilliance, and do not begrudge them the adoration that they enjoy in retirement. Quite rightly, they are revered as heroes; but Gagarin’s charm, wit and approachability would have assured him a place in the hearts of this modern generation, too. A place that no one else in all human history can ever occupy. Number One. The First Man in Space.
It is a genuine honour that our book has been republished some 13 years after it first hit the bookshelves. We had timed the first publication in 1998 to mark the 30th anniversary of Gagarin’s wasteful and untimely death in a plane accident (for that’s what it was, despite the whining of the conspiracy theorists). To be able to transmit his story to the public once again, and this time to mark the half-century since human beings first broke through the Earth’s atmosphere and entered the cosmos, is to recognise one of the most important moments in human development. As mentioned in the very first pages of this book, nothing could lend greater validity to that moment than Neil Armstrong’s own thoughts on the matter. ‘It was Yuri Gagarin who called on all of us to follow the stars’.
The unique nature of this book, and the reasons why it is such an important document, are all attributable to those extraordinary people who agreed to speak with us back in the late 1990s. Our narrative is a record gleaned almost entirely from those who were at the scene: a first-hand account from men and women at the sharp end of the Soviet space programme, whose voices had been for so long silenced by fear of a visit from the foot soldiers of the Lubyanka.
We were fortunate to be in Russia at a time of unprecedented freedom, largely because the old security apparatus collapsed in disarray upon the dissolution of the USSR. It was a chaotic time, of that there can be no doubt, with mafia-style gangs overshadowing every business, large and small, and many aspects of Russia’s shape-shifting politics, too. Boris