Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [50]
At three minutes, the nose fairing fired its pyrotechnic charges, pulling away to expose the ball. Gagarin caught a glimpse of dark blue, high-altitude sky through his portholes. Now he became slightly annoyed at the brightness of the television lamp, which made him squint if his head was tilted a certain way – when he was trying to look out of a porthole, for example.
Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of roubles-worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground. Vostok climbed the rest of the way into orbit atop a stunted upper stage, with just one small rocket engine. Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never travelled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘the eerie silence of outer space’. The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system, and yet more fans behind the instrument panels to cool the electrical circuits. Anyway, Gagarin’s ears were covered with microphones hissing with their own special static, or with ground control’s ceaseless demands for news. ‘Weightlessness has begun,’ he reported. ‘It’s not at all unpleasant, and I’m feeling fine.’
Vostok was rotating gently, partly so as not to waste thruster fuel on unnecessary maneouvres, and partly to prevent the sun from heating any surface area of the craft for too long. Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upwards out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball, before drifting downwards out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again – the horizon not straight, but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.
Travelling eastwards, ever eastwards, flying at eight kilometres per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘The flight continues well. 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!’
As Vostok swept over Siberia, less than twenty minutes after launch, its steeply tilted orbit carried it to the Arctic Circle, then over the north-eastern hemisphere and towards the North Pacific. At Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, almost on the extreme east of the Soviet subcontinent, a remote radio monitoring station calculated Vostok’s speed and altitude from the incoming telemetry. This would be the final opportunity for accurate measurements before the less well-equipped sea-borne stations took over. Alexei Leonov had arrived at Petropavlovsk a day or two before Kamanin and the State Committee at Baikonur had made the final cosmonaut selection for the flight. As Leonov waited for Vostok’s signals, including the crude television picture from within its cabin, he had no idea which of his friends would be in there. ‘When Yuri flew, there wasn’t a central mission-control complex like the one we have today [at Kaliningrad, north-east of Moscow]. Therefore a number of cosmonauts, familiarized with all aspects of the mission, were disbursed among all the major radio listening posts around the Soviet Union, and as