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Most published accounts state that Gagarin’s descent to earth went smoothly, without serious incident. Gagarin himself was always careful to support this version of events. His official account of the flight, The Road to the Stars, contains only a hint of trouble, so fleeting that it was entirely overlooked by Western experts:

The braking rockets turned on automatically . . . I ceased being weightless, and the growing g-loads pressed me into my seat. These grew and grew, and were heavier than at take-off. The craft began to revolve and I told ground control about it. The turning I had worried about soon stopped and the descent went on normally.6

The turning I had worried about . . . The only opportunity Gagarin had to tell the truth, formally at least, was when he testified to a special State Committee, headed as always by Korolev, Kamanin and Keldysh. This meeting was a private opportunity for the cosmonaut to report candidly on Vostok’s overall engineering performance during the flight. It was not considered appropriate to release any sensitive technical details to outsiders. Certainly there was no need for Gagarin to tell the world that he could have been killed.

Just before re-entry the ball’s main linkages with the rear equipment module separated correctly, but the umbilical cable, with its dense bundle of electrical wires that transferred power and data to the ball, did not come away cleanly. For several minutes the ball and the rear module remained tied together, like a pair of boots with their laces inadvertently knotted. The whole ensemble tumbled end over end in its headlong rush to earth.

The ball was weighted with a special bias, so that the thicker layer of heat shielding at Gagarin’s back would swing round naturally of its own accord to face the super-hot onrush of the earth’s atmosphere. With the equipment module corrupting the air flow and distorting the proper mass distribution, this alignment was no longer possible. ‘The craft began to rotate rapidly. I was like an entire corps de ballet,’ Gagarin reported to the secret State Committee. ‘I waited for the separation but there wasn’t any. When the braking rocket shut down, all the indicator lights on the console went out. Then they lit up again. There was no separation whatever. I decided that something was wrong. The craft’s rotation was beginning to slow, but it was about all three axes, ninety degrees to the right, to the left . . . I felt the oscillations of the craft and the burning of the coating. I don’t know where the sound of crackling was coming from. Either the structure was cracking, or the thermal cladding was expanding as it heated, but it was audibly crackling. I felt the temperature was getting high.’7

The heat of re-entry created an ionization layer around the ball, and no voice radio messages could get through. Korolev and his ground controllers probably did not become fully aware of Gagarin’s problem until after he had landed.

Atmospheric heating eventually burned through the cable and separated the rogue equipment module, but the effect was to sling the ball away at a tangent with an additional sickening spin. At one point the rotation was so severe that Gagarin began to lose consciousness. ‘The indicators on the instrument panels became fuzzy, and everything seemed to go grey.’

Perhaps the State Committee’s discussions of this problem did not come soon enough for the engineers to make suitable adaptations, ahead of Gherman Titov’s mission? At any event, he survived a similar difficulty when he flew on August 6, 1961. Gagarin’s post-flight description of the separation failure was perfectly calm, quite relaxed, but Titov says that if his own experience was anything to go by, he must have wondered: ‘Which is stronger, the capsule or the other module? Which will break first? You switch on all the recorders and transmitters, to try and report in case you don’t make it. You see the little earth globe rotating, and the clocks still running, which means information is still coming from