Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [55]
At last Gagarin heard denser air whistling past the ball and his whirlwind rotation became less severe. Outside the charred porthole he saw pale blue sky. He was shaken, but any minute now he knew that further stresses awaited him. At seven kilometres’ altitude the hatch above his head blew away. The noise was terrible. The cabin seemed suddenly so very open, so exposed. According to Gagarin’s published account, he wondered for a crazy moment: ‘Was that me? Did I eject just then?’
His account does not quite square with the recollection of Vladimir Yazdovsky, Korolev’s Director of Medical Preparations, and a member of the ground-control team at the time. He remembers Gagarin triggering the ejection himself.
The entire procedure was supposed to be automatic. When the pressure sensors registered an atmospheric pressure consistent with an altitude of seven kilometres, Gagarin would come shooting out of the ball, and at four kilometres, the ejection seat’s propulsion pack and large parachute canopy would fall away, releasing him so that he could descend more gently under his smaller personal parachute. If his seat did not fire at the right time of its own accord, then he had the option of triggering the ejection himself, but he was not supposed to do this without good reason.8
As the ball began to slow down in the denser atmosphere and the heat of the initial re-entry faded away, Gagarin’s radio link with ground control was restored. According to Yazdovsky, ‘He reported that the g-loads were still very heavy, and they were pulling him in different directions. We said, “Hang on in there.” We suggested to him not to eject too soon, but he ejected early, from an undefined height.’
It seems that the ground controllers were unaware of the separation problem that Gagarin had encountered earlier and did not realize why he was complaining about excess spin and g-loading. Perhaps Gagarin did not have time to explain in greater detail; or perhaps he knew that he should not discuss the separation problem over the voice link, in case any Western listening posts were eavesdropping. The dialogue in this very last phase of the mission has never been published, but the historian Philip Clarke believes that the ball might still have been rotating at an uncomfortable rate, long after the equipment module had finally separated. Gagarin’s decision to eject early was not necessarily a panic reaction. He may have believed that the spinning of his capsule would interfere with his ejection, and the sooner he attempted it, the better.
In the event, Gagarin’s ejection and touchdown went smoothly. As soon as the ejection seat’s rocket charges were spent, a large parachute canopy unfurled to slow down his fall. Then the seat fell away, as planned, leaving him to drift more gently to the ground under his own parachute.
Baikonur’s morning was Washington’s night. At 1.07 Eastern Standard Time, American radar stations recorded the launch of an R-7 rocket, and fifteen minutes later a radio monitoring post in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska detected unmistakable signs of live dialogue with a cosmonaut. White House science advisor Jerome Wiesner called President Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger with the news. Salinger had already prepared a statement for Kennedy to read out. The President had gone to bed a few hours earlier with a sense of foreboding. Wiesner asked him whether he wanted to be woken as soon as the rocket was launched? ‘No,’ the President answered wearily. ‘Give me the news in the morning.’9
At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his