Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [56]
On the afternoon of April 12, President Kennedy held a press conference in Washington. Normally a self-confident and eloquent public performer, he seemed distinctly less sure of himself than usual. He was asked, ‘Mr President, a member of Congress today said he was tired of seeing the United States coming second to Russia in the space field. What is the prospect that we will catch up?’
‘However tired anybody may be – and no one is more tired than I am – it is going to take some time. The news will be worse before it gets better. We are, I hope, going to go into other areas where we can be first, and which will bring perhaps more long-range benefits to mankind. But we are behind.’11
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COMING HOME
Korolev, Mazzhorin and the trajectory mappers at OKB-1 knew precisely the direction that Gagarin’s ball would adopt as it plunged through the atmosphere and fell to the ground. What they did not know was exactly how far along that direction it would travel before coming to rest. The trajectory calculations from Mtislav Keldysh’s computers were good to an accuracy of just a few kilometres. In the vastness of outer space this was more than acceptable. For a homecoming Vostok ball it could have meant the difference between landing harmlessly in an empty field and crashing through a roof, killing all the people beneath. With great care, Vostok’s incoming route was selected to place as few houses as possible in the path of danger. All the descent scenarios favoured large meadowlands, scrublands and fields.
Today, Russian capsules come down onto the vast (and supposedly uninhabited) steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from where they lifted off in the first place. A well-rehearsed procedure for capsule location and crew retrieval has operated for three decades. Back in 1961, Korolev and his mission planners were not quite so ready to dump their very first cosmonaut into the middle of nowhere. Gagarin fell to earth only a short distance from where he had first flown an old Yak-18 at the Saratov AeroClub six years earlier. The exact location of his touchdown was twenty-six kilometres south-west of the town of Engels in the Saratov region, on the outskirts of a village called Smelkovka.
From ground level there was no possibility of observing the ball’s hatch flying away, or the sudden jolt of Gagarin’s ejection seat. At seven kilometres’ altitude, this was all happening too high up to be seen. But tractor driver Yakov Lysenko heard a distinct crack in the skies above his head. Naturally he looked up. The faint echo of the hatchway’s explosive bolts took twenty seconds to reach him. By that time Gagarin and his craft had fallen three kilometres closer to the ground, and their parachutes had opened. They were just about visible now to the naked eye. In fact, it is probable that Lysenko heard a different bang closer to the ground, when the ball’s parachute hatch was blown off at just four kilometres’ altitude to deploy the folded canopy from within. ‘You can hear an explosion if it’s a plane or something like that, but I saw there was no plane,’ says Lysenko. ‘There was no engine roar. I was standing and watching, and I saw a ball in the air. Well, not a ball, but something landing with a parachute. A pilot from a plane, I thought.’
Lysenko ran back to Smelkovka village to raise the alarm. He gathered together a reassuring group of friends, and they all tramped across the fields to the spot where he had seen the ‘pilot’ come down. Gagarin seemed very happy to encounter ordinary folk like them. ‘We came to the place, and he was coming towards us. He was very lively and happy, especially after he landed successfully. He was wearing