So far, Vostok 1 is working with the precision of a watch.
After five minutes of flight, the core rocket stage has used up its propellant. It, too, shuts down, falling away from the spacecraft.
Seven minutes after take-off, Gagarin is flying over central Russia, rapidly heading East.
Then another rocket stage, its fuel depleted, separates and drops off as the spaceship eats altitude. It’s outgunning Earth’s strongest natural force.
I really wonder what the people of the world will say when they hear about my flight, he thinks to himself, breaking out into his first smile since blast-off.
“Earth, the rocket-carrier has separated,” the cosmonaut radioes. “I feel well. The orientation systems are working normally.”
Ten minutes after lift-off, the final stage shuts down. Then the spacecraft reaches orbit, crossing over an invisible threshold into another world.
Vostok 1 orbits above Siberia, shooting out towards the North Pacific Ocean.
“I can see Earth in the view port of the Vzor.”
This is the first sight of the planet from space by human eyes after millions of years of evolution. At that moment, he sees himself as a cosmic scout. Is there a Promised Land out here in space somewhere? Will humans find any unknown life-forms surviving on other planets one day? Will they discover untold secrets of the universe?
“Weightlessness has begun,” Gagarin states.
It’s an odd sensation to lose his body weight. He feels incredibly light. It’s something like an out-of-body experience.
As a boy, he’d read about this unearthly state when devouring the science fiction stories of Russian writer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, such as Dreams of Earth and Sky and Outside of Earth. The author, writing in a time before airplanes, had illuminated the cosmos in a way any child could understood, turning the universe into a magical place a child could love, one in which even impossible adventures could happen.
Gagarin isn’t afraid to be in space. He’s been living in it, in his imagination, since boyhood.
Tsiolkovsky had even described an egg-shaped space capsule, carried on a rocket, which would take four days to get to the Moon, as well as giant floating space greenhouse dwelling, producing enough food to accommodate a hundred people living in outer space. The writer’s vision had been to industrialise space travel.
Then the spaceman becomes slightly disorientated and uncomfortable. After a few moments, he decides he can get used to the weightless condition, refusing to be overwhelmed. He’ll just let go and see what he can achieve in this state.
Even through the ascension is over, the cabin is still noisy, with humming and whirring sounds from air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system. His earphones, embedded in his inner helmet, buzz with static from the radio communication system.
A few minutes after attaining orbit, the spaceship passes high over the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Russia. A proud countryman, Gagarin feels a special love for his homeland.
As he’s admiring the view of Earth, Vostok 1 speeds out over the Arctic Circle and above the North Pacific Ocean.
Vostok 1 is programmed to head diagonally across the Pacific Ocean in a southerly direction towards the base of South America. During that leg of the voyage, sea-borne stations will take over the communications with the spacecraft.
Gagarin floats out of his chair. He drifts to the ceiling of the capsule, hanging in mid-air. It hasn’t taken him long to realise he shouldn’t resist the peculiar zero g effect. All his limbs are light, but he no longer feels weak, that he’s missing something, even though his arms and legs don’t really seem at that moment to belong to him, but to space.
His pencil and note-pad fly around. Then a map takes off and flutters soundlessly in the cabin. When he sucks some liquid out of a tube, more as an experiment than to quench his thirst, a few drops drip out but then don’t drop down to the floor of the cockpit. Instead, they stay around in the zero-g air, forming themselves into tiny spheres which eventually cling to the porthole.
It’s wonderful being weightless, as if he’s been infused with an additional source of physical power. Once he gets used to the new way of moving in space, Gagarin enjoys sailing around the cabin, peeking out the multiple portholes at the panoramic vistas below.
He finds he can write in weightlessness. He makes notes in his flight log-book.
About half an hour after launch, the Sun sets over the North Pacific. Vostok 1 crosses into night. As Gagarin is reading the dials on the instrument panel, everything outside becomes pitch black, his spaceship racing into Earth’s dark side. He reasons he’s directly over the middle of an ocean because there are no glittering lights anywhere to be seen.
Outside the portholes is a black cosmos. It’s studded with the stars’ sharp points of light which don’t seem to flicker when viewed in space.
By now, the space vessel has already gone beyond the Hawaiian Islands.
Gagarin finds he isn’t getting hungry or tired. Has he entered eternity, or some such place, where Earth’s laws can be transcended, where a person can labour without ever becoming exhausted? Is space going to be a worker’s paradise, as envisaged by Tsiolkovsky?
The pilot checks his bodily indicators and notes that his pulse and respiration are still absolutely normal. Beautiful! He thinks to himself.
And his mind is able to think logically and clearly. Will space really be a place of wonder, after all, rather than of fear? He’s become an explorer: all of this is a brand new experience in the history of the world.
At 9 hours and 48 minutes, Moscow time, Vostok 1 crosses the Equator, travelling in a south-easterly direction, orbiting over the South Pacific. Earth has become a ghostly sphere with beclouded darkness covering it like a shroud.
Gagarin is well aware that he may have to take over manual control of the ship if any malfunctions occurred. So far, the automatic systems have performed faultlessly, a fact which only increases his admiration for the Chief Designer and the Soviet automation experts. He understands that as a cosmonaut he’s merely the summit of a very large pyramid of engineers, technicians and designers.
He can’t quite escape the sense of being honoured to be flying such an intelligent and powerful space machine. Although he’s just a small cog in a complex system of policy, design and mission control, he’s enraptured by the power of scientific knowledge. It has lifted him to these hitherto inconceivable heights, looking down at his planet from a commanding altitude. Born a peasant, and yet look at the heights his life has reached! Then and there, he vows to continue increasing and promoting the knowledge of space flight. He believes he’s found his future.
Despite all these positive sentiments, as he peers into the impenetrable darkness of space and Earth’s night side, he’s a little frightened of the responsibility which has been entrusted to him.
And the most dangerous part of the mission still lies ahead: re-entry and landing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ABOUT THREE QUARTERS of an hour after take-off, the automatic orientation programme is activated, as Gagarin’s spaceship emerges out of Earth’s shadow at a speed of 28,000 kilometres an hour.
The Sun rises fast as the craft heads straight into the planet’s daylight side. In just under an hour of flight, Vostok 1 has gone from early morning, passed into night and then re-emerged into the next morning. The space journey isn’t just a conquest of geographic distance and of gravity: it’s an acceleration through the passage of time.