Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin: One Orbit, and Then Nowhere Left to Go

Twenty-one months of his childhood were spent in a mud hut three metres square, dug beside the family house after German troops requisitioned it. Eighteen years after his village was liberated, the same boy sat in a metal sphere atop a converted ballistic missile saying "Poyekhali!" — off we go. The flight lasted 108 minutes. Nothing in Gagarin's remaining seven years came close, and everyone involved, including Gagarin, knew it from the moment he landed.

Occupied Childhood

He was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, the third of four children of Aleksey Gagarin, a carpenter, and Anna Gagarina, a dairy farmer, both working on a state farm. The Wehrmacht took Klushino on 18 October 1941, burned the school and ended his first year of education. His father was beaten and hospitalised; a soldier cut his mother's leg with a scythe. After a German tried to hang his younger brother Boris, Yuri poured soil into tank batteries. The village was freed on his ninth birthday.

The family moved to Gzhatsk in 1946, where he learned mathematics and science from a former Soviet airman at a volunteer-run school.

Foundryman, Tractor Student, Pilot

At sixteen he apprenticed as a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy, taking evening classes at a workers' school. He graduated with honours in mouldmaking in 1951 and went to the Industrial Technical School in Saratov to study tractors — and, decisively, joined the local flying club at weekends, on biplanes and then the Yak-18.

In 1955 he was accepted to the First Chkalov Higher Air Force Pilots School at Orenburg. He nearly washed out: he could not land the MiG-15, until an instructor gave him a cushion to sit on, which raised his eyes enough to see over the nose. On 5 November 1957 he was commissioned with 166 hours and 47 minutes in the air, and posted to Luostari air base near the Norwegian border, flying MiG-15bis. On 6 October 1959, days after Luna 3 photographed the far side of the Moon, he wrote asking to be considered for space.

Selection

The medical commission screened 154 qualified pilots down to twenty-nine and then twenty. The requirements were brutal on physique: aged twenty-five to thirty, under 72 kilograms, under 1.70 metres — the Vostok capsule was small. Gagarin was among the first twelve approved on 7 March 1960. Training began at Khodynka on 15 March: parachute jumps, oxygen-deprivation runs, the centrifuge, isolation in an anechoic chamber. An Air Force doctor wrote of him that August: "Modest; gets embarrassed when his humour gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuriy; fantastic memory... quick reactions; persevering."

On 30 May 1960 he entered the accelerated Vanguard Six. Asked to vote anonymously for who should fly first, his fellow cosmonauts chose Gagarin — all but three of them. In January 1961 a commission under Lieutenant-General Nikolai Kamanin examined the six and Gagarin ranked best on the written paper; on 8 April the State Commission approved him as primary pilot, with Gherman Titov as backup, without discussion.

108 Minutes

Vostok 1 lifted from Baikonur at 6:07 UTC on 12 April 1961. His call sign was Kedr — cedar. Korolev counted him up through the stages and wished him a good flight; Gagarin answered, "Off we go! Goodbye, until we meet soon, dear friends."

He completed a single orbit. The flight was largely automated; he could take manual control only in an emergency. Re-entry did not go to plan: the equipment module failed to separate cleanly, staying tethered by a strand of wires, and the spacecraft spun under 8g until they burned through. At about seven kilometres he ejected, as designed, and came down by parachute near Saratov, where a farmer and her daughter saw a man in a pressure suit descend from the sky. They backed away in fear, he recalled: "I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

He had been promoted to major by special order while still in orbit. The Soviets initially concealed that he had not landed inside the craft, fearing the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale would not certify the record; the FAI later revised its rules and confirmed it.

The Living Monument

On 14 April 1961 a twelve-mile parade ended in Red Square. He was made Hero of the Soviet Union, given the Order of Lenin, and named the first Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR. Then came the tour: nine countries in four months, roughly thirty in all. In Manchester he refused an umbrella in pouring rain and insisted the convertible stay open so people could see him. John F. Kennedy barred him from the United States on the grounds that he was too popular.

He rose to colonel by November 1963, and became a problem: too valuable to risk. He re-qualified as a fighter pilot in 1965 and was made backup to his friend Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1, having argued that the rushed launch needed more safety work. When Soyuz 1's parachutes failed and Komarov died, Gagarin was barred from spaceflight for good and grounded from flying solo. On 17 February 1968 he defended a thesis on spaceplane aerodynamic configuration at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, graduating cum laude.

On 27 March 1968, on a routine training flight in a two-seat MiG-15UTI with instructor Vladimir Seryogin, he crashed near Kirzhach and was killed. At least three investigations followed and none settled it: a KGB report declassified in 2003 blamed outdated weather information and external tanks left attached; documents released in 2011 pointed to a sharp manoeuvre to avoid a weather balloon; Leonov maintained a Su-15 had passed within metres, breaking the sound barrier. The Kremlin declined a fresh inquiry in 2007. His ashes are in the Kremlin Wall.

Why Yuri Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit him, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice. Gagarin's flight was designed by Korolev's engineers and flown mostly by machine; the pilot's manual override was locked behind an emergency. He was not chosen for intellect. He was chosen because he was 1.57 metres tall, physiologically robust, politically unembarrassing, and — the decisive factor — because the other cosmonauts voted for him.

What the record does support is a specific and underrated cluster of qualities. The Air Force psychological assessment of August 1960 named them: fantastic memory, quick reactions, high intellectual development, perseverance, modesty. He topped the written examination among the Vanguard Six. He came from a burned village with almost no schooling, qualified as a foundryman, then a technician, then a jet pilot, then took a cum laude engineering degree on spaceplane aerodynamics while being paraded around thirty countries. And he sat calmly on top of an ICBM with survival odds nobody could honestly quote, then rode an unplanned 8g spin without panicking.

Call that courage, temperament and adaptability rather than genius. The one thing he was unquestionably world-class at was being the first human to leave the planet and come back sane, likeable and useful to a state that needed a symbol. That is a talent, but it is a talent of character.

Legacy

Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin. So were a training centre, an academy, the Baikonur launch pad, a 262-kilometre lunar crater and the KHL's championship trophy. Armstrong and Aldrin left a medal bearing his name on the Moon in 1969, and since 2011 the United Nations has observed 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight. He died at thirty-four, having spent seven years as the most famous man alive for something that took under two hours.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Central Committee of the AULYCL
• Educated at Saratov Pedagogical College, Orenburg Military Aviation Piloting High School and Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy
• Worked as aircraft pilot, astronaut and military officer