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Mahesh

11/04/22 04:20 AM IST

Yuri Gagarin

  • WHAT
  • WHY
  • WHEN
  • WHERE
  • WHO
  • HOW
What are the chances of Gagarin coming back to earth safely?
  • Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was given 50% chances of making it back to earth safely.
  • Everybody involved in the mission knew the risks were high.
  • But the Soviet Union was determined to beat the United States, which was planning to put a man in space through NASA’s Mercury Project, in putting a man in space.
  • This was a secretive mission; Gagarin did not get to even inform his family about the trip outside earth. When his wife asked him where he was headed to, he said it was a business trip.
  • When she enquired where his business destination was, Gagarin said “very far”. He wasn’t lying. This “business trip” would change everything for him – first for good, and then for the worst.
  • On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
  • During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space capsule in 89 minutes.
  • Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, “Flight is proceeding normally; I am well.”
  • But the flight was fraught with drama. At one point the control room lost data transmission and problems involving the antennae put the shuttle into a much higher and riskier orbit than planned.
  • On re-entry, a glitch caused the ship to rotate swiftly and the landing capsule was slow to detatch from the service module. Gagarin ejected from the flight, and parachuted onto a field near the Volga River about 450 miles southeast of Moscow.
  • This did not go as per plans – for this to be a complete trip, Gagarin was not supposed to eject till he reached much close to earth.
  • The part of his ejection was kept a secret for a long time. But it did not really matter. Gagarin had been to space. And he had made it back alive.
  • The 27-year-old cosmonaut's mission lasted 108 minutes in total and made him a national hero. On 14 April Gagarin was flown to Moscow, where he was greeted by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and driven into town on a highway lined with cheering Russians.
Why Soviet wanted this mission to be successful?
  • After his historic feat was announced, the attractive and unassuming Gagarin became an instant worldwide celebrity.
  • It was surreal – here was a communist nation that glorified collective work celebrating individual achievement. Gagarin became Russia’s first international icon.
  • He was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
  • Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets were renamed in his honor. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made him make statements attributing his success to communism.
  • Gagarin had put the Soviet Union farther ahead of America in the space race, and, therefore, in the Cold War. It seemed then that the Soviet Union could not be beaten in this race.
  • “The United States must now run like hell”, screamed one headline in an American newspaper.
  • By the time World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict had begun. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers – the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist autocratic Soviet Union – against each other.
  • Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower and – by extension – its political-economic system.
  • The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961.
  • Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S. space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in Friendship 7.
  • By that time, the Soviet Union had already made another leap ahead in the “space race” with the August 1961 flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov in Vostok 2. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more than 25 hours in space.
  • To Soviet propagandists, the Soviet conquest of space was evidence of the supremacy of communism over capitalism (the Americans eventually won the race with the moon landing).
  • Alan Shepard was the first American in space and the second person in space, launching on a suborbital flight in a Mercury capsule called Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961 — just three weeks after Gagarin's flight.
When this mission was conceptualised ?
  • In 1960, after much searching and a selection process, Yuri Gagarin was chosen with 19 other pilots for the Soviet space program. Gagarin was further selected for an elite training group known as the Sochi Six, from which the first cosmonauts of the Vostok program would be chosen.
  • Gagarin and other prospective candidates were subjected to experiments designed to test physical and psychological endurance; he also underwent training for the upcoming flight.
  • Out of the twenty selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov due to their performance during training sessions as well as their physical characteristics — space was limited in the small Vostok cockpit, and both men were rather short. Gagarin was just 1.57 metres (5 ft 2 in) tall.
  • In August 1960, when Gagarin was one of 20 possible candidates, a Soviet Air Force doctor evaluated his personality as: “Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuri; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.”
  • Gagarin was also a favoured candidate by his peers. When the 20 candidates were asked to anonymously vote for which other candidate they would like to see as the first to fly, all but three chose Gagarin. Gagarin kept himself physically fit throughout his life, and was a keen sportsman.
  • Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky wrote: “Service in the Air Force made us strong, both physically and morally.
  • All of us cosmonauts took up sports and PT seriously when we served in the Air Force. I know that Yuri Gagarin was fond of ice hockey. He liked to play goalkeeper... I don't think I am wrong when I say that sports became a fixture in the life of the cosmonauts.”
  • Just three days before blastoff from what would later be known as the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Gagarin was told that he was chosen for the mission. In a letter to his wife, Valentina, he asked her to raise their daughters "not as little princesses, but as real people," and to feel free to remarry if his mission proved fatal. This letter was only to be delivered if he died on the mission.
  • The first was a draft on Gagarin’s successful return and history being made.
  • The second sought help from all countries in locating Gagarin (assuming that he ejected and returned on earth but was out of Soviet borders).
  • The third announced Gagarin’s tragic but brave death.
  • It was, thankfully, the first letter that had to be opened and released to the press. When Moscow Radio announced the making of history, people went berserk. And it was not just the Soviet people who were celebrating.
  • For most people, regardless of their national affiliations, this was a triumph of human spirit. One of their own – a human – had been to space. This was a beautiful outcome of the Cold War.
Where this mission leads Gagarin to?
  • He became celebrity after this mission. Whole World is talking about him.
  • The 27-year-old cosmonaut became a figurehead for the Soviet Union and toured the world lunching and dining with global celebrities and leaders.
  • For example, the first man to travel to space spent eight days in India in 1961.
  • During those exhausting days, Gagarin met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, addressed a huge gathering in Mumbai’s Shivaji Park and received a raucous welcome from an adulating public across India. “I think that sometime Soviet and Indian cosmonauts will research unexplored expanses of space together,” were Gagarin’s prophetic words during the visit.
  • Two decades later, Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to enter outer space when he joined commander Yuri Malyshev and flight engineer Gennady Strekalov on the Soyuz T-11 spacecraft.
  • Gagarin also received more than a million letters from fans across the world, an astonishing outpouring of global admiration – for he was not an obvious star material. He was short and slightly built.
  • Yet Gagarin possessed a smile "that lit up the darkness of the cold war", as one writer put it, and had a natural grace that made him the best ambassador that the USSR ever had.
  • With fame came temptations, and he surrendered to a few of them. His worst moment came when he injured his head after leaping from a window to avoid Valentina, his wife, who had discovered a girl in his hotel room.
  • The Soviet leadership made an official statement that Gagarin injured his head trying to prevent his daughter getting hurt when he stumbled holding her. The hero could do no wrong.
  • Valentina did not like all this fame because she feared her husband was being pulled away. An alert Valentina was the reason Gagarin would stay away from the many women who just would not leave him alone. She kept him on earth. But she could not keep him from falling.
  • The sudden rise to fame took its toll on Gagarin. While acquaintances say Gagarin had been a "sensible drinker", his touring schedule placed him in social situations where he was always expected to drink.
  • In 1962, he began serving as a Deputy to the Soviet of the Union, and was elected to the Central Committee of the Young Communist League.
  • Gagarin was now getting restless, and wanted to return to flying. He did not want to rest on his only achievement. The pilot in him was not interested in politics.
An incident then shook Gagarin’s conscience to the core.
  • Vladimir Komarov, a cosmonaut, knew he was going to die when he left Earth for space on the Soyuz 1.
  • His best friend Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space, knew Komarov would die too.
  • But Leonid Brezhnev, the new leader of the Soviet Union, wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution with a space spectacle. Brezhnev, unlike his predecessor Khrushchev, maintained a distance from Gagarin.
  • Gagarin and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems - serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin requested, should be postponed. The request was denied.
  • Komarov couldn't refuse the mission because the backup cosmonaut would have been Gagarin, his friend. So he went along with it and when things predictably failed — antennas didn't open, power was compromised, navigation was difficult — US intelligence claim to have picked up Komarov's cries of rage "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
  • His spaceflight on Soyuz 1 made him the first Soviet cosmonaut to fly into outer space more than once, and he became the first human to die on a space mission.
  • Gagarin was now the helpless hero. The one who inspired millions with his brave flight could not save his friend’s life. The hero now quietly wanted to return to flying.
  • This was not possible because when Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was permanently banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights. This seemed to be the end of his career and his fall from glory.
  • But Yuri Gagarin refused to go down without a fight and a flight. The thing he was made up of didn’t know how to surrender to circumstances. That is, after all, why the Soviet bosses had selected him as the most suitable man to risk his life intelligently and bravely.
Who is behind the killing of Gagarin?
  • The first cosmonaut of the world now decided to fly again. Against all odds, he rose again only to die under tragic circumstances.
  • He began training to re-qualify as a fighter pilot. On 17 February 1968 he successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on the subject of spaceplane aerodynamic configuration, passing with flying colors.
  • On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, Gagarin and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died in a MiG-15UTI crash near the town of Kirzhach.
  • The cause of the crash that killed Gagarin is not entirely certain, and has been subject to speculation about conspiracy theories over the ensuing decades.
  • With little more than Soviet-sponsored reports, KGB (Russian secret service) investigations, and long withheld testimony as explanations, conspiracy theories sprung up to explain why a plane piloted by two experienced Russian airmen suddenly just fell out of the sky.
  • By all accounts, Gagarin’s retraining was going well. Gagarin was scheduled to fly three practice missions in a Russian-built MiG-15 training jet that day — two solo and one with Seryogin, which was the day's first flight.
  • It was a rainy and windy morning when he boarded a bus on bound for the airfield and realized he was missing his identification. Always superstitious, Gagarin told the people around him this was a bad omen.
  • A little after 10 a.m., Gagarin and Seryogin took off in the two-seater jet and headed to the flight zone in weather conditions that were probably deteriorating. A few minutes later, Gagarin came over the radio to say he had completed the exercise, and was heading back to base.
Then, radio silence.
  • After ten minutes of no sighting or communication with the aircraft, the base dispatched rescue teams to seek the jet. Around 3 p.m., crews found the burning, charred plane among the trees and snow of the Russian countryside.
  • The accident was unsurvivable. While Seryogin's body was identified, there was hope that Gagarin had ejected before impact. That hope dissipated the next day when Gagarin's remains were found not far from the plane's wreckage.
 Different theories behind Death
  • The 29-volume Soviet investigation report dismissed various conspiracy theories, instead indicating that the actions of airbase personnel contributed to the crash. The report states that an air traffic controller provided Gagarin with outdated weather information, and that by the time of his flight, conditions had deteriorated significantly. Ground crew also left external fuel tanks attached to the aircraft. Gagarin's planned flight activities needed clear weather and no outboard tanks.
  • The investigation concluded that Gagarin's aircraft entered a spin, either due to a bird strike or because of a sudden move to avoid another aircraft. Because of the out-of-date weather report, the crew believed their altitude to be higher than it actually was, and could not react properly to bring the MiG-15 out of its spin.
  • Another theory, advanced by the original crash investigator in 2005, hypothesizes that a cabin air vent was accidentally left open by the crew or the previous pilot, leading to oxygen deprivation and leaving the crew incapable of controlling the aircraft.
  • A similar theory, published in Air & Space magazine, is that the crew detected the open vent and followed procedure by executing a rapid dive to a lower altitude. This dive caused them to lose consciousness and crash.
  • On 12 April 2007, the Kremlin vetoed a new investigation into the death of Gagarin. Government officials said that they saw no reason to begin a new investigation. Some thought Gagarin might have been drinking, or even that he and Seryogin might have been distracted by taking photographs from the plane’s window.
  • In his 2004 book Two Sides of the Moon, Alexey Leonov, who was part of a State Commission established to investigate the death in 1968, recounts that he was flying a helicopter in the same area that day when he heard "two loud booms in the distance."
  • Corroborating other theories, his conclusion is that a Sukhoi jet (which he identifies as a Su-15 'Flagon') was flying below its minimum allowed altitude, and "without realizing it because of the terrible weather conditions, he passed within 10 or 20 meters of Yuri and Seregin's plane while breaking the sound barrier."
  • The resulting turbulence would have sent the MiG into an uncontrolled spin. Leonov believes the first boom he heard was that of the jet breaking the sound barrier, and the second was Gagarin's plane crashing.
  • Rumours were floated that the Soviet establishment murdered Gagarin because he was becoming a threat – first by his popularity and then by his questioning of the establishment. However, it was never conclusively proved that Gagarin was murdered. He just lifted off to never return.
How did the Soviet Union planned the visit of Gagarin to Space?
  • Gagarin became the first man in space. But he did not just fly there. His spacecraft made it possible – and designing it was an incredible feat by any engineering standard.
  • Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, was only revealed to have masterminded the USSR's rocket wizardry after his death in 1966.
  • His genius, his transformation into one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union – and his interaction with his favourite cosmonaut, his "little eagle" Yuri Gagarin, is the real story behind that flight on 12 April 1961.
  • Gagarin became the face of Soviet space supremacy, while Korolev was its brains. The pair made a potent team and their success brought fame to one and immense power to the other. Neither lived long to enjoy those rewards, however.
  • In the 1950s, the United States was desperately trying to copy the captured Nazi technology using German engineers. The Soviet Union merely relied on the genius and hard work of Korolev.
  • Korolev slept for only a few hours a night, lived frugally and on 21 August 1957 launched the Soviet R-7 rocket, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, on a 4,000-mile journey from Baikonur cosmodrome, in modern-day Kazakhstan, to the Kamchatka peninsula. He had beaten the USA by 15 months.
  • German engineer Von Braun may have built the V2 and later the Saturn V rocket that took American astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon, but his achievements were dwarfed by those of Korolev.
  • The ‘chief designer’ – he was never named in state communiqués because of the official disapproval of "the cult of personalities" – developed the first intercontinental missile and then launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1.
  • He also put into space the first dog, the first two-man crew, the first woman, the first three-man crew; directed the first walk in space; created the first Soviet spy satellite and communication satellite; built mighty launch vehicles and flew spacecraft towards the moon, Venus and Mars – and all on a shoestring budget.
  • Korolev’s bravery and dedication to space remain unmatched.
  • On 3 December 1960, Korolev suffered his first heart attack. During his convalescence, it was also discovered that he was suffering from a kidney disorder, a condition brought on by his detention in the Soviet prison camps. He was warned by the doctors that if he continued to work as intensely as he had, he would not live long.
  • Korolev became convinced that Soviet leader Khrushchev was only interested in the space program for its propaganda value and feared that he would cancel it entirely if the Soviets started losing their leadership to the United States, so he continued to push himself even harder. He died in 1965.
  • Before his death, Korolev had designed a mighty launcher, the N1, which was intended to carry men to the moon.
  • Engineers continued to work on it but without the chief designer's guidance and inspiration, they were lost. It’s fairly said that science is a collective work and rocket science more so.
  • But, as fate and history would have it, it was in the communist establishment of Soviet Union that a man single-handedly propelled his country to the space.

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