The Cruise of the Vostok

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Triumphant music blared across the land. Russia's radios saluted the morning with the slow, stirring beat of the patriotic song, How Spacious Is My Country. Then came the simple announcement that shattered forever man's ancient isolation on earth: "The world's first spaceship, Vostok [East], with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit."

From Leningrad to Petropavlovsk, the U.S.S.R. came to a halt. Streetcars and buses stopped so that passengers could listen to loudspeakers in public squares. Factory workers shut off their machines; shopgirls quit their counters. Schoolkids turned eagerly from the day's lessons. Somewhere above them, a Soviet citizen was arcing past the stars, whirling about the earth at 18,000 miles an hour, soaring into history as the first man in space.

Radio reports identified the "cosmonaut" as Major Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, 27. According to the official announcement, the Vostok had blasted off from an unidentified launching pad at exactly 9:07 a.m., Moscow time. Brief bulletins, from time to time, traced its orbital track. Word came that at 9:22 a.m. Gagarin had reported by radio from a point over

South America: "The flight is proceeding normally. I feel well." At 10:15 he checked in over Africa: "The flight is normal. I am withstanding well the state of weightlessness." At 11:10 a report was broadcast that at 10:25 Gagarin had completed one circuit of the earth and that the spaceship's braking rocket had been fired. This was the perilous point when the Vostok, its nose white-hot from friction with the earth's atmosphere, began its plunge to a landing. All Russia waited nervously--and the government-controlled radio milked every moment for suspense. Not until 12:25 was the proud announcement put on the air: "At 10:55 Cosmonaut Gagarin safely returned to the sacred soil of our motherland."

Hats were heaved aloft. Russians cheered, hugged each other, telephoned their friends. The celebration spread from factories to collective farms, from crowded city streets to clusters of huts on the lonely steppes. Newspapers blossomed with bright red headlines. Everywhere people paraded with banners hailing the Soviet leap into space. Not even for Sputnik 1 had the U.S.S.R. worked up such effervescent enthusiasm.

Never the Same. The extravagance was understandable. Yuri Gagarin had flown higher (188 miles) and faster (18,000 m.p.h.) than any other man ever before; yet even such startling statistics shrank into insignificance before the infinite implications of his trip. Suddenly man's centuries-old dream of space travel had been transformed into reality.

Vostok was not an unmanned satellite-impersonal, cold, emotionally empty. It had carried an ordinary man soaring across the face of the heavens, and mankind's imagination had soared with him. Scientists could talk with new assurance about a whole new series of technological achievements that might refashion the world of the future: manned satellites watching and perhaps controlling the weather, guiding ships and airplanes, acting as communication relay stations, providing a drastic change of environment for people with diseases that cannot be cured on earth. Military men conjured up orbiting space fleets, bristling with giant nuclear missiles capable of devastating the land below.

All this had been talked about before, but Yuri Gagarin's high ride made it all seem sure and possible. As the first man in space, his own contribution had been no more than his own survival, but the world to which he returned would never be the same again.

Kind Russian Eyes. The Soviet system has minimized personal publicity in the space field, but last week every segment of the state united to make Gagarin's achievement a personal triumph--ironically surrounding it with bourgeois trappings. Petitions were drawn up to rename a Moscow square after the cosmonaut. A glacier was given his name. An already prepared issue of a commemorative stamp began to roll off the presses. Reporters worked overtime to introduce him to his countrymen. One ebullient newsman described him as having "a kind Russian face, with eyes well separated." Another, who interviewed Gagarin soon after landing, seemed so dazzled by the new national hero that he wrote: "His eyes were shining as though still reflecting spatial starlight." A nationwide hookup broadcast a telephone conversation between "Gaga," as the Soviet public promptly nicknamed him, and Premier Khrushchev, who was vacationing on the Black Sea.

Khrushchev: How did you feel?

Gaga: I felt fine. The flight was very successful. All the apparatus of the cosmic ship functioned properly. During the flight I saw the earth from a great height. I could see the seas, the mountains, big cities, rivers and forests.

K.: So you felt all right?

G.: You are quite right, Nikita Sergeevich. I felt fine on the flight. Just like at home.

K.: You have made yourself immortal because you are the first man to penetrate into space.

G.: Now let the other countries try to catch us.

K.: That's right. Let the capitalist countries try to catch up with our country, which has blazed the trail into space and launched the world's first cosmonaut.

Eagle Scout. After all that, it was no surprise that Major Gagarin's authorized biography read as if it had been manufactured to fit the occasion. What was released to a curious world was a wordperfect picture of the "new Soviet man" --it might well have described a U.S. Eagle Scout from Iowa. Yuri was born on a collective farm near the small town of Gzhatsk, 100 miles west of Moscow. The young boy shone in the local school, and after completing the sixth grade, he was sent to manual training school in a Moscow suburb. He graduated as a molder, but never worked at this skilled trade; his record was good enough to get him into an "industrial technicum" (a sort of technical junior college) at Saratov on the Volga. While there, he learned to fly at the Saratov Aero Club and was admitted to the Soviet air force's cadet academy at Orenburg. He graduated with top honors in 1957 and married a pretty medical graduate, Valentina Ivanovna. They have two children, both girls: Elena, 2, and Galya, one month. It was all so pat and proper and bourgeois that White Russian refugees from South America to Tyrone, Pa., recalling that Gagarin was the name of a princely family, felt free to claim Yuri as one of their own. But the suggestion that he was really a descendant of Russian nobility never quite rang true.

Reporters, trying to put some flesh on the bare bones of official handouts, interviewed Valentina Gagarina in her two-room-and-kitchen apartment near Moscow. The place was bulging with excited neighbors, and as the newsmen arrived, word came over the radio that Valentina's husband felt fine. She turned off the radio and wiped away her tears, while her older daughter nibbled stolidly on an apple. Valentina explained that the whole affair was news to her; she had not even known her husband was a major until she heard it on the radio. She had known, she said, that he was engaged in important work, but not that he was about to blast off into space. "He was afraid to upset me because I was an expectant mother."

There were no such secrets now. Whenever she turned on her radio, Valentina Gagarina could hear her husband's voice, or glowing reports about his achievement. The newspapers, which were on the streets with special editions, were full of him, too. Over and over they printed his story: the first eyewitness report from outer space.

Blue Band. "From the spaceship," said Gaga, "I could not see as well as from an airplane, but still I could see very well. I saw with my own eyes the spherical shape of the earth. I must say that the view of the horizon is unusual and very beautiful. I could see the unusual transition from the light surface of the earth to the blackness of the sky. There is a very narrow band that makes the transition. This band is a delicate blue color."

Asked about his first feelings on touching the earth again, he replied: "It is difficult to say in words all the feelings that took hold of me when I stepped on our Soviet land. First of all, I was glad because I had successfully fulfilled my task. In general, all my feelings can be expressed by one word: joy. When I was going down, I sang the song, The Motherland Hears, the Motherland Knows."

Gagarin said that weightlessness in orbit makes everything easier to do. "One's legs and arms weigh nothing. Objects float in the cabin. I did not sit in my chair as before, but hung in midair. While in the state of weightlessness, I ate and drank, and everything occurred just as it does on earth. I even worked in that condition. I wrote, jotting down my observations. My handwriting did not change, although the hand did not weigh anything, but I had to hold the notebook. Otherwise it would have floated away. I maintained communications over different channels and tapped the telegraph key."

"I did not see the moon," he reported. "The sun in outer space is tens of times brighter than here on earth. The stars are easily visible. They are bright and distinct. The entire picture of the firmament has much more contrast than when seen from the earth." The sunlit side of the earth, he said, was quite plain, and he could easily see the shores of continents, islands, big rivers, folds in the terrain, large bodies of water. When passing over the Soviet Union, he spotted the great squares of collective farms. He could even tell cultivated land from pasture.

None of this was surprising to space scientists. Everything the first cosmonaut reported had been suggested earlier by the instruments of unmanned satellites or by earthbound theory. The narrow blue band that Gagarin saw was the familiar color of the clear sky--the blue component of sunlight that the atmosphere scatters upward into space as well as toward earth. Still, all such details held a fresh fascination: they were part of a firsthand observation, an eyewitness confirmation. They belonged to a tale told by an adventurer into the unknown, and if they added little to man's knowledge, they glowed nonetheless with bright authenticity. Gaga had been there.

Smooth Landing. At the end of the first jubilant day, Gagarin was still at an unspecified base, undergoing a careful physical examination and presumably being questioned by experts. But whatever the Soviet space experts learned, they added little to Gaga's own story. They published only the bare statistics of the flight: it lasted 108 minutes, of which 89 minutes were actually spent in orbit; the rest was climbing to orbit and descent to the earth. Academician Evgeny Fedorov, one of the big brains of the Soviet space program, spoke briefly about the descent. It was accomplished with retrorockets, which slowed the Vostok and brought it down into a "braking zone" of gradually thickening air. There the ship was heated by friction and suffered tremendous strain, but the braking effect was distributed over thousands of miles of flight. "At the height of several tens of kilometers [one kilometer--.62 miles] above the earth." said Fedorov, "the spaceship's speed is reduced to a few hundred meters [one meter--1.094 yards] per second. With a shriek, it cleaves the air, rushing toward its preselected landing place. Parachutes open and the speed is reduced to a few meters per second."

Fedorov's account suggested that the cosmonaut landed inside his space capsule, but according to other sources in Russia, Major Gagarin parachuted out of the capsule before it hit the ground. Space Scientist Nikolai Gurovsky said: "The cosmonaut came down smoothly in a glade near a field. Landing on his feet, without even tumbling, he walked up to the people who saw him."

Rash Risk? Although only stubborn skeptics expressed doubt that the flight had been made at all, with every report more contradictions came to light. And when newsmen checked back over the preflight publicity, more curious items turned up. For days, Moscow had been flooded with rumors about an imminent attempt at space flight. Before the Vostok flight, the Moscow correspondent for the London Daily Worker cabled his paper that the cosmonaut son of a famous Soviet airplane designer had orbited the earth three times and landed with serious injuries. The London Daily Sketch identified him as Gennady Mikhailov. Soviet authorities promptly denied both reports. But the rumors continued, and the papers stuck to their stories.

By the time Gagarin's flight was announced, the Soviet public was primed. Tension was increased enormously by the apparently reckless daring of passing the word while the Vostok was still in orbit.

The descent to earth, the most difficult and dangerous part of the flight, was still ahead. A last-minute failure might have left Gagarin in orbit to die a slow and lonely death, or fried him in the atmosphere. Earlier Soviet tune-up flights had suffered similar fates.

Had the Soviets really risked their space prestige so rashly? Most foreign observers felt sure that they had not. It seemed probable that Major Gagarin had arced into orbit and returned safely before anything was reported. There were also other minor mysteries about the Vostok's flight. According to the Russian official account, he checked in over South America only 15 minutes after the Vostok was launched. Yet South America is more than half an orbit away from the probable launching. At a space conference in Florence, Italy, Academician Anatoly Blagonravov, 66, a former Czarist artillery expert who often acts as a Russian space spokesman, was asked how Gagarin did his sightseeing from the Vostok. He replied that Gagarin looked out "by radio." This suggestion that the Vostok had no portholes only brought smiles from U.S. space experts, who pointed out that even the U.S. Mercury capsule has tough, heat-resistant portholes.

Upper Crust. Such problems did not seem to bother official Russia a bit. These days, whenever a rocket blasts off its pad, the flight is almost always as much a propaganda maneuver as it is a scientific adventure. But this time even the poorly organized and obviously inaccurate propaganda could do little damage to the towering scientific feat. Just two days after his trip, Yuri Gagarin got a hero's reception in Moscow. Red Square, the city's ceremonial center, was decked out in festive dress. Banners fluttered from tall silver flagpoles; streetcars, buses, autos, lampposts and buildings were draped with bunting. Portraits of the cosmonaut were spotted all over the city, and bookstalls were already peddling his biography. Crowd barriers were in place and honor guards lined the 20-mile route to Vnukovo Airport.

Gagarin arrived in a turboprop airliner escorted by a swarm of jet fighters. Along with his parents and Wife Valentina, the entire upper crust of the Soviet hierarchy was on hand to greet him. The nuzzling, the bear hug and the long kiss he got from Premier Khrushchev seemed even more active than Valentina's warm embrace. Other dignitaries greeted the cosmonaut in their turn. Then, in a column of flower-decked cars, the official party drove slowly toward Red Square and a 20-gun salute from Red artillerymen.

Standing atop the Lenin-Stalin tomb, the most sacred spot in Communist Moscow, Gagarin was greeted by the Presidium, the powerful ruling body of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev made a long speech comparing him to Columbus, naming him a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarding him the brand-new title of First Hero Cosmonaut. The new major, neat in his grey and blue uniform, spoke with admirable poise, the party line rolling easily off his tongue. He thanked the party, the government and Premier Khrushchev for trusting him, a simple Soviet pilot, with the first flight to outer space. "While in outer space," he said, "I was thinking about our party and about our homeland."*

Next day, the stories began to take on an added polish. Russian papers published reports that Gagarin had slept like a baby the night before his flight, that he had climbed into the Vostok as calmly as if he were taking off on a fishing trip. At a press conference in Moscow's green and white House of Sciences, Gagarin and a group of scientists, including Aleksandr N. Nesmeyanov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (TIME cover, June 2, 1958), added little new information, but they rehashed the flight with unflagging enthusiasm. And they promised to release more scientific data soon. Told that U.S. newsmen had suggested he came from a princely family, Gagarin cracked: "I express my regret, but I have to disappoint them."

Sophisticated Circuit. The U.S., which had long since conceded Russia this impressive victory in space, was embarrassed just the same. And the U.S. Mercury Project, still straining to perfect a rocket system capable of lofting a man into a short trajectory far less impressive than the Vostok's sophisticated circuit of the earth, seemed especially belittled.

For several weeks, signs that the Russians were about to try something big had been recognized and reported. The U.S. Navy spotted Soviet tracking ships in the Pacific; Soviet trawlers, perhaps radio-relay ships, were in the South Atlantic. Rumors circulating through the U.S.S.R. reached Washington promptly. Most of them were discounted, but one day before the shot, U.S. intelligence sent an urgent alert. Although the Vostok was launched at 1:07 a.m. Washington time, and the first Russian radio announcement was delayed until 2 a.m., it was only 1:30 a.m. when the Pentagon told Presidential Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner that a big Russian bird was aloft.

"Let's Go." As Washington awoke to its propaganda defeat, the proper people said the proper things. President Kennedy congratulated the Russians. So did James Webb, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But behind the cheerful and gracious phrases were frustration, shame, sometimes fury.U.S. spacemen had been beaten again.

At Cape Canaveral, U.S. astronauts were still waiting their chance to ride a Mercury capsule down the Atlantic missile range. But now even this little experiment seemed empty and futile. Mercury men were hard put to conceal their discouragement. They had all been working with desperate intensity; some were groggy with fatigue; and they felt that their country was not behind them. "We could have got a man up there," cried one of them angrily. "We could have done it a month ago if somebody at the top two years ago had just simply decided to push it." Said another: "All of us were longing for someone to say 'O.K., boys, let's go.' We were prevented from winning by high-level decisions. If Columbus' Santa Maria had been handled that way, she would never have left the harbor."

These bitter men were only partly right. U.S. defeats in space go back a long way to a few top-level decisions. Perhaps the most serious U.S. handicap is lack of a big and reliable Stage 1 rocket booster. The Russians have boosters with more than 800,000 Ibs. of thrust. They developed them because they thought that they would need them to loft heavy nuclear warheads across the world's oceans.

The U.S. has weaker boosters only because its nuclear physicists decided correctly that they could build comparatively light nuclear warheads that would not need giant rockets to carry them to their targets.

From the lack of a big booster have flowed many familiar U.S. troubles. Everything that the U.S. fires into space, including the man-carrying Mercury capsule, must be built as light as possible. Structure and equipment are inevitably delicate, pushed to the peak of performance. The Russians have plenty of payload to play with. They can use rugged, dependable and comparatively heavy parts. Their spacecraft can afford the luxury of parallel electronic circuits, one ready to take over if the other fails. Many of the Russian achievements in space, including their accurate control systems, can be explained by the weight-lifting muscles of their big boosters.

Star in the West. Still, many U.S. spacemen are growing weary of this pat excuse. They prefer to blame a longstanding failure of U.S. imagination. While he was still in Germany in the early 19405, Rocket Expert Wernher von Braun realized the possibility of producing satellites and saw plainly that they would have enormous propaganda value. When he came to the U.S. in 1945, he pleaded for "an American star, rising in the west" to impress the world. U.S. space enthusiasts took up his cry, but the U.S. Government was slow to give support.

The Russians recognized the great opportunity, used their big booster rockets to score their long series of propaganda triumphs in space. Now it is increasingly difficult for the U.S. to catch up. But despite its defeats, the U.S. can and will continue to do sound scientific research in space. It has been doing this for years, learning more with small, numerous and deftly instrumented spacecraft than the Russians have with their monsters. Such work impresses scientists, and adds immeasurably to the world's store of knowledge, but the great world public probably could not care less about such discoveries as the energy of cosmic rays or the number of electrons in space. Only a spectacular and extremely difficult bit of rocketeering, say a manned trip around the moon, will top Russian spacemen in the eyes of the world.

Instruments v. Men. Aside from its tremendous value as propaganda, the latest Soviet shot accomplished little. During his trip around the earth, Major Gagarin apparently saw nothing of scientific interest, and reported less than his weight in instruments would have reported. He did not even exercise control over the Vostok; all button pushing was done from the ground.

But this was no less than most scientists, including Russians, expected of him. The scientific consensus is that during the early stages of space exploration, instruments will be better explorers than heavy, vulnerable humans, who require tons of supplies and equipment to keep them alive. Instruments are smaller, lighter and tougher than men. They can stand acceleration, shock, vibration, spinning, heat, cold and radiation. Best of all, they do not demand to be brought home alive. They transmit to earth all the information that they have gathered in space: then they die as streaks of fire without reproach or protest. Or they land on the moon or Mars and stay there, reporting faithfully until their radios fade.

For a long time, human space travelers may be relatively useless cargo. But scientists whose imaginations run beyond the immediate future do not scoff at men in space. There will come a time, the scientists believe, when men will be needed because of the human capability for judgment and improvisation. A collection of instruments landed on the moon can do only the specific jobs for which it is designed. It can look around with TV eyes, scan the close and forbidding horizon, feel the ground for moonquakes, perhaps examine pinches of moon dust for chemical content. It can do almost anything that its designers want it to do--except the most important thing of all: react intelligently to unexpected situations.

No collection of instruments, for example, could be expected to show interest in a book with platinum leaves inscribed in an unknown language and left by an unknown race in a lunar crevice one million years ago. The moon is unlikely to have such objects on it, but it may hide things that are just as startling. Mars should be even richer in surprises. It may shelter subtle kinds of life, or relics of life, that no instrument would appreciate. Voyages to Mars will always be unsatisfactory until men report what they see there.

Human Triumph. Even if the deadly Russian-American rivalry that now supports most space research should die out, men will surely continue their struggle to escape from their own globe. For in the end, space victories do not belong to any particular nation. They are achievements of the science and technology of the human species, the result of man's urge to explore the unknown.

When the Vostok circled the earth, it got its impetus not from Russian science alone. Built into its structure were Brit ish, German, American, French, even Chinese and ancient Egyptian ideas. Russian scientists have often said as much, and they did so again last week. Said an official Soviet Government and Communist Party announcement: "We regard these victories in the conquest of outer space not only as the achievement of our people but as an achievement of all mankind." However chagrined U.S. scientists felt last week, they also partook of the Russian triumph.

Most scientists around the world think that Major Gagarin and the good ship Vostok have opened a door that will never entirely close. Space exploration may slow down for a while or stop, but the human species is young, and it is the bumptious master of a fruitful planet. More men will always yearn to travel in Major Gagarin's wake, to see the blue band around the curve of the earth. Eventually, perhaps 10, 100, or 1,000 years from now, a great spaceship will carry men far out in the solar system. They will learn whether the moon and the planets have value as real estate. They may tinker with the offensive atmosphere of Venus, perhaps making it suitable for human breathing. They may develop human subtypes that will enjoy Venus as it is. They may learn to live in space itself, cruising the solar system in artificial, mobile planets. Human civilization is only 7,000 years old, and countless years lie ahead. But wherever future adventurers travel, whatever they find in the black, cold reaches of space, they will always remember the pair that preceded them--the Vostok and Major Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin.

* The ceremonies were shown live on European TV by the Eurovision network. Showings in the U.S. were from tape flown across the Atlantic by jet.

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