Still Gaga

Still riding high in the Vostok's astral wake, Soviet scientists last week filled a few more gaps in the official description of Space Traveler Yuri Gagarin's 89-minute trip around the world.

To guard against temporary failure of landing controls, the Vostok was crammed with enough food and water for a ten-day whirl. For low-altitude emergencies, there were two escape hatches and an ejector seat equipped with a parachute, emergency rations, an oxygen supply and a radio transmitter. As he spun past the stars, Yuri could study his surroundings through three heat-resistant portholes. Even if he spotted no landmarks 188 miles below, he could get his bearings by watching an "optical orientator"--a cockpit globe synchronized to turn with the 18,000-mile-an-hour flight of the orbiting spaceship.

Did Yuri actually make the flight? U.S. certainty that he had come by his honors honestly was based on a strategic network of listening posts capable of tuning in on the actual countdown, long-range radar tracking stations that plotted the orbit of the satellite and could even estimate its size and weight, electronic eavesdropping that may have overheard Yuri's radio reports to earth, and, finally, traditional cloak-and-dagger espionage inside the Soviet Union.

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