Yuri's Flaming Descent

To the crew of an orbiting spaceship, the earth below may seem a multicolored haven--distant blue oceans and brown-and-green continents flecked with white clouds. But well-trained astronauts will know that a dangerous ordeal--a flaming return through the atmosphere--stands between them and home. Only one man, Major Yuri Gagarin of the U.S.S.R., has made such a descent. Last week in Pravda he described the long dive.

At 10:15 a.m. Moscow time, said Gagarin, he was over Africa, and the spaceship's automatic controls signaled that back in Russia preparations were being made to turn on a braking device, presumably a retrorocket. "This meant," he reported, "that the final stage of the flight had begun--the return to earth, which was perhaps more crucial than ascent into orbit and orbiting itself. I readied myself for it. I faced transition from a condition of weightlessness to new and perhaps even greater overloads. I also faced tremendous heating of the ship's outer surface on entering the denser layers of the atmosphere. I remembered the mishap of Cosmic Ship III, which on Dec. 1, 1960, burned up with its cargo of two dogs. The fate of Pchelka and Mushka had a bitterish taste. Would all systems work normally? Did some unforeseen peril await me?

"Automation is automation," brooded Gagarin as the critical moment approached, "but I had determined the ship's position and was ready to take control with my own hands. But at 10:25 the braking device was turned on by remote control, and it worked perfectly. The Vostok began to lose speed, and shifted from its orbit into a transitional ellipse. Then it began to enter dense layers of the atmosphere. Its outer surface heated rapidly, and through the curtains that covered the portholes I saw the lurid crimson glow of the flames that raged around the ship. I was in a ball of fire plunging downwards, but inside the cabin the temperature was only 20DEG C. (68DEG F.).

"Weightlessness had long ceased, and the mounting overload pinned me to my seat. It kept increasing and was greater than during takeoff. The ship started to spin, and I informed the ground of this. But the spinning, which worried me, soon stopped, and the rest of the descent went normally. All the equipment had worked splendidly, and the ship was headed precisely for the selected landing area. At 10:55 the Vostok, having circled the globe, landed safely in a fallow plowed field of the collective farm, Lenin's Way, southwest of the city of Engels not far from the village of Smelovka."

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