Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (11 page)

So there’s a pang as I see the
lunar horizon slip past the portholes before I’m all that far away. But we
might need the thrusters to get home. Ordinarily they’re only for small
movements—rotations about the spacecraft’s various axes. And in those
instances, of course, the ones on opposite sides of the craft fire in opposite
directions to impart some spin—which has to happen in reentry, for instance.
But we can use them for translations, firing the opposing ones in the same
direction. And if we fire them for long enough, we might be able to correct
enough of our velocity error so as to make it home safely.

“Dawn-2, come in. Dawn-2, this is
Cedar, come in.”

“Cedar, this is Dawn-2.”
Komarov’s voice.

“Old man Komarov!” He’s only
seven years older than me, but that put him at the upper end of our cosmonaut
class. He’s a veteran of Sunrise-1, a sharp engineer, talented and smart. (As I
mentioned earlier, he was supposed to fly on the first Union this year. But the
craft wasn’t ready, and I helped delay that flight. I suppose I’d be bitter in
his place, but if he’s upset, he hasn’t mentioned it.) “What happened to
Blondie? I thought he’d be coming back on.”

“They ordered him off the console
to get some rest, Yuri.”

“Very well.” I miss Blondie, but
I’m glad they’re making him take a break. We all have a tendency to drive
ourselves too hard in this line of work, to get by with few breaks until we
ourselves are at the breaking point. (Surely that, too, is part of being a real
man.) So when you make someone like Blondie take a break, you are actually
doing him a favor, because he won’t let himself have one otherwise.

“What can we help you with,
Cedar?”

“Dawn-2, I want to know if
there’s a plan to use the thrusters for the midcourse correction.”

“I’m glad you mentioned that,
Cedar. We were discussing that while you were having your fun.”

I chuckle. “Were you going to
tell me?”

He laughs. “Everything in its
proper time, Yura.”

Now I laugh a little. My spirits
are good. They will figure out how to get me home. I’m looking forward to
seeing my friends, looking forward to the parties and the fun—getting drunk,
perhaps, yes, but more than that, the comradeship. And surely they will marvel
at the photos I’ve taken; they will be amazed to see the earth as I have seen
it, as it truly is, a precious sparkling gemstone against a dead backdrop of
black and white and gray and tan.

Komarov comes back on: “In all
seriousness, the ballistics center has been monitoring your trajectory to see
how the moon’s mass concentrations may have affected it. But once that’s in
hand and they’ve run the numbers, we should be able to do a series of thruster
firings tomorrow. In the meantime, have some dinner and get some sleep.”

“Will do, my friend.”

•••

Mathematically, every orbital
path can be described as a section of a cone.

Say, for instance, you have a
simple cone pointing downwards. If you slice it horizontally, you have a
circle. (Slice further up or down the cone, and you will of course have circles
of different sizes.)

If you slice at an angle, you’ll
have an ellipse, provided your slice passes through the central vertical axis
of the cone, and at an angle less than the side of the cone. The ellipse may be
extremely elongated, but it will be a closed loop; it will begin and end in the
same spot. The small end of the cone is like the body you’re orbiting; the
orbital path will be fast and quick in that tight section, and slow and lazy in
the farther reaches. (This is what we’re doing with our Molinya satellites, for
instance. Since the Soviet Union is north of the equator, we can’t have
satellites in a geosynchronous orbit over our territory—because the orbits must
be inclined, they will move north and south even if their orbital period is exactly
one day, and if they are south, they will be below the horizon and therefore
useless. But the Molinya satellites are in elliptical orbits. During the long
slow period, they are over our territory, and capable of transmitting for long
portions of the workday. And then they zip around while the sun is down and
take their place again the next day.)

Now say you take a slice of the
cone that doesn’t pass through the central vertical axis. Since the cone is
open-ended, the slice will be open-ended. A hyperbola.

My path to and from the moon is
constructed, mathematically speaking, of these various slices. Circles and
sections of circles, and ellipses and sections thereof, and the same with
hyperbolas. You start out with an orbit that’s circular, or perhaps slightly
elliptical. Then second cosmic velocity puts you on a hyperbola, an open-ended
path that will never come back to earth. Except it passes close enough to the
moon that the moon slings you around, again on another hyperbola. And this, in
turn, must intersect earth’s path—all while the earth is moving around the sun
and the moon is moving around the earth.

If it intersects earth’s path at
a proper angle, then, fine, you will reenter. But if it doesn’t, you will be in
trouble. You will perhaps be in an extremely elliptical orbit. And your orbit
will only decay if the tighter faster end of the ellipse passes through the
upper reaches of the atmosphere. If not, you might be up there for months or
years. Decades, even. Or if you’re far enough from earth’s path on the return,
you will perhaps be on yet another hyperbolic path. Open-ended. Going God knows
where.

My path should have been a
free-return trajectory as soon as we left earth orbit, before we discarded the
Block-D stage. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t. They were wrong in measuring
my telemetry, perhaps. And the S5.53 can’t get me back on course. But we can
fix it with the thrusters. I am confident. We will nudge the end of the
hyperbola back into place.

•••

In the morning I eat, floating free,
staring out at the heavens. It is still strange and disorienting to stargaze at
breakfast. Since we are not in shadow, I cannot see many of them, but there are
a few. How many of them have planets, little earths of their own? How many of
those planets have sent voyagers into the cosmos? For all I have seen and done
and learned, I will never know the answer.

As for the planets I do know
about, I can see Mars and Jupiter, but Venus is lost in the sun’s glare. We may
visit these in my lifetime, but I’m less optimistic now that Sergei Pavlovich
is gone. As for whether or not we’ll find life there, who can say?

I feel melancholy, knowing I’ll
be an observer at best for all of that, knowing that one way or another, I’ve
reached my limits, and the best I can hope for is to come humbly home.

I did not sleep terribly well. I
am eager to get back to Valya and the children, to eat a real meal, to sleep in
my own bed. I believe it will happen, but only if we work hard.

Komarov is on the console again.
We chat briefly. I miss Blondie, but old man Komarov is a good man, too. I know
he will do all he can.

I type in the commands for the
solar alignment. We are going to do a 10-second burn and allow the ballistics
center to compute our revised trajectory. We will then have to do additional
burns until we’re back on track.

When the timer counts down, I
press the button and there is a gentle reassuring push from the thrusters.

“Very good, Yura,” Komarov says.

We cut the thrusters at the
appointed time.

After some minutes, the
ballistics center has done their work. They have run the numbers through their
giant computers and determined that I need an additional 30 meters per second
of delta-v to get back on target for the reentry corridor. We will be tight on
the propellant, but we should be able to do that. The second correction is
scheduled for after lunch.

My mealtime goes by rather
peacefully. It occurs to me that I will miss these quiet times, this solitude.
If past experience is any guide, I will not have any time to myself for some
while. More press conferences and tours and foreign trips to tropical lands:
perhaps they will at least be more forgiving in their scheduling this time.

After everything is cleaned up, I
strap myself back in. It is time to do another solar alignment. We always want
to make sure we’re properly oriented before a course correction, especially
since the stellar alignment isn’t working and our orientations are less precise
and we burned up so much propellant already. I page through the binder and punch
in the commands. As usual, the craft swings about.

But this time it keeps moving.

The sun slices lazily past the
porthole, and then the moon, receding but still large, and then the distant
earth, and then I see the sun coming around again.

In my heart there is a pang. I
take a deep breath. “Solar alignment has failed. Solar alignment has failed,” I
transmit. I look at the instrument panel briefly, but it only confirms what I
already know. “We are tumbling at a rate of approximately 30 degrees per second.”

The delayed response: “Cedar, we
understand,” Komarov says. “30 degrees per second.”

And now the sun and moon move and
earth are moving faster. “Dawn-2, my rate of yaw is increasing. We might have a
stuck thruster. Switching to manual controls.”

“Understood, Cedar.”

I key in the commands to turn the
spacecraft back over to manual control and I manipulate the thrusters. It is a
yawing motion; the spacecraft is spinning like a skidding car.

I apply thrusters in the
direction opposite the rotation and it slows. I bring the earth into view. But
when I take my hands off the controls, I see it moving again.

“Dawn-2, the thruster is still
stuck.”

Again I start working the
controls. By applying full opposite thruster, I am able to arrest the motion,
but I can only bring it back to a stop. I cannot move back in the opposite
direction. This tells me the thruster is still stuck and still firing, and when
we are stopped, it is only because both yaw thrusters are firing in the
opposite direction, counteracting one another. Which also means we’re wasting
fuel.

“Cedar, understand you are still
rotating about the Y-axis.”

I am in a bind. This needs to be
stopped. And I cannot keep doing what I have been doing, because it isn’t
working.

Finally I move my hand controller
with
the direction of rotation and then back. And somehow this works,
and the rotation stops. “Dawn-2, we have stopped rotating.”

Of course, we are still back
where we were before we attempted the solar alignment: we still need to do an
alignment before we can fire the thrusters, and we still need to fire the
thrusters to get home.

I am waiting for an answer. I try
again: “Dawn-2, this is Cedar. Rotation is stopped. How do you wish to
proceed?”

“Cedar, we will try the solar alignment
once more using the backup thrusters.”

Again I key in the commands.
Again the spacecraft keeps rotating. This time I grab for the controllers
quickly to arrest the motion.

“Solar alignment has failed.
Solar alignment has failed.” I take a few deep breaths.

There is a period of deliberation
down below. Bruised egos battling intellectually in the measured way we have
described to keep human passions to a minimum. A competition of sorts, but with
strict rules. Almost like a fencing match. All arguments and voices carefully
kept in check. And I know that at the end, when all the points are tallied up
and graded, they are going to give me their best advice.

At last, I get it: “Yura, we
believe it is a short in the controllers. We are going to deactivate the yaw
thrusters. We will read up the coordinates and see if you can align manually
using the other thrusters. Then we will isolate and fire the pitch thrusters
only in translation mode. This should help us avoid further rotation.”

“Understood, Dawn-2.”

“Your peroxide levels are low. We
do not want to waste fuel on further alignments. We are going to have you fire
the thrusters until exhaustion. We believe this will still get you in the upper
limit of the reentry corridor.”

Everything is, as the Americans
say, up in the air. Beyond up in the air, even. Komarov and the control center
are projecting a certain optimism, but they’re also refusing to make firm
predictions. And I understand. We are beyond the outer limits of what anyone
thought possible, so there is no use asking for certainty or even probability.

They read up the new procedure
and I copy everything down in my logbook. I wonder in passing: are the
Americans and the British still listening? Surely this will be of interest to
them. Will they tell the world about my troubles before we do?

“It’s a good thing this is all
just a communications exercise,” I joke.

A delay. Then: “Repeat your last,
Yura.” Komarov is slow in both ways today.

“Dawn-2, I said it’s a good thing
this is all a communications exercise, and not a real mission. Otherwise I
would really be in trouble.”

The situation is too serious for
laughter but Komarov does at least chuckle. “Indeed, Yura.”

Once the yaw thrusters have been
deactivated I rotate the craft to get the sun in the alignment telescope
crosshairs. Then I translate along the rotational coordinates they have
provided, keeping a careful eye on my instruments.

“Good luck, Yura,” Komarov says.

“Go to hell, old man.”

I fire the thrusters. Feel the
spacecraft’s gentle push. I watch the counters turn. Far too soon, they stop.

•••

I have talked about disasters,
but I’ve only hinted at my own.

If I’m speaking more truthfully
about my past, I should at least talk about my time in the whirlwind, the
strangeness and dislocation I felt when everything was out of my control.

Flashbulbs, motorcades,
flashbulbs, microphones. There were moments, like the ones I’ve already
described in Moscow and Manchester and London, where I feel like I handled
everything very well indeed. And again, on the whole, I’m proud of my conduct.