1961 – Breaking Free
Humans must have dreamt of flight for centuries, but to go into space, to the moon, is possibly a more recent aspiration, given it depends on the realisation, or at least the confident belief, that the moon is an object, not a mysterious source of light. Even so, early science fiction was quick to make use of the idea of activity in space. Lucian is credited with writing one of the earliest science fiction novels in 79 AD, with humans observing a war between aliens on the Moon and on the Sun, and travel to the moon by a sailing ship lifted on a waterspout. Centuries later Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy included the discovery the Moon is the First Sphere of Heaven, inhabited by souls who abandoned their vows and so were ‘deficient in the virtue of fortitude’. A place for aliens or deficient souls: not an auspicious place to visit. No matter, soon after Dante’s allegorical approach, travels to the moon became popular in fiction and non-fiction.
Part of that had to do with the possibility of life on the Moon, especially yet confoundingly associated with the enduring image of the ‘Man on the Moon’. How did this face on the moon figure in human imagination? Some European traditions suggest a man was banished to the Moon for a crime. Christian lore tells he is the man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and sentenced by God to death by stoning, (as set out in Numbers, XV. 32–36). There’s a Roman legend that he was a sheep-thief. An excellent article on this subject summarises similar stories from cultures around the world. [i] Even my hard-nosed science teacher father would take me out in the garden, set his telescope on the Moon and ask me if I could see the face!
As for fiction classics, it’s hard to choose. I enjoyed a Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Galoshes of Fortune. With a title like that, who wouldn’t. Written in 1838, magic comes from a pair of boots which grant wishes to the wearer. A worker puts them on without knowing their power, and ends up on the moon, meeting moon men. This saga ends when the man’s body is taken to a hospital: his boots are removed, breaking the spell and consigning his adventure to a bad dream! 27 years later, Jules Verne, teller of amazing tales, published From the Earth to the Moon. A Florida gun club develops a cannon capable of shooting a group of people into space. They land on the Moon and meet the locals, a kind of weird anticipation of NASA moon shots from Florida more than 100 years later. Two of my other favourites date from the 20th Century. In 1901, H G Wells published The First Men in the Moon. In this adventure, people are captured by lunar visitors, and taken to the Moon, from where all but one eventually escape. However, the most enjoyable of all came in comic strip form, with Hergé’s classic Tintin story, Explorers on the Moon. Written in 1954, this is close to realistic, with the Moon dry, dusty and pitted with asteroid craters, the astronauts wearing space suits with amazing goldfish bowl helmets. It’s claimed Hergé chose the helmet design to ensure you know who was who in the story panels.
A little later, accounts became more serious. Wernher von Braun wrote a series of articles for Colliers, with Chesley Bonestell, on the theme Man Will Conquer Space Soon! Prophetic and at the same time a great promotion of the work for which von Braun was seeking support. He kept going, polishing his vision in a 1955 Disney production, Man and the Moon, a film described as a ‘docufiction’. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s haunting 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, a film memorable for the ‘intelligent’ computer, Hal. It contains a lengthy moon landing scene, a realistic sequence developed in collaboration with scientist and SF writer Arthur C Clarke.
Books, films and speculation, all of that was turned aside in 1957, when the Space Race began between the Soviet Union and the United States, then the two Cold War superpowers. The race’s starting gun was the Russian launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, beeping as it circled the earth, a beep that would remain stuck in the minds of millions! Sputnik 1 orbited for three weeks before its batteries died and then continued silently for another two months before it fell back into the atmosphere. It was a polished metal sphere, just 23 inches in diameter, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable, as radio amateurs discovered, and in those first three weeks its orbit covered virtually the entire inhabited Earth. Yes, I was one of those millions, entranced by that beep, and waiting for more!
I have no idea whether or not Russia viewed Sputnik 1 as a key item for Soviet propaganda. What I do know is was only a short time before Russia was promoting this example of their leading edge technology. More to the point, the launch amazed the Americans. Surely the US led the world in technology, and Russia was a scientific backwater? It got worse. The Soviet Union launched a second satellite, Sputnik 2, on 3 November 1957, and it was another month later that the much anticipated launch of America’s first rocket was announced – which failed!
The back story is fascinating. [ii] Since the 1930s, Germany had been experimenting with liquid fuel rockets. That work had led, by 1943, to the mass-production of the V2 (“Vengeance Weapon” 2), a ballistic missile with a 200 mile range, flying at some 2,500 miles per hour. This was the rocket that began to fall on London in late 1944, and, unlike its predecessor, the V1, which could be seen and heard before it fell, this one appeared from nowhere. The rocket had been developed by an army team under Lieutenant Karl Becker, and, critically for the future, the team recruited Wernher Von Braun as a promising young engineer. At the war’s end, American, British, and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture Germany’s rocket engineers along with several German rockets themselves, and the designs on which they were based. Each of the Allies captured a share of the members of the German rocket team, but the United States was to benefit the most, as they recruited von Braun and most of his engineering group.
By 1947, the Cold War had begun between the USA and the USSR, an expression of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism. America became anxious when, in September 1949, it discovered that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb. The US might soon face a nuclear war; the arms race was under way. Quickly, this led to developing a hydrogen bomb, along with long range bombers to drop nuclear bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of delivering nuclear weapons. US concerns were paralleled in Russia, which feared invasion from the West. As early as 1947 Stalin had ordered the development of Russian ICBMs to counter the threat they saw coming from the US.
Rocketry was central to this, and it was Russia that first developed a new rocket. While some of its components (notably boosters) still resembled the V2, the new rocket incorporated a staged design, a completely new control system, and a new fuel. It was successfully tested in August, 1957, the world’s first fully operational ICBM. Over the same time period, the United States had set up multiple rocket programs divided among the different branches of the American armed services, with each developing its own ICBM program. The Air Force began research in 1945, but the early program was cancelled. In 1950, von Braun began testing the Redstone rocket and the following year, the Air Force began another program, Atlas, which, after its maiden launch in 1957, became the first successful American ICBM. Von Braun’s V2 had been prolific, the parent of R7 in the USSR, and Vanguard, Redstone and Atlas in the USA.
While warfare was a driver, both sides wanted to win the space race – the first to put a human in space, and the first to land a man on the moon. By 1955, both the United States and the Soviet Union had built ballistic missiles that could be utilized to launch objects into space. In separate announcements four days apart, both nations publicly announced that they would launch artificial Earth satellites by 1957, or 1958 at the latest.
Inevitably, the race was marked by confusions and misunderstandings. President Eisenhower was worried that a satellite passing above a nation at a height of over 62 miles might be seen as violating that nation’s sovereign airspace. He also feared that he might cause an international incident and be called a “warmonger” if he were using military missiles as launchers Given this, he selected the as yet untried Vanguard rocket, a research-only booster, and von Braun’s team was not allowed to put a satellite into orbit with their Jupiter-C rocket, as it was intended for use as a future military vehicle. Frustrating for the team, as they had launched a Jupiter-C capable of putting a satellite into orbit, but this was only a test of suborbital reentry capability.
Over in Russia, team leader Sergei Korolev heard about von Braun’s 1956 Jupiter-C test and, mistakenly thinking it was a satellite mission that failed, expedited plans to get his own satellite in orbit. Rumours suggested the US was planning to announce a major breakthrough at an International Geophysical Year conference in Washington on 6 October. Korolev thought von Braun might launch a Jupiter-C with a satellite payload on or around October 4 or 5, in advance of the meeting. To get there first, Russia’s R-7 launched Sputnik 1 on October 4th.
On January 31, 1958, nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, von Braun and the United States successfully launched its first satellite on a modified Redstone, at Cape Canaveral Concerned about the Russian lead, in early 1958 President Eisenhower recommended the US Congress establish a civilian agency to direct nonmilitary space activities, and from this the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created. It seemed Eisenhower’s concerns were justified. In 1958, Korolev upgraded the Russian R-7 to be able to launch an 800 lb. payload, and, after five attempts, delivered an ‘impactor probe’ to the Moon in 1959, and a little later another flew behind the Moon, sending back the first ever pictures of its far side.
By 1959, some American observers had predicted that the Soviet Union would be the first to get a human into space, aware of the time needed to prepare for Mercury’s first launch. They were correct. On April 12, 1961, the USSR surprised the world again by launching Yuri Gagarin into space on a single orbit around the Earth in Vostok 1. Gagarin was described as the world’s first cosmonaut, a word made up from a rough combination of Russian and Greek to describe a “sailor of the universe”. Gagarin could take control of Vostok 1 in an emergency by opening an envelope inside the spacecraft’s cabin, where he would find a code to be typed into its computer. However, Vostok was flown in an automatic mode as a precaution: at the time, medical scientists weren’t certain what would happen to a human in the weightlessness of space.
Vostok 1 orbited the Earth for 108 minutes and made its reentry over the Soviet Union, with Gagarin ejecting from the spacecraft at 7,000 metres (23,000 feet), and landing by parachute. The International Federation of Aeronautics credited Gagarin with the world’s first human space flight, even though their qualifying rules for aeronautical records at the time required pilots to take off and land with their craft. For this reason, the Soviet Union submission to the FAI omitted to record the fact that Gagarin did not land with his capsule. When the ejection landing technique was later disclosed, the FAI committee decided to investigate, and determined the technological accomplishment of human spaceflight lay in the safe launch, orbiting, and return, rather than the manner of landing, and revised their rules, thereby keeping Gagarin’s record intact. Gagarin became a national hero of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and was a worldwide celebrity. The launch date, April 12, was declared ‘Cosmonautics Day’ in the USSR, and is still celebrated today in Russia as one of the official Commemorative Dates of Russia. In 2011, it was declared the International Day of Human Space Flight by the United Nations.
What do we know of this man who first ‘broke free’ of the Earth? Gagarin started work as a foundryman, and later joined the Soviet Air Forces as a pilot. He was selected for Russian space program with five other cosmonauts. Gagarin was a popular candidate; when asked to vote anonymously for a candidate besides themselves they would choose to be the first to fly, most picked Gagarin. A Soviet doctor’s evaluation from 1960 is revealing: “Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuriy; 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.” [iii] He had the right stuff!
The record of radio communication between the launch control room and Gagarin included the following dialogue at the moment of rocket’s launch: Korolev: “Preliminary stage….. intermediate….. main….. lift off! We wish you a good flight. Everything is all right.” Gagarin: “Поехали!” (Poyekhali! Let’s go!). Gagarin’s informal ‘poyekhali!’ became a key phrase in the communist world, marking the beginning of human space flight. Vostok 1 was Gagarin’s only venture, but he served as backup to the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal crash. Gagarin was banned Gagarin from further spaceflights. He died in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting with his flight instructor crashed. Today, his brief single spaceflight seems almost punk, but, symbolically, his “poyekhali”, like Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, signified the moment the impossible had become possible.
But breaking free was costly, using funds that might have helped eradicate poverty, or conquer diseases. Instead, we live in a world dominated by outcomes from the space race’s technological innovations. Many have turned to be central to creating today’s ubiquitous digital consumer products. What a paradox that, 60 years later, the inheritance from escaping from gravity would be the creation of a new form of attraction, as billions today seemed yoked to their digital devices, and many, if not most, seem quite unable to break free!
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon#cite_note-20
[ii] All that follows draws on various Wikipedia articles and sources
[iii] From Siddiqi, Asif A (2000). Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974. Washington, DC: NASA, quoted in Wikipedia’s article on Gagarin.
