To infinity and beyond
THOMAS ELLIS lauds a book that boldly goes deep into the origins of the space race, introducing the events, characters and rivalries that made the first Soviet space flight possible
On the morning of 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force lieutenant stood on the threshold of immortality. As the cosmonaut aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin would became the first person in history to orbit the Earth. During his 106-minute journey, he would fly higher and faster than anyone before him, only narrowly avoiding disaster. He returned to Earth a hero – living, breathing proof, according to Soviet propagandists, that communism was the future. Sixty years later, with crewed flights to and from the International Space Station barely making headlines, the heady days of the early space age seem as remote as a distant star.
Stephen Walker’s engrossing new book thrillingly recaptures the danger and strangeness of the space race as it guides readers through the engineering struggles and Cold War rivalry that set Gagarin on his path to the stars. The author provides a fascinating glimpse into the inner world of the Soviet space programme, hidden from outsiders behind concentric walls of propaganda and secrecy. We follow the cosmonauts from the selection process, which whittled down 3,461 potential candidates to just 20, through a training programme that included punishingly long stints in isolation chambers to test psychological resilience, before arriving finally at Tyuratam, the colossal Soviet space port that rose from the steppe of Kazakhstan.
Early chapters cut between the American and Soviet space efforts. After the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, outer space became an arena in which the superpowers vied to demonstrate their technological superiority.
Chapters on the Mercury Seven, the elite test pilots recruited to be America’s first astronauts, will be familiar to anyone who has read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The cross-cutting approach evokes an atmosphere of frenzied Cold War competition and the vastly different worlds inhabited by Mercury Seven astronauts and “Vanguard Six” cosmonauts.
US astronauts were celebrities with lucrative publicity contracts. Soviet cosmonauts were anonymous before their flights. Astronauts lived in suburban splendour. Several cosmonauts initially found themselves billeted in a disused volleyball court.
Astronauts tore through the streets of Florida’s Cocoa Beach in sports cars. Cosmonauts stretched out their meagre salaries by taking the bus.
Walker has a keen eye for moments that humanise the cosmonauts, engineers, doctors and generals behind the Soviet space effort. By juxtaposing these fallible humans with the titanic technologies involved, he resurrects the wonder that space travel inspired – as well as the terror that bubbled beneath the surface in an endeavour where the slightest miscalculation could lead to a gruesome death.
Drawing on family correspondence, Beyond’s depiction of Gherman Titov, the second cosmonaut and Gagarin’s understudy – a troubled Renaissance man who could perform gymnastics or recite Pushkin’s poems with equal aplomb – is particularly touching. Gagarin himself, however, remains elusive, a blur at the centre of his own story. But though Walker fails to fully reveal the man behind the myth, he still succeeds in making Gagarin’s story feel as astounding today as it must have been 60 years ago.
US astronauts were celebrities with lucrative publicity contracts. Soviet cosmonauts were anonymous before their flights