Archives|Russian Space Mementos Show Gagarin's Ride was a Rough One
By WILLIAM J. BROAD MARCH 5, 1996
THE launching of the first human into space by the Soviet Union -- a 108-minute dash around the globe by Lieut. Yuri A. Gagarin on April 12, 1961 -- stunned the world, particularly the United States, which at the time was struggling to catch up in the space race. Shortly after the Soviet success, President Kennedy, under enormous pressure to outdo the Communists, announced a bold plan to land Americans on the Moon by the end of the decade.
But it turns out that Lieutenant Gagarin's flight aboard Vostok 1 was far from the seamless triumph that Moscow publicized for so many decades. In fact, man's first voyage beyond the planet was nearly a disaster, Western aerospace experts have learned.
And Sotheby's, the auction house and a fixture of capitalism that has catered to the affluent since 1744, is helping to illuminate this hidden crisis of Communist history. Among the hundreds of items of Soviet space paraphernalia that Sotheby's is auctioning off in New York City this month for Russian groups and citizens are some notes written by Lieutenant Gagarin's commander, which tell how the spaceship spun dangerously out of control near the end of its single orbit of Earth.
"Malfunction!!!" the commander, Col. Yevgeny A. Karpov, wrote in a frantic scrawl.
"Sudden impact," he continued, adding that the spacecraft and its passenger were spinning wildly.
"Don't panic!" he wrote, apparently fearing the flight was doomed. "Emergency situation."
After 10 minutes of high drama, the lurching spacecraft belatedly separated from the braking rocket that was causing the gyrations and began its fiery descent back into the atmosphere, still wobbling.
Western experts have authenticated the episode from other Russian sources, including a detailed report by Lieutenant Gagarin himself, concluding concluded that he had a close brush with death. "In a number of ways it could have killed him," James E. Oberg, an expert on the Russian space program and a consultant to Sotheby's, said in a telephone interview from Houston.
If the dangerous nature of Lieutenant Gagarin's flight had been made public at the time, experts say, the revelation might have changed the course of history.
"There's no question that Kennedy would have been much slower in making a commitment to send Americans to the Moon," said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a space historian.
At the start of the space age, he added, White House science advisers were leery of sending humans into orbit and wanted to focus on ground experiments and on lofting chimpanzees. But the Soviet success made the advisers look timid. "Their arguments would have been much more influential if it was known that Lieutenant Gagarin had had serious problems," Dr. Logsdon said.
Senator John Glenn, the former American astronaut who in February 1962 became the first American to orbit Earth, agreed. "If something like that had been known, it might have played into the hands of the doubters," he said in an interview.
As it was, the eight-year, $25 billion program culminated in 1969 with the first human footsteps on another world. The Soviet Union tried to win this round of the space race but failed to do so, in the process blowing up a number of giant rockets.
The space race began in October 1957 when Moscow launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. Washington followed suit in 1958. The contest heated up in 1961 with the launching of the world's first manned spacecraft, Vostok 1. On board was Lieutenant Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force, then 27.
His capsule consisted of a cannonball-like sphere that weighed three tons. Attached to its base was a two-ton service pod that, among other things, held a retrorocket meant to slow down the speeding spaceship.
Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, reveled in the flight's success and asserted that it "reflected the heroic accomplishments of the Soviet people." Lieutenant Gagarin's own days of glory were cut short; he died at 34 in the crash of a military jet in 1968.
Over the years, Western experts heard rumors of trouble with his historic flight into space, but secrecy cloaked its details until the Soviet Union itself fell apart. Then, in 1991, amid a flood of disclosures, the Moscow newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna published a transcript of Lieutenant Gagarin's secret report the day after his flight. The troubles, buried at the end of the long transcript.
"As soon as the braking rocket shut off, there was a sharp jolt, and the craft began to rotate around its axis at a very high velocity," Lieutenant Gagarin told the authorities. "Everything was spinning around."
The issue lay dormant and generally unknown until Sotheby's was approached by the widow of Colonel Karpov, Lieutenant Gagarin's commander, who wanted to put his notes up for sale. She sought out the auction house because it had conducted a sale of Soviet space memorabilia in 1993 and was preparing for another.
David Redden, a Sotheby's director in New York City, was looking over some of the notes with a Russian translator late last year when they came upon a page covered with exclamation marks. "We saw this word 'malfunction' and suddenly it became a riveting document," he recalled.
The scrawled notes said the separation of the two parts of Lieutenant Gagarin's spacecraft occurred not 10 seconds after the firing of the braking rocket, as planned, but after 10 agonizing minutes. Even after the separation, the notes reported, the spacecraft continued to spin uncontrollably, apparently even as it began to plunge back to Earth.
Mr. Redden said it was unclear exactly when Colonel Karpov's notes were written, whether during the flight or soon after. Some evidence, he said, suggested that reports to ground controllers were supplemented by knowledge Colonel Karpov could have gained only during Lieutenant Gagarin's debriefing.
Fascinated but uncertain about the report's authenticity, Mr. Redden called in Mr. Oberg, the American expert on the Soviet space program and author of "Red Star in Orbit." He attested to its accuracy, having stumbled on Lieutenant Gagarin's report in the Moscow newspaper and heard about the emergency from sources in Russia.
The notes are revealing, Mr. Oberg said, because they have none of the staged coolness of Lieutenant Gagarin's after-the-fact report to the authorities and instead show the raw emotions of a participant in the crisis. Even to have written such notes and kept them personally was "a severe security violation," Mr. Oberg added.
He said the orbital emergency was especially dangerous because, according to his Russian sources, the two sections of spacecraft were not tightly joined during their forced union but were loosely tied by a thick bundle of cables and wires known as an umbilical, apparently causing the two parts to spin around one another and possibly to hit one another.
Mr. Oberg added that if the aft section had failed to come loose, the astronaut capsule's heat shield might have malfunctioned during atmospheric re-entry, perhaps letting spacecraft and passenger burn up.
Mr. Oberg said the disclosure of the near disaster added to the Soviet achievement by revealing the resiliency of Soviet space equipment in a crisis and the dimensions of Lieutenant Gagarin's courage.
"Both sides, by exploiting the political values of these events, dehumanized the adventure," he said. "So both countries grew disillusioned with these activities, thinking they were safe and dull when in fact they have never been either."
A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 1996, on Page C00007 of the National edition with the headline: Russian Space Mementos Show Gagarin's Ride was a Rough One. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe