ting the figurative irony of Powers’ words. The United States and its own effort to put a man in space had indeed been caught off-guard. Next morning came the front-page headline: Soviets Put Man In Space. Spokesman Says U.S. Asleep.
It was not only the world that expressed shock and disbelief at Gagarin’s achievement; even those closest to him—his family—had little or no idea of what had happened. Only his wife, Valentina, knew that he would be flying into space, although he had told her that the mission was planned for 14 April, so as not to worry her. He informed his parents that he was going on a business trip and, according to his sister, would be traveling “very far.” Upon learning of the flight, his mother’s reaction was to buy a train ticket to visit her daughter-in-law in Moscow and help care for their children. His father, meanwhile, was working on the collective farm and, after hearing that someone called Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was in space, he responded that it could not be his son, who was “only a senior lieutenant.” The enormity of what his son had done became apparent when he headed to the local soviet for more information and was quickly pushed onto the phone with a Communist Party official in Gzhatsk. Within hours, Alexei Gagarin and his sons were answering an endless stream of calls from journalists within and beyond the Soviet Union.
High above Earth, at 10:25 a.m., just off the coast of western Africa, near Angola, Vostok’s retrorocket fired automatically to begin its re-entry into the atmosphere. Gagarin would never need to touch his controls, nor open the envelope, nor worry about the three magic numbers. Five thousand miles still remained to be covered before landing back in the Soviet Union. However, all did not go according to plan. Ten seconds after retrofire, as intended, the four metal straps holding the instrument section and the capsule together severed, but an electrical cable failed to separate. The cable contained a thick bundle of wiring which provided power and data to the capsule. For 10 minutes, the two remained connected, with the unneeded instrument section trailing behind and causing the capsule to experience wild gyrations as high as 30 degrees per second. The incident, which was not revealed by the Soviets, but which Gagarin hinted at in his state-sanctioned report, was potentially disastrous. The capsule was weighted in such a way that it would naturally rotate to point the thickest part of its heat shield into the direction of travel. If the instrument section did not separate cleanly, the capsule could not assume its correct attitude and properly bear the brunt of re-entry heating. Gagarin could burn alive.
Fortunately, at 10:35 a.m., as the spacecraft’s meteoric descent path neared Egypt, the cable finally burned through and separated the instrument section. After slinging the capsule away with a spin so severe that Gagarin almost lost consciousness, it finally attained aerodynamic equilibrium with its heat shield positioned accurately. It was later revealed that the complications arose when a retrorocket valve failed to close properly, allowing some fuel to escape from the combustion chamber. As a result of this loss, the engine cut off a second too early, slowing Vostok at a less-than-expected rate and preventing a normal shutdown command from being issued. In the absence of this command, the engine’s propellant lines remained open and pressurised gas and oxidiser continued to escape through the nozzle and served to induce the wild gyrations. Although the engine was ultimately cut off by a timer, its lack of delivered thrust caused the spacecraft’s control system to scrub the primary sequence to separate the capsule from the instrument section. The notes of the cosmonauts’ physician, Yevgeni Karpov, auctioned by Sotheby’s in March 1996, revealed his concern, and, indeed, analysts have speculated that—had the world known of these problems—the ’60s space race might have slowed dramatically.
Gagarin himself made one brief reference to the incident. “The craft began to 