Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight Read Online Free Page B

telemetry. Everything is as expected.
    And now: orbital sunrise. I feast
my eyes on it, for I may not see it on the way home.
    I am moving faster than the
planet spins. So my sunrise is earth’s sunset. The effect is the same as
before, only in reverse: I see arcs of color appear in the blackness and then
swell as the sun fills the center. And then I must look away, for the sun, once
it is up above the horizon, is even brighter than on earth, more brilliant than
you can imagine, impossibly bright against the black sky. One of those
incomparably strange things: to have full sunlight when the sky looks like
night.
    And then I’m across the
terminator and the Atlantic is beneath me, bright blue. Very few clouds today.
    “Yura, you have go-ahead for
Block-D firing,” I hear. “Ten minutes to go.”
    This is the big new thing. What
nobody has done before. If something had gone wrong they could have held me
back.
    The big computers downstairs have
been spinning. Vacuum tubes and lights and mechanical contraptions churning out
calculations. Blondie reads out the expected values for the burn time and
delta-v based on my orbit. The sun is rising higher in the black sky. There is
still some static and I have him re-read the values before I’m content that
I’ve heard them correctly.
    The burn will take place over the
Gulf of Guinea. That last little bight of the Atlantic Ocean. The armpit of
Africa.
    “Five minutes to go.”
    I key in commands to stop the
solar rotation and align the spacecraft for the burn. The ionic control system
is still acting strangely, but the 100-K tells me I’m properly oriented.
    I transmit: “I’m ready up here.”
    I am excited, even though I know
how final this will be. During East-1, if something had gone wrong I would have
at least returned to earth eventually. But on this mission, once I hit second
cosmic velocity I will be leaving the planet behind. Trusting my life yet again
to equations and calculations, scribblings on forgotten chalkboards and
discarded pieces of graph paper. The spacecraft will have to stay on course and
approach the moon at just the right angle and in just the right spot so that
the lunar gravity will send me whipping around back to earth. We will of course
be able to make a couple of mid-course corrections. But at best, it will be six
days until I can make it home, and if I’m not on a very narrow course, I will
not be able to survive reentry. Still, I think of the years when it seemed like
I would never make it back up here. And I am here and it is real and I am
excited.
    “One minute.”
    I see the seconds count down.
    Then the rocket ignites. Gravity
returns and I am pressed back into my form-fitting couch and I watch the timer
climb. White numbers on black dials, like the odometer on a car, counting seconds
towards the magic number: 459. Watching, watching, watching. Will something go
wrong even now? At 440, I bring my hand up to the control panel. If the rocket
keeps firing past the appointed time I will need to cut it off manually.
Everything has been calculated precisely, but if it is executed sloppily it
will all be for naught.
    But right on schedule the numbers
stop spinning. Again I feel my body rise against the straps.
    “Second cosmic velocity,” I
transmit.
    “We concur. Everything appears
nominal. Cedar, you have go-ahead to jettison the Block-D stage.”
    “Jettisoning Block-D stage,” I
say. It doesn’t seem enough. So I add: “We’re on our way to the moon!” Even
though I’m the only one up here.
    •••
    Near the end of East-1, I knew I
was in trouble.
    That orbit had been at a higher
inclination, about 65 degrees. It had taken me arcing up towards the Arctic,
avoiding Japan, then down across the Pacific, missing South America by swooping
below Cape Horn and over the Antarctic Peninsula. Then up across the South
Atlantic for reentry. Geography being what it is—the area of knowledge that
most thoroughly resists state decrees and