12
The Island
Tuesday 12th April, 2011
BY AMAL SIRIWARDENA
T
he space age really began on October 4th 1957,
when the Soviet Union launched the first earth
satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. The artificial
moon was spherical in shape, weighed 184 pounds and
was twice the size of a basketball. It carried no scientific instruments (plans to include these had been
shelved to beat the U.S. to the punch); but the “beep,
beep” of its powerful transmitter was heard by ham
radio enthusiasts around the world. However, it was
enough to cause a psychological earthquake in the
West, particularly in the United States, what came to
be known as the ‘sputnik shock’. For the Americans,
smugly certain about their scientific and technological
superiority, the Sputnik was a tremendous shock.
There was also widespread agonizing over whether the
U.S. had fallen behind in the quality of its science education.
Russian firsts
Over the next few years the Russians capped their
initial achievement with a series of other firsts: the
first satellite to carry an animal (the dog Laika in
Sputnik 2), the first rocket to reach the moon, the first
to photograph its hitherto unknown side, the first animals to be recovered from orbit. But the crowning
Soviet triumph came on April 12, 1961 when Yuri
Gagarin returned after successfully completing one
orbit round the earth in the spaceship Vostok I. His
flight lasted just 108 minutes. What was not revealed at
the time was that his spaceship started to spin out of
control on the descent and Gagarin nearly lost consciousness. But fortunately it later stabilized.
According to the official reports at the time, and
Gagarin’s own account, he landed in his spaceship.
However it is now confirmed that he ejected from it
and landed by parachute. The shock of the heavy landing may have been too great for the cosmonaut to survive without injury.
The U.S. sent its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, into
space three weeks later; but Shepard did not reach
orbit and made an up-and –down ballistic flight, then
euphemistically called ‘sub-orbital’. The second
American flight nearly ended in disaster. Unlike the
Russians, the Americans landed their spacemen in the
sea and the escape hatch of the capsule blew open prematurely filling the capsule with water. Astronaut
Virgil Grissom had a narrow escape from being
drowned and the capsule was lost. By the time the U.S.
sent John Glenn to be the first American to orbit the
earth, the second Soviet spaceman, Gherman Titov,
had already spent an entire day in orbit. His flight
appears to have been timed to coincide with the building of the Berlin wall.
Open and secret
The two programs presented interesting contrasts,
reflecting the different political systems. The
American civilian space program was relatively open,
while the Soviet one was shrouded in secrecy. The
Russian launchings were not pre-announced enhancing their effect. Even the name of Sergei Korolev, the
technological genius behind the early triumphs of the
Soviet space program, was not publicly known at the
time. On the other hand everyone knew that Wernher
Von Braun, the man who gave Hitler the V2 rocket
with which he bombarded London, was heading the
U.S. space program.
Yuri Gagarin grew up on a Kolkhoz (collective
firm) where his father was a carpenter. Like many of
their compatriots, the family suffered greatly in the
Second World War, with two of Gagarin’s siblings
being abducted by the Germans, though they later
returned. The future cosmonaut, whose education was
interrupted by the war, had only six years of formal
schooling! Thereafter he joined a foundry school as his
parents could not afford to give him a higher education. He later trained as a pilot, joined the Soviet Air
Force and became a test pilot, which was his entry
point into the cosmonauts’ cadre. Gagarin wrote an
autobiography, ‘Road to The Stars’ which I read a
child. It was interesting in parts, but was naturally
very ‘politically correct’ about the Soviet Union and
himself. It does not mention the name of Joseph Stalin
who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist until 1953.
Stalin’s name became a prohibited word after Premier
Nikita Khrushchev denounced him at a party congress
in 1956. When asked what the most important event in
his life prior to his space flight was, he replied that it
was his joining the Communist Party and added that
he still considered it the most important event in his
life. But Gagarin, with his handsome looks, personal
charm and beaming smile was sent to the tour the
world, and proved to be a good ambassador for the
Soviet Union. He visited Sri Lanka too, and the writer
was there with his father opposite Dickman’s Road to
wave at him. But if Gagarin was the public face of the
Soviet space program, Korolev was the brains.
Sergei Korolev, the unsung hero of the Soviet space
program was working on military rockets, when he
was denounced by colleagues, arrested on trumped-up
charges and thrown in prison during Joseph Stalin’s
great purge of 1937-38,
He was sent to one of the most dreaded labour
camps in Eastern Siberia, the Koylma gold mine. For
the rest of his life he suffered from poor health owing
to his harsh incarceration; he is also said to have hated
gold. But later, due to the exigencies of war, he was
transferred to a ‘prison design bureau’ which was set
up to exploit the talents of imprisoned scientists.
After the war he was assigned to work on inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s) which were finally
used to explore space. Throughout his career he had to
contend with competition and jealousy from his rivals
within the space program. The Nobel Committee once
wished to award a prize to the Soviet ‘Chief Designer’
and requested that his identity be revealed.
Khrushchev’s reply was that all the Soviet people
deserved the award. His concern is said to have been,
not so much secrecy, but the reactions of other designers if Korolev was to get the prize. The award went to
someone else.
Diverse reactions
The Soviet feats in space brought about diverse
reactions, which were of course intertwined with politics. Regi Siriwardena’s article in the ‘Ceylon Daily
Mirror’ on the morrow of the flight is reproduced elsewhere on this page. Regi’s article, while dated both
politically and scientifically, gives an interesting
insight into ‘how things looked then’. Regarding his
statement that in future the history of the world will
have to be divided into eras before and after Gagarin’s
flight, we are still too close to the event to pass judgment.
In common with many who were politically on the
Features
left, Regi saw in the Soviet achievements the superiority of socialist central planning and organization. I
believe that in later years he himself would not have
agreed with what he wrote, but at the time his was a
widespread view, and not confined to those who were
socialists or Marxists. Regi has quoted Sir Bernard
Lovell, who as Director of the Jodrell Bank radio
observatory, had a first hand view of the Soviet space
program, and was a great admirer of Soviet science.
Lovell speaks of the efficacy of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences determining the initiation of scientific projects. He seems to have been suffering from an acute
case of ‘Sputnik Shock’ when he says that ‘no human
frailties and vacillations shall interfere with this unity
of purpose’! The reality is that the Soviet space program was riddled with jealousy, rivalry and politicization as much as any similar enterprise in any country!
But Lovell’s statement underlines the fact that there
was then a belief in statism and central planning that
sometimes crossed ideological lines.
There were however alternative explanations of
the Soviet achievements. One which has been given,
and there are no confirmed reports
about what happened to them. When
asked about them at a press conference in the U.S. in 1976, Valentina
demanded that the offending journalist be expelled from the roomand so he was.
Lost cosmonauts
The secrecy in the Soviet
space program gave rise to allegations of ‘lost cosmonauts’,
fatalities in space that the
Russians had not revealed.
Whatever has come to light
subsequently has not confirmed any such incidents,
save for one. In March 1961,
Valentin Bonderenko died in
a simulator filled with pure
oxygen when he accidentally
caused a fire by discarding
an alcohol cotton ball onto
The writer may be reached at
[email protected]
The article by Regi Siriwardena
referred to above, which appeared in
the ‘Ceylon Daily Mirror’ of 13th
April 1961, is given below
among others by Arthur C. Clarke, is rooted in the respective military strategies.
After the Second World War, due to the
emerging cold war situation, there
was a need to develop missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
The initial Hiroshima-type weapons
weighed several tons and needed a
massive rocket to deliver. The
Americans, who balked at the cost of
developing such a rocket, chose to wait
till lighter bombs became available which
they eventually did. The Russians, with
their more closed political system, went
right ahead and built the massive rocket.
By the time it was ready it was no longer a
military necessity, as lighter warheads
were available. But the Russians then used
it to win the race into space.
Space is now our Home
The cream of German design staff
Arthur Clarke however, debunked another
favourite theory of the time, which was that the
Soviet successes were the work of German scientists
they had captured during the war. He pointed out that
while the Russians had captured some German technicians, whose practical experience was valuable in the
early stages, the Americans by skimming off the
cream of the German senior design staff such as Von
Braun had benefited much more.
However even during these early days of the space
race, the situation was not exactly as we saw it
through the window of the media. The Russians, with
their powerful booster rockets, could put heavier
spacecraft into orbit and led the way in manned space
flight. But the U.S., with their sophisticated technology,
particularly electronics, had better instruments and
was ahead in the technology of scientific space
research. American satellites discovered the Van Allen
radiation belts surrounding the planet and returned
data on the Earth’s magnetic field. The U.S. also pioneered weather and communication satellites. These
were achievements of solid scientific value, but unfortunately were not the kind that command media headlines. The Americans were also more successful in
planetary space probes, where equipment had to be
packed into a small spacecraft and kept functioning for
months.
The last straw
For the American ego, Gagarin’s flight was the last
straw. On May 25th 1961, President Kennedy
announced that ’this nation should commit itself to
achieving the goal, before this decade is out, to land a
man on the moon and return him safely to earth’. At
the time it seemed uncertain whether even still the
Americans would get there first- there were rumours
of Russian plans for a moon landing as early as 1967.
For jingoistic reasons the average American, and most
of the elite, went along with the move. But there were
powerful dissident voices even then.
The first moon landing
A couple of years later, Richard Nixon, later to
become president declared: “Because it has been stated that American prestige is at stake in this race, the
average citizen may be loath to question the huge
sums being requested to put a man on the moon. But
he should question them.” Ironically, it fell to Nixon in
his term as president to celebrate the moon landing.
The story of Valentina Tereshkova, the first
woman to go into space, is another interesting saga.
Tereshkova, like Gagarin grew up on a collective farm;
her father was killed in World War II. Nikita
Khrushchev was determined to show that under
socialism an ordinary Soviet woman, a farm girl or
factory worker, could go into space.
She was plucked from her job in a textile factory,
and with three other similar women put through
intensive training. Her only qualifications for the job
were that she was an amateur parachutist and was
active in the young communist league at her factory.
Unlike their male counterparts, who would all eventually get a chance to fly, the women knew there was no
plan to send more than one of them into space, which
created intense competition to be the chosen one.
Since Tereshkova had never been a pilot, Korolev was
pressured to modify the Vostok to be operated by
remote control. Twenty-six-year-old Valentina was
launched for a three-day flight aboard Vostok-6 on
June 16, 1963. She ejected from her spacecraft, as
Gagarin had done, and landed by parachute. After the
flight, the other three women vanished without a trace
Gagarin in Sri Lanka
an electric hot plate. Yuri Gagarin was at his bedside
for many hours before he died of third degree burns.
Needless to say, Gagarin’s book makes no mention of
the Bonderenko incident. Three U.S. astronauts,
preparing for a flight, suffered a similar fate six years
later; when their spaceship caught fire on the ground
during a launch pad test.
The first fatality
But the Russians suffered their first real space
fatality when Vladimir Komarov was killed in 1967
aboard the then new Soyuz spacecraft. Komarov was a
close friend of Gagarin, who was the backup pilot for
the flight. Technicians had found over 200 structural
defects in the Soyuz and knew that any man who ventured in it was unlikely to return alive. Soviet leader,
Leonid Brezhnev, wanted to stage a dramatic midspace rendezvous between two ships with the crew
then switching places. Gagarin, who had no wish to
see his good friend die, wrote a memo which he tried
to forward to Brezhnev. But no one wished to be the
messenger and the memo never reached Brezhnev. The
launch proceeded, the Soyuz malfunctioned in orbit
and the second flight was cancelled; it was attempted
to return Komarov prematurely and he was killed
when the parachute failed to deploy. He was heard on
his descent, cursing those who had sent him into
space. But perhaps the most grotesque part of the
whole episode was that his charred remains were
shown in an open casket at the state funeral. In less
than a year, the blue-eyed hero Yuri Gagarin was also
dead, killed in a still unexplained plane crash. Again,
conspiracy theories abound, but nothing has been
proved.
Komarov’s death ended any Soviet attempts to race
the Americans to the moon, if they ever intended to do
so. In any case by the end of 1965, the U.S. had caught
up in manned space flight.
A one horse race
For some time before Neil Armstrong’s ‘one giant
leap for mankind’ on the lunar surface in 1969 it was
clear that the U.S. was in a one-horse race. There were
once again serious questions raised on the lines of
‘what did we do it for’? The defenders fell back on the
spin-off, the benefits in other fields that would result
from the technology developed for the Apollo program.
“As if the way to make a better washing machine” the
critics sneered, “was to go to the moon rather than just
build a better washing machine”. But the truth behind
the Apollo project, that it was a knee-jerk reaction to
the Soviet successes of the early years, is now seldom
acknowledged. Nor is the fact that this was the reason
it did not lead to any continued progress in manned
lunar or planetary exploration. An article in the ‘New
York Times’ on the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo
landing naively asked how we could have abandoned
the moon. The writer should have asked himself why
we went there to begin with!
Having said the foregoing, the early space age,
however much things were tainted by global politics
were exciting years for those of us who took an interest in science and astronomy. Indeed, as Wordsworth
said, ‘bliss it was to be alive in that dawn’!
When the history of man is written in the future it will have to be
divided into two eras –before and
after April 12, 1961.
For a million years, ever since he
evolved from the apes, man has been
confined to his planetary home.
Yesterday the Earth ceased to be
man’s only domain in the universe.
Yesterday, he began his entry into a
new realm –the realm of space.
Yesterday Yuri Alexeyvich
Gagarin, blazed the trail for the astronauts of the future who will journey to
the moon and to other planetary worlds.
With the first man in space, the Soviet Union
has once again taken the lead in this revolutionary
world of world of human endeavor. This achievement
marks the fifth pioneering feat in space flight by the
Soviet space scientists in the three and a half years
since the space age began in 1957.
October 4, 1957: Launching of Sputnik I, the first
earth satellite.
January 2, 1959: Escape velocity achieved for the
first time. Launching of Lunik I, which became the
first artificial planet of the sun.
September 12, 1959: Launching of Lunik II the
first rocket to land on the moon
October 4, 1959: Launching of Lunik III, the first
space station to circle the moon and photograph its
hidden side.
April 12, 1961: First man in space.
In the face of this record it is ludicrous to say, as
some western commentators did yesterday, that it was
only an ‘accident’ that the Soviet Union had a man in
space before the United States. The Soviet triumphs
had been the result of superior planning and organization of technical as well as human resources in the scientific field. Let me quote on this point the objective
testimony of a British Scientist, Sir Bernard Lovell,
the director of the Jodrell Bank research station. This
is what Prof. Lovell said in his Reith lectures in 1958.
“During the vital years of the development of
these (space) projects American science was under the
shadow of a Secretary of Defence who could see little
value in research that had no immediate foreseeable
economic or commercial value. By contrast, the power
of the Academy of Sciences in Russia is very great.
The essential factor appears to be that the initiation of
scientific projects is determined by the desire of scientists of the academy, and that the financial restrictions
which place such grave handicaps on Western
Scientists do not exist……The direct and continuous
communication between the council of ministers and
the senior academicians determines that the that no
human fragilities and vacillations shall interfere with
this unity of purpose.”
With the successful voyage of the first space man
around the earth, it is no longer fantastic to suppose
that within five years an expedition may land on the
moon. But it is not only a new frontier that has been
opened to human exploration, but also a new dimension in human thought and feeling. Pioneer Gagarin
knew yesterday sensations which will someday be
part of the familiar experience of human beings. Not
only the physical sensation of increased weight at
take-off and weightlessness in free fall , but also the
psychological experience of cosmic loneliness in
outer space.
And beyond this there lies – still to be known- the
tremendous experience of setting foot on another
world where our Earth hangs in the sky. On the grave
of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian father of the
science of astronautics are carved the words: “Man
will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and
space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the
atmosphere , timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.”
Note: The above article reflects Regi’s views at the
time, but may not be consistent with those he held in
later years.
Prince William should succeed the Queen: poll
More than half of people in the UK
believe Prince William should become
the next monarch, a poll has found.
And one in three wants the Queen to
abdicate within the next two years,
according to the study.
The poll detected signs of a ''fairytale
effect'', with Prince William and Kate
Middleton's wedding now less than three
weeks away.
The Panelbase survey of almost 2,000
adults - conducted for the Sunday Times
between Tuesday and Thursday - found
that 59 per cent of people favour dispens-
ing with tradition to see William, rather
than the Prince of Wales, ascend the
throne.
The remaining 41 per cent said they
wanted Prince Charles to become king.
Notably, Prince William recorded
strong support among young women,
with 78 per cent of those in the 18-34 category saying they wanted the young
Royal to succeed Queen Elizabeth.
Panelbase also found that 33 per cent
of UK adults want the Queen to give up
the throne within two years.
Some 42 per cent of young men and
39 per cent of young women believe she
should abdicate.
In a separate survey, support for
Prince William assuming the throne was
even higher among people in Scotland, at
61 per cent, with 39 per cent wanting
Prince Charles to become the next king.