The Family Gagarin Left Behind

Photo: Allen Abel

Air & Space magazine/ By Allen Abel

They are his daughters and his widow, his nieces and cousins, his space-going peers, his former rivals, millions of us who knew him only from black-and-white newsreels as the first man in space, and a dwindling few who remember first-hand how far he had to rise to reach the stars.

It was April 12, 1961, when a dreamy boy born to poverty and flames on the Eastern Front of the Second World War flew weightless for nearly two hours in a capsule called Vostok—“the East.” Barely seven years later, when he was 34 years old, the spacefaring hero with the famous, easy smile was killed in a crash of his own MiG-15UTI jet, his hand still on the joystick when he and his instructor copilot hit the trees. He is one of history’s bravest and most tragic adventurers.

I am searching for the father and husband and friend behind the chiseled face on a statue or gleaming idol on a coin. But his elder daughter seems more comfortable discussing his public persona, calling his flight “one of the main achievements that took place over the last 100 years, not only for this country but for mankind.”

1968

She is telling me this in an office above one of the world’s great treasuries, the exhibition halls of the Moscow Kremlin, where czarist—and later, Communist—power presided over centuries of serfdom, socialism, and sacrifice. Elena Yurievna Gagarina was two years and two days old when her father lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and not quite 10 when he died. Today, she is the director of the Kremlin State Museum, where she is the guardian of imperial robes, royal carriages, and Fabergé eggs.

It is difficult to imagine a more elegant workplace, or a more elegant woman. When Barack and Michelle Obama visited Moscow in 2009, it was Elena who escorted the First Lady through the galleries. Fluent in English, she is the custodian not only of Russia’s royal jewels but also of every Yuri Gagarin statue, every postal tribute, and every published encomium. All must pass her personal inspection.

“There are good sculptures and bad sculptures, good stamps and bad stamps,” she says. “This is the role which is given to me by law: that all images of my father and stories of his life I should see.” Fine art, she says, is all that ever attracted her, even as her father was reaching for—and falling from—the heights of space exploration and fame. “Each of us in our family followed a different path,” she says. “My mother was a doctor, my sister an economist. Our parents wanted us to follow our own interests.”

Elena worked her way up to become the curator of 18th century English drawings and engravings at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. (Her only child, a daughter, works at the Kremlin with her.) It is natural to wonder whether someone named, say, Kuznetsova—the Russian “Smith”—would have risen as high as Yuri Gagarin’s daughter. But Elena waves off this petty conjecture. “I never used my name for my career,” she says. “My field of interest is very different from anything connected with space travel. I always wanted to be an art historian from the earliest age. But still, of course, people know my name. Everyone has a story about my father. Everyone has a story to tell about the 12th of April.”

Elena herself doesn’t remember much of that day. “When my father went into space, I don’t think that at that period I understood it quite well,” she says. “I was too young. All the people I encountered every day—our friends, our neighbors—were connected with the space project.”

No one at the time knew much about the engineering challenges of spaceflight. “The cosmonauts understood that it was 50-50 if the flight would be successful or not. The general consensus was that it was safe. But Father had complete trust in the chief designer [Sergei Korolev]. Korolev loved him very much.”

The second daughter, Galina Yurievna Gagarina, was 36 days old when her father flew. “When I was a child, I lived as every child does,” she says. “We hadn’t any special teacher or special school or special conditions of life. Our city—Star City—was a very special place. From the very beginning, I knew that. But for us, it was normal. At school, I studied with many different children. Not all were the children of cosmonauts.”

By the time Galina reached fourth grade, American astronauts were on the moon. If the Gagarina girls had been unique as infants, their celebrity no longer was so singular. A lot of the dads at Star City had gone into space.

We are in Galina’s office at Plekhanov University in Moscow, where she has been a professor of economics for 25 years. Galina, who is married to a pediatrician from the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east, has one child: a boy, now 17, named Yuri. Like her sister, she is fluent in English.  More >>

Gagarin’s Flight Record Falsified

discoverynews.com/ By Amy Shira Teitel

On April 12, 1961, the world met Yuri Gagarin, a former Soviet Air Force pilot who shot from obscurity to international fame after making one full orbit around the Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

But the mission records the Soviet Union submitted to international authorities to secure Gagarin's place as the first man in space present a very different mission. Specifically, his landing was deliberately falsified. During the year, lies about the Vostok landing system called into question whether or not Vostok 1 deserved its place as history's first spaceflight at all.

In 1905, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI, known as the International Air Sports Federation in English) was established to manage and maintain all records of accomplishments in aviation. By the 1950s, the FAI had grown to include aeronautic and astronautic categories under its umbrella. With spaceflight on the horizon, the organization established a set of guidelines for what constitutes a spaceflight -- if two nations were going to vie for the record of first in space, the FAI should have clear rules to determine a winner.

The terms of spaceflight reflected the organization's roots in aviation. For a flight to count, the pilot-astronaut or pilot-cosmonaut would have to land with his spacecraft. After all, if a pilot fails to land  with his aircraft, it's usually because something has gone wrong and the flight has been a failure. Why should spaceflight be any different?

The Soviet Union statement presented to the FAI stated  that the cosmonaut had landed inside Vostok 1 as per the organization's guidelines on spaceflight. Signed by the sports commissar of the USSR, the document asserts that "at 10:55 a.m. Moscow time on the 12th of April 1961 ... the pilot-cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyvich Gagarin landed with the 'Vostok' spaceship."

He hadn't. He couldn't have even if he'd wanted to.

The Vostok spacecraft was basic and unsophisticated and lacked a braking system. Gagarin did as he was trained to do: He ejected during the final phase of his descent. He and Vostok 1 touched down separately by parachutes.

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Gagarin's landing was much scarier than the innocuous one described in the FAI's formal record. Vostok 1 fired its retrorockets and began its fall through the atmosphere, but the cables connecting the crew module with the instrument unit failed to separate. The latter heavier unit fell first, exposing Vostok's fragile hatch to the fiery phase of reentry. Only after the cables burned away did Vostok reorient itself with its heat shield down. Its parachute deployed late, and when Gagarin ejected 23,000 feet above the ground, his own 'chute deployed late as well. He landed 10 minutes after and miles away from his spacecraft in the Saratova region near the border of Kazakhstan.

Farmers who saw the cosmonaut fall from the sky didn't know what to make of the man in the orange suit and helmet. A woman and her daughter reportedly reached Gagarin first; when she asked if he came from space, he confidently said that he had before asking to use a phone to call the Soviet Space Agency.

But the FAI accepted the Soviet-issued statement on the flight. At least, it did until Gherman Titov followed Gagarin into orbit four months later.

Titov, who had been Gagarin's backup for Vostok 1, spent a little over 25 hours in orbit before returning to Earth on Aug. 7, 1961. His landing was similarly veiled when the flight record was presented to the FAI, this time seeking to secure a duration record for the Soviet Union. It states that "pilot-cosmonaut Gherman Stepanovich TITOV and the spaceship 'Vostok 2 ... landed in the vicinity of the village of Krasny Koot." While the official record is ambiguous, the cosmonaut made no secret of his landing. He publicly admitted to ejecting before touching down by a personal parachute.

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Titov's admission called Gagarin's landing, and consequently his record as the first man in space, into question. If Gagarin and Titov both ejected before landing, the Soviet Union would lose its spot in history as the first nation to launch a man into space.

Controversy began to brew and the FAI held a special meeting of delegates to reexamine Titov's records and reconsider Gagarin's. The result of the meeting was a change to the parameters that defined spaceflight rather than a change to the records. The parameters switched to focus on the payload launched; this technical achievement mattered more than how the astronaut or cosmonaut landed. That Gagarin had orbited the Earth was the real achievement, and both his and Titov's records remain in the FAI's books.

Gagarin's true landing and the technical problems that very nearly killed him during his descent weren't publicized until 1971, three years after he died in a plane crash in 1968. The FAI posthumously honored Gagarin that year by established the Yuri A. Gagarin Gold Medal to recognize the achievements of space pilots in man's ongoing conquest in this new realm.

After the decision to keep Gagarin's record intact, the early Vostok landing system went from a controversial issue to a historical oddity of the transition from flight in aircraft to spaceflight in capsules.

'First Orbit' Reveals What Yuri Gagarin Saw

By Jennifer Ouellette

"The feeling of weightlessness was somewhat unfamiliar compared with Earth conditions. Here, you feel as if you were hanging in a horizontal position in straps. You feel as if you are suspended." -- Yuri Gagarin on being the first human in space

On April 12, 1961, a Russian cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin made space history when he became the first human being to blast off into space, aboard a bell-shaped capsule known as Voystok 1.

In 108 minutes, he circled the Earth, passing over the Pacific Ocean, the Straits of Magellan, the Atlantic and Africa before Voystok 1 reentered the Earth's atmosphere and landed near Engels, Russia.

Gagarin became a national hero overnight, and his untimely death seven years later while piloting a MiG-15 fighter jet during a routine training flight was a national tragedy in the Soviet Union. But Gagarin's status as a hero now transcends Mother Russia: "Yuri's Night" is a global Webcast celebration, held each year on April 12 in his honor.