Dan Snow's History Hit - Yuri Gagarin: The First Human to Leave Our Planet

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

On April 12th 1961 the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the first man into space; Yuri Gagarin. Strapped to the top of a gigantic ICBM Gagarin was blasted into space as the result of a highly secretive programme. This completely surprised those on the other side of the Iron Curtain and caused considerably fear in the West. However, this momentous achievement was in fact a stab in the dark for the Soviets. Lacking the funding and technology of their American adversaries it almost came to ruin on a number of occasions as we shall find out in this podcast. Dan is joined by Stephen Walker who is a brilliant storyteller, director and author of Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space to tell the thrilling story of the first human in space.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On April 12th, 1961, the Soviet Union shocked the world, I mean shocked the world, by launching the first man into space. Yuri Gagarin, strapped to the top of a gigantic intercontinental ballistic missile, was blasted into space as a result of a secret program that the West didn't really know was happening. So it came as a very unwelcome shock on the other side of the Iron Curtain that the Soviet Union had this capability. But as you'll hear in this podcast, they almost didn't have the capability.

To be honest, it was a bit of a stab in the dark. This is such an amazing story. And I'm proud that on this 60th anniversary of one of the most important events in human history, we've got this podcast out with the very brilliant Stephen Walker. He is such a fantastic storyteller. He's a director, a producer of wonderful documentaries. He's written wonderful books and this latest one is fabulous. He's going to join me on this podcast to talk me through a truly remarkable episode in our history. Yuri Gagarin, first human being to head into space. We've got various programs actually about space history. We've got one on Apollo 13. Lots of people are watching on

historyhit.tv. It's our digital history channel. It's like Netflix, just for history. Please head over there, historyhit.tv, sign up and watch all the wonderful documentaries we've got and check out all the back episodes of this podcast as well without ads. I'm still recovering from my weekend's exertions as I rampaged across England with Dr. Kat Jarman filming for History Hit TV on the footsteps of the great heathen army, the Viking army that almost, almost conquered the whole of England in the 9th century, but didn't quite, thanks to a little guy called Alfred. That's where we end up, at that battlefield, or well, we end up at the place that we think might be the battlefield. Lots of exciting

discoveries to be made there. In the meantime, though, everyone, please enjoy this episode of History Hit with Stephen Walker. Stephen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Delighted to be here. Thanks, Dan. Well, it's a big anniversary. It's a huge anniversary. Tell me, where does the story begin? Like the moon mission begins with Kennedy giving that speech, we will do this and go to the moon and the other things which remain unidentified. What about this story? Where does it begin? will do this and go to the moon and the other things which remain unidentified. What about this story? Where does it begin? This story starts with a competition, actually. This story essentially starts with the Americans being beaten in the race to put a satellite in space in 1957,

with Sputnik being their first satellite in space, which creates absolute mayhem in America. I mean, complete terror. Everybody's terrified that they're going to be raining down bombs and nuclear missiles from space. And Lyndon Johnson, who later became president, is saying control of space means control of the world. I mean, it's really terrifying. And so what the Americans decide to do is that they decide the only way they can get ahead in the race to space is to put a human being in space, which seems to us like not such a big deal, but it's a massive deal at the time. And they start a program called the Mercury Program with a bunch of astronauts that are

selected after grueling tests. And the Soviets are watching all of this, and they're watching in secret. And so what they do is almost immediately after the American Mercury astronauts are being announced and become kind of rock stars in America, what these guys do in Russia is they also have a grueling selection. And they select not seven, as the Mercury astronauts were, but 20 cosmonauts in secret, literally under deep cover. And these guys are not even allowed to tell their wives what they're doing, their families what they're doing. And that's how it starts. It starts with a race that is open on one side and completely secret on the other side. The Soviets, what is their tech? Is it far more primitive than the Mercury program? Is it better?

Do they have better rocket scientists? What's going on there? Well, what they've got is the biggest missile in the world. They've got a missile called the R-7 missile. Back in 1957, this is a missile that can fly from the Soviet Union to drop a thermonuclear weapon essentially on the United States of America. And it's that advanced. And the reason why it's big is because their bombs are primitive. They're very heavy hydrogen bombs. So the Americans have got these very sophisticated bombs, but small rockets. And the Soviets have got this great big missile, which can carry a great big bomb. It's not quite like this, but effectively what they do is they take this massive risk, and they replace the thermonuclear weapon sitting on top of the world's biggest intercontinental

ballistic missile and replace it with a human being. That's how they do it. I mean, it is Wallace and Gromit. This guy is in a spherical padded capsule with a less than 50% chance of getting through this alive. There's even some discussion from the KGB to put a bomb on that capsule in case he either goes insane or decides to defect towards the United States of America, so they can blow the capsule up with him inside and pretend the whole thing never actually happened. I mean, it's a story of paranoia and secrecy beyond anything you can actually imagine. And they pull it off. That's the incredible thing. I don't know how they do it. Well, I do, I describe in my book,

but they pull it off. Let's talk about Yuri Garen, but also the other Cosmorts. If they were keen, volunteers, well up for it, didn't mind the odds of coming back weren't great? Do you know, they often at the beginning didn't even know what they were volunteering for, because they weren't told. They were told by these doctors that went out to kind of examine various kinds of possible candidates. I mean, hundreds of them in Red Air Force bases across Western Russia. They were actually told that they would be volunteering to fly a special kind of flying machine, unlike any other flying machine yet invented. Most of them thought it was a kind of helicopter they were going to end up flying. In fact, it turns out to be a spacecraft flying in orbit.

So they genuinely didn't know exactly what it was that they were actually volunteering for. Once they were there, once they got going, you know, these guys have the same kind of boiling competitiveness, that sort of alpha male competitiveness that the Mercury astronauts had as well. It's not really that dissimilar. The difference is they've got no money, they're in secret, they have no fame, and their wives end up cleaning each other's floors with floor polishes to make ends meet, whereas the Mercury astronauts become these incredible celebrities that everyone wants to be part of. So you've got these two, in some ways, similar sets of men, and yet so

radically different. They're also small, because they've got to sit inside the little capsule that actually fit where the bomb would otherwise have been in order to get into space. What's so much flying? I mean, we can talk about this later when we actually talk about how the journey went. They're obviously all pilots, of course, but what do they have to do? They just sit on an enormous bomb, get blasted into orbit, and then presumably there's a key moment when they make a decision to come back. Yeah. It's glorious. One of the things I do in my book is I contrast, as you've probably seen, the difference between the cockpit of the American Mercury capsule and the cockpit of the, what was called Vostok spherical Soviet capsule. And the difference is the American capsule looks for its time,

very sophisticated fighter jet. It's got dials and it's got levers and it's got buttons. You know, it's sophisticated. The Vostok looks like the inside of a Trabant, you know, one of those 1960s Eastern European cars. It's got about four dials in it. Essentially, what you're dealing with is somebody that is not expected to fly the mission, but to endure the mission. But they got cold feet. And in the last few days, they decided, gosh, we have to give this guy some measure of control in case everything goes wrong up there. So they had a manual system. But because it's so Soviet, they locked it. And they locked it with a three-digit code. Inside the capsule, this guy, Yuri Gagarin, was supposed to press three secret numbers in order to unlock the code,

which would enable him to steer his spacecraft back to Earth manually. But they then decided, we don't trust this guy. So what we're going to do is we're going to put the code in an envelope, seal the envelope, glue it somewhere to the inside of the lining of this capsule, so that if something goes wrong at the last moment, he'll somehow find the envelope, open it, see the numbers, press the numbers, and take control of the capsule. I mean, it's insane. The Americans have been practicing manual descents for two years, and these guys had three hours. Literally three hours. There's the famous incident with the dog, though. They did put an

animal into space, didn't they? They put 42 animals in. And what people think about is the one dog, Laika, that they sent up, but they had no way of getting Laika back in 1957. And they did that because the Premier, Khrushchev, really wanted space spectaculars. You know, look at our technology. It's better than the Americans. We can beat the Americans. Come to us, the rest of the world, and be Soviet because that is where the future lies. But they actually had a lot of dogs that went up. In fact, one dog actually ran away just before she was due to be launched. And somehow, I don't know, got away. And they literally found a stray wandering around the staff canteen, actually on the Cosmodrome air base.

And they put this poor mongrel actually in the canteen. The next thing, she was in space. These dogs were trained by circus trainers to begin with. They were all picked off the streets of Moscow. And then they were basically trained for the program in order to pave the way for the human mission in 1961, because nobody knew what was going to happen up there. So the way this story is often told is that at this point, the Soviets were actually ahead of

the Americans technologically. Your book suggests that they weren't really, but they didn't worry about the old health and safety. And they absolutely just went for it the moment they got a sniff of it. Yeah. I mean, look, they weren't even going to wear spacesuits. That was developed as an afterthought. Seriously, as an afterthought. There is a thing in my book, actually, about the abort system. I mean, this is incredible. The abort system on the missile, in case there was an abort on the pad, and this huge ICBM actually blew up on the pad with the cosmonaut stuck at the top, 40 metres high. The idea was that there would be an automatic ejection of this hapless cosmonaut from the top of the rocket. He would fall effectively 10 storeys into a steel

mesh, like a net that was at the bottom. And then he would have to crawl across the net to a domestic bathtub, which is attached to a rope, and get in the bathtub and then be lowered to the ground. This is why the rockets exploding around them, where essentially what would happen is that medics would somehow get them and somehow pull him clear. It was such rubbish. They didn't even dare tell the cosmonaut the system even existed, but they had it just in case. It's difficult for us to think like this, but 60 years ago, with the Cold War at its peak, with Kennedy new in the job, with Khrushchev crowing about the fact that the future was Soviet, the world's future was Soviet, with the Berlin Wall about to be built, with the Vietnam War about to be fought, who came

first? Who actually put a human being, the first human being outside the biosphere to look down on our world? Who did that first was huge. It meant everything. It wasn't just about a technological race that came down to the wire. It was literally about which way does the world go? What is its future? Is its future Soviet? Or is its future backward American, as the Soviets would have said? So everything ran on this moment, which is why it's such a major thing 60 years later, because the fate of the world essentially felt, to them at the time, like it rested on the success of that mission. I guess we shouldn't give the Americans too many plaudits for the health and safety consciousness and not wanting to put up astronauts too early. Because also, if this mission had gone wrong,

which you point out it almost did, the Soviets would just deny that its existence. Whereas the Mercury launches were global news. So it was super embarrassing when they didn't go right. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of them didn't go right. I mean, in fact, they spectacularly didn't. I mean, there was one, I think the first test launch they had, which I mentioned the book, it's called the four-inch flight, because it managed to get four inches off the pad. And then everything just stopped. And it just sort of fell back onto the pad, denting the fins on the way. And this was on television. Everybody could see this stuff. Things kept going wrong. The thing about the Americans was that everything was done in public. Everything was

done on live television. And the thing that they were so scared about, and Kennedy in particular, remember, new in the job at that time, was so scared about, was that an astronaut would actually blow up right there on the pad in front of 80 million American viewers. I mean, it's a spectacular own goal. And there was actually a senior government scientist at the time who actually said this would be the most expensive public funeral in history. They just were terrified that this would happen on live television in front of the world. So they were cautious. But their caution was the Soviets' gain. Because as you say, the Soviets didn't have those, they weren't squeamish like that. They were ready

to send up rockets without announcing them, with certainly not filming them on live television. And they only did announce them when they actually finally got into orbit. And that's what happened with Yuri Gagarin. bit and that's what happened with Yuri Gagarin. Here's the Dance Notes History. We're talking Yuri Gagarin with Stephen Walker. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in potsdam was really stalin saying yeah tell me something i don't know the unexpected and it was at that

moment that he just handed her all these documents that he discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Well, let's talk about that. Well, we should actually say that eric garan very interesting from your book i didn't realize what a traumatic childhood the german invasion of the soviet union members of his family enslaved murdered i mean it's a full-on soviet experience yeah i mean it

was i mean he was in that part of western russia which was overrun by the nazis in 1941 he was living with his parents and with his sister and brother in a little house there. They were turfed out of the house by the SS. And his father had to build a dugout where they lived for the next two years. They literally lived in a dugout sort of behind the house. And there was an occasion where, I think Gagarin was seven years old,

had a younger brother called Boris. And Boris, I don't know how it happened, but an SS guy decided this boy was irritating him. So he hanged him from a tree, from an apple tree in their garden. And Yuri Gagarin saw this. He was seven at the time. And he raced back to the dugout where his mother was, and he screamed to his mother, and his mother came running out. And the SS guy had gone at that point, and he managed to cut down this boy, Boris, who was five and was amazingly still breathing and still alive, didn't talk for months and months afterwards. And Yuri Ligarin saw all of this, you know, he was living in a dugout, his brother nearly died, he saw this. And I think what that

did for people like that, and of that sort of generation in the Soviet Union, I find this again and again with people I was interviewing, is a kind of a toughness. Death is part of life. And actually, if you get blown up in a rocket, you get blown up in a rocket. It's not a hardness because there's enormous amounts of humanity and poetry and love, I think, in there, and appreciation of this incredible moment where they're going to see the world for the first time. But there's toughness, a different kind. Go through the siege of Leningrad and things like that. 27 million Soviets died. It changes things. So they were prepared to take the kind of risks because as far as they were concerned, they were in a war

still, this time with the United States. Well, talk me through April the 12th, 1961. How does the launch go? Well, the launch is traumatic for everybody involved. There is an incredible character, this book is really about those characters, there's a great character called Korolyov, who is the architect of the whole Soviet space program. And he actually loves this guy, Gagarin, there's a kind a father-son relationship between them. Korolyov is in the bunker, which is a hundred feet underground, because if this thing blows up,

everybody's going to die. He's down there. He's got a phone in front of him, which he can command this abort. We're coming up to seven minutes past nine, Moscow time in the morning. Yuri Gagarin is sitting in his spherical capsule. He's battened down. There's been a problem with the hatch. And at one point, they weren't even

sure if the hatch was securely fastened. And so they had to take it all off and put it all back again. And then finally, they light the candle at 9.07am. And this guy goes and he screams out over the radio. He screams out the word, Poyakali, which in Russian, it means let's go. And off they go. And he goes up. And it is the most incredible ride. He is in orbit 11 minutes later. Very nearly something goes wrong with one of the stages of that rocket. And something sort of does go wrong because his orbit ends up being way too high. But he is in orbit 11 minutes after leaving this secret missile base in Baikonur in Kazakhstan, which is still the main kind of rocket base for the Russians. And there is this incredible moment where he literally feels himself lifted off his seat. It's that first experience of weightlessness.

lifted of his seat. It's that first experience of weightlessness. And he then turns to the porthole, which is on his right-hand side. And in a secret briefing that was kept classified for decades, and which I quote in the book, not the version he gave to the press afterwards, he looks out for the first time on the world. And what he sees is sensational. He sees something that no one has ever seen before. He sees this incredible thin blue line that is our atmosphere. And he sees the stars with a sort of brilliance that you cannot see on Earth, and they don't twinkle.

And then he sees, because the spacecraft is actually slowly spinning, he sees the sun sliding through his porthole window. And he talks about this light filling this capsule. I mean, it's incredible to radiant. I mean, I dare say even heavenly light that fills this capsule. You're kind of beyond politics at that point. This is an incredible moment. This is three and a half billion years of life on this planet. And this is the first organic thing to leave the biosphere and see the world below. So he races into a sunset and then he loses all contact with the ground.

And for most of the time, he has nobody to talk to because that little radio he's got doesn't work properly. And there's total isolation. So he is in a spinning capsule, very slowly spinning, where he turns the lights down, where he has nobody to talk to except a tape recorder, and somebody had forgotten to put in enough tape. So he actually has to take an autonomous decision nobody to talk to except a tape recorder, and somebody had forgotten to put in enough tape. So

he actually has to take an autonomous decision and rewind his tape and then erase over everything he's just said. And he looks at the world. He sees this fast motion sunset. And then he goes into the black side of the world from literally north to south across the whole of the Pacific Ocean in about 20 minutes. And then he runs the bottom of South America, north of Antarctica, and he races into the daylight, into a fast motion sunrise. And on he goes. And then all things start going wrong, you know,

and it is a mind-blowing moment for him and for humanity, I think. It's extraordinary. Talk to me about the big moment when he decides it's time to come down. He's going to give all my secrets away, Dan. That's what I'm going to do. He has a terrible, terrible moment where two parts of his Vostok capsule,

the bit which has the retro rocket and the spherical bit that he's attached to, are supposed to separate just before re-entry. And they don't. And they're supposed to separate within 10 seconds and they don't separate. They don't separate for 10 minutes and he starts to spin and he starts to spin really fast. I mean, he is spinning, he calls it a cordupelle. This stuff didn't come out for decades and some of it is still secret. That's the incredible thing. There are still secrets about this stuff. So he's spinning into the

atmosphere, skimming the surface of the atmosphere. He's also way off course at this point. He has no idea where he is, in fact. At one point, he thinks he's over America earlier on. He's actually over the Pacific. There's no instrumentation. There's no mission control. There is just him in a cannonball like Wallace and Gromit going around the world. And he starts to enter the upper levels of the atmosphere. And of course, the friction starts to build, and the heat starts to build. And he describes in this secret recorded briefing, and I have it quoted in the book, he starts talking about how he can smell burning. He can hear crackling. And it's pretty obvious, because the two parts are still joined

together, that the heat shield isn't operating properly. And that if this does not separate, he's a dead man. He's going to burn alive going back into Earth. Remember, they'd already announced on Moscow radio to the whole world when he was in orbit, that he was in orbit. That's when the secret gets released. But he still had to come down. So his parents are hearing it on the radio for the first time. They're discovering their son, they think is a fighter pilot, is actually in space, in a spacecraft orbiting the world. But of course, they haven't announced the news yet that he's come back. So at the very moment when Muscovites and people across the Soviet Union are celebrating, already they're in the streets cheering their guy on, you know,

he still has to come down. And he's not down safely yet. You want me to tell you what happens next, don't you? I wouldn't mind. He's spinning down. He's spinning into the atmosphere. And he's cool as a cucumber. That's the incredible thing.

I mean, this is the guy that watched his brother being hanged when he was seven. I mean, he's got the right stuff. He's human. He's terrified. Of course he is. And he talks about that. But at the same time, he's a pilot. He's a fighter pilot.

He's been right on the border flying against NATO countries. He is coming down and he is cool. And he's still, get this, recording what he's seeing in his little tape recorder, the bit of tape that he's actually got left. He's still actually doing that as he comes down. And yet he's facing the most horrific death. He's going to burn alive, basically. Or even worse, the two bits could slightly come apart. And with the violence of the spin, the retro rocket could smash through his little thin walls of his little spherical capsule to him strapped vulnerably inside. So that could happen as well. And what actually happens is that the heat starts to burn off the connections, the cables are actually connecting the two parts.

And a heat sensor, it's like a backup sensor, which is actually on the spacecraft, triggers a separation literally at the last moment. And suddenly, boom, he's free. For a moment, they're still attached like two shoes tied by a shoelace. For a few seconds later, spinning around like this. It's crazy what happens. When heace for a few seconds later, spinning around like this. It's crazy what happens. When he lands, a few minutes later, he's actually ejected from the capsule because the capsule can't land inside it. He actually ends up, of course, in a potato field in the middle of nowhere. And the only people there are a grandmother and her daughter who are picking potatoes, basically from the ground.

And they see this guy, he's still got his helmet on, he's got problems with his breathing tube, he's got this orange spaceship, and he's waving his arms and he's walking towards these people. And of course, they just run away. They're absolutely terrified. So the first man to go around the globe in 106 minutes ends up in a potato field with two women who are running away. He landed in the Soviet Union, right? I mean, could he have landed in Cornwall? Yes. He could have defected to Cornwall. I mean, he actually, if he got that envelope out and pressed the buttons in the right order, he could have actually done just that. And I actually checked that with some technical people in Russia today who know quite a lot about the workings of

the Vostok, some of which, as I said, are still secret. He could have done, you know, he could have done anything. The incredible coincidence is that by some fortuitous combination of circumstances, he was so off course that he actually ended up parachuting over or very close to the city where he'd studied foundry work in an industrial college just off the Volga River when he was a teenager. And he looks now and he goes, I recognise this place. I recognise that bend in the river. I mean, you just couldn't make this stuff up. He recognises this stuff. And so he does actually know pretty much where he is because he lands, totally coincidental, know pretty much where he is because he lands totally coincidental on mother russian terra firma on mother russian soil on this potato field close to the place where this kind of peasant

background guy studied foundry work three or four years previously he was a lucky mother russia um his life went downhill like so many astronauts people have glimpsed Earth I guess you just realise that the rest of your life is just a crushing anticlimax and he drank and died an early death didn't he?

Well he did he was sent out as Khrushchev the Premier's poster boy basically you know good looking guy big dazzling smile

which I think is one of the things that lent him to that job and he went all over the world he didn't go to the United States of America he once addressed the United Nations but he didn't do a tour

of the US but he came here to the UK and famously had tea with the Queen. And apparently it was quite a successful tea that he had with the Queen. And they loved him here. He was very successful. But he did start to do that rock star thing. I mean, he became the kind of most famous man on the planet. I mean, it was incredible this moment. We're all used to Neil Armstrong. But actually, you've got to go back to a time when Neil Armstrong wasn't there. And this guy was actually it. So he did drink, he did womanise, he did all that sort of stuff. And he did sort of descend, but he managed to

get himself back in shape again for what he hoped would be some more flying in space. But then something really strange happened. And he was killed in a plane crash in 1968, training on a jet. And the circumstances of that plane crash remain a mystery to this day. I mean, there are so many conspiracies about was he killed by the KGB? Was he murdered? Was he bumped off by a bit? Did he actually, what happened? And no one has satisfactorily worked it out. I actually interviewed a guy who was there who heard the crash happen.

And his evidence that he gave to the secret commission of inquiry in 1968 was tampered with. He saw it 20 years later and he told me on the record, he's dead now. He told me on the record, and I have it in an interview, that he went and managed to get his files and all his evidence had been changed, even though his signature was his signature there. Who knows what happened? Who knows? Poor old Yuri Gagarin. What a story. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast talking about The Book is a Triumph. It is called Beyond the Astonishing Story. It's got the longest subtitle in the world. Beyond the Astonishing Story of the First got the longest subtitle in the world. Beyond the Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space.

Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Enjoyed it very much. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. This part of the history of our and i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it i'd be very very grateful thank you