# Grounded *Yuri Gagarin and the Seven Years He Was Not Allowed to Fly Alone* — Legendary Biographies No. 276 - **Subject:** Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin - **Written by:** Marit Sandvik - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / History - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 224 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-556-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale (ISBN 979-8-90623-665-4) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/276-grounded.html ## About this book The cosmonaut center stood northeast of Moscow, in buildings cut out of birch forest. Yuri Gagarin had been trained in them. He came back to them at twenty-nine as deputy training director, a colonel who commanded no flying unit, to prepare other men for the work he was not permitted to do. He had been taken from senior lieutenant to major in a single step, skipping captain, on the strength of one flight of one hundred and eight minutes. Eleven of the twenty-one chapters sit after 12 April 1961: the flight is the shortest and least interesting thing that ever happened to him. The Soviet Union did not select a cosmonaut, it cast one. The man had to be short enough for the capsule, he had to photograph well, and his background had to read correctly in every newspaper on earth. Nikolai Kamanin, the general who ran selection, wrote in his diary that he ranked Gagarin and German Titov nearly equal and chose days before the launch. Then Site 1 at Baikonur: manual controls locked, the release code sealed in an envelope in the cabin, an ejection at seven thousand meters into a plowed field in Saratov Oblast. Because the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale required a pilot to land with his craft, the state said he had and went on saying it until 1971. He repeated it, to journalists, to the federation, across thirty countries in eighteen months. The rest is the seven years. A seat in the Supreme Soviet, an itinerary that reads as labor when it is laid out, and requests for flight hours that survive only because the officer whose job was to refuse them kept a diary. After Vladimir Komarov came down in 1967 he was barred from spaceflight permanently. No written order forbidding him to fly aircraft has ever been produced, and the book says so directly under its own central argument. Seven serious accounts of the crash near Novosyolovo are set out and none is adopted. He was thirty-four. ## Contents 1. Klushino 2. The Dugout 3. Gzhatsk to Lyubertsy 4. The Volga 5. Orenburg 6. Luostari 7. The Twenty 8. The Chief Designer 9. Choosing a Face 10. One Hundred and Eight Minutes 11. The Lie About the Landing 12. Vnukovo 13. Thirty Countries 14. Foros 15. A Saint Without a Church 16. Grounded 17. Komarov 18. The Thesis 19. Novosyolovo 20. The Argument About a Crash 21. The Uses of Yuri Gagarin ## Questions **Who is Grounded about?** Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Grounded — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,323 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 68,500 words, 21 chapters, 224 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Marit Sandvik writes for Legendary Biographies, published by Greenlight Publishing. A full author profile is available at legendary-biographies.com.