Grounded

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.