The Cold War space odyssey

Bestselling author Stephen Walker has produced an utterly binge-worthy yet sobering history of spaceflight set against the biggest existential conflict of the 20th century

After Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in 1969, The New York Times asked a few famous people for reactions. The 14th Dalai Lama hailed the landing as “the very acme of scientific achievement”. He added, “But the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind and progress toward achieving the real mental peace and satisfaction when he reaches the moon”. According to Buddhist psychology, delusion, greed, and hatred are the mental defilements, the root causes of suffering.
 
The Dalai Lama was speaking during the hate-filled Cold War, when Armstrong’s lunar walk was a direct response to the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, the Soviets had been the first human group to put a man in space. The cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was sent there in a missile originally designed for mammoth nuclear payloads. Spaceflight was part of a deadly existential conflict. So, it’s safe to assume that Gagarin’s flight, too, would have made the Dalai Lama introspect.
 
The gentle monk’s quote is not part of this book. But the book, too, emphasises that cheerleading need not be the automatic response to spaceflight; that the magnificent achievement can be considered soberly and as part of a larger perspective. Neither does Beyond succumb to jingoism, nor does it treat spaceflight like a spectacle. Yes, it celebrates the feat, but also reminds us that “a dramatic sense of purpose” while achieving the impossible can dissolve sacred concerns for human life and values.
 
The book depicts the international race to be the first to put a man in space. The backdrop is infused with Cold War existential anxiety and unfathomed sky. It’s an epic stage for the best and worst human traits: bravery, ingenuity, optimism, ambition, teamwork, among others; also aggression, xenophobia, power-lust, and sexism, among others. This is clearly a book of its time, written in the sixtieth year after the Gagarin spaceflight.
 
It shows spacefaring efforts in their grey complexity. First, winning the space race would have been propaganda for capitalist and communist alike; specifically those Americans and Soviets who considered having male bodies a prerequisite for spaceflight; and also ostensibly egalitarian Soviets who wanted a man of Russian ethnicity to have the honour, among people from the many ethnic groups that made up the USSR. Way to bust nonsense about spacefaring as a “meritocratic” enterprise. We are also told how American rocket development was led by ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun.
 
Further, both the US and USSR played out worst-case scenarios using monkeys and other hapless beings. For instance, among other tests, the US put pigs under “high-speed acceleration”; we are told, “[t]hey were sometimes eaten after they had been killed” in a test. The Americans chose potentially aggressive but smart chimpanzees to launch into space; the Soviets chose obedient dogs, a fact used to make a piercing assessment about both societies.
 
Appalling accounts follow of how the US and Soviet space programmes subjected their human candidates, too, to tests that assessed fitness for an unearthly, inadequately known frontier, tests that were, essentially, torture: they involved anal probing, heat chambers, centrifuges and vibration chambers, isolation chambers, exposure to ultraviolet rays, being hung upside down, among others. The book tells us how the Soviet space programme leaders, in their haste to make a Soviet man the first in space, wilfully neglected safety and gambled with the lives of cosmonauts, including Gagarin. According to one estimate, Gagarin’s historic flight had more than a 50 per cent chance of failure, which in space or re-entry pretty much meant death. Unlike media-friendly Americans, the Soviets hid their failures, perhaps hampering US attempts to improve safety for their astronauts. In various other ways, too, the book investigates those implications of spaceflight that are frequently airbrushed.

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

Author: Stephen Walker

Publisher: William Collins

Price: Rs 999; Pages: 512

 
The narrative has two major strands, and switches pleasingly between them: the American and Soviet parts of the race to put a man in space. The book features available information (along with quite a few important photos), but also interviews with people who saw events unfold at close quarters; some of them have not spoken before, according to the author. The information is woven together superbly. Written in accessible language, Beyond  deploys time-honoured tools of storytelling with triumphant facility: suspense, visual writing, adroit use of scene and dialogue, swift pacing, and fleshed-out character arcs and profiles, among others.
 
As you might expect, Yuri Gagarin’s brief life is treated in ample, satisfying detail. It’s the archetypal “hero’s journey”: a carpenter’s son, having lived through some of the most terrible years in Soviet history from the Nazi invasion onwards, became the first spacefarer. The Soviet scientists, engineers and others who put him in space, too, are revealed in three dimensions, as are their American counterparts.
 
In dramatic fashion, the narrative devotes lavish attention to the preparations for Gagarin’s launch, the flight itself, and his return to earth. We feel like we’re with Gagarin in his spacecraft; lovingly and meticulously, we are shown what he saw and the dangers he survived during his 108-minute orbit of the planet. Even though we are aware of the ending, the book has twists and turns that we might not know.
 
We are told, for instance, that the Americans could have been first in space; in the words of then-candidate astronaut Alan Shepard, “[W]e had them by the short hairs — and we gave it away”. No spoilers, though.
 
Finally, Gagarin’s flight is placed in happier perspective; it “meant everything” to the USSR, that had lost “some twenty-seven million of its citizens just sixteen years earlier in the Second World War, many of whose cities had been devastated, much of whose industry had been obliterated”. And, temporarily at least, the Cold War was laid aside in celebrations around the world.
 
In Beyond,  Stephen Walker, author of one prior bestselling book, and award-winning documentary director, brings to the general audience a book that is screaming its head off to be a web/TV series. As a text, it is admirable for taking a non-cheerleading, nuan­ced, and balanced look at one of humankind’s most celebrated achievements. With hardly a word out of place, Beyond is an expertly written drama. It is utterly binge-worthy.