Yuri’s Ghost
Dear Susannah
The Kazakhstan Star Base – built in the 1950s around the dream of Sergei Korolev, veteran of the gulags and Chief Engineer of the early Russian space programme – is a direct analogue of Kennedy Space Centre.
Russian space technology has always struck me as very Jules Verne. There is something almost Victorian about it, as though the rockets it manufactures are powered by steam and coal, great locomotives climbing unseen tracks all the way to orbit. The base has its own runway so I got a good look at the facilities as we came in to land. Launch gantries and service towers that might have been built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel or George Stephenson. Hardware that looks like it was forged in a blacksmith’s workshop; I’m sure some of it dates from the beginning of the Cold War, back to the days of Stalin and the gulags. Very pre-Perestroika. And cosmonaut suits that resemble something a deep sea diver might wear, rockets that run on clockwork and coal, with boosters that look like tree trunks, as if lighting a giant bonfire is all it takes to reach orbit.
The welcome I received couldn’t have been warmer, the precise opposite of the Russian weather I’d been warned about. I shall tell you more about that later when my fingers have fully thawed, and I don’t feel as frozen as a Victorian street urchin in the middle of winter.
The training centre is more spectre-ridden than any haunted battlefield. They say these halls are haunted by the ghost of Gagarin himself. If so, we have nothing to fear for surely Yuri will be the most benign of revenants. He must want us to succeed. His were the first human eyes to see the Earth from orbit and I feel he is watching us now, urging us on.
The accommodation is basic but then so are my needs, which amount to little more than a room to sleep in. I haven’t spent long in my quarters. I’ve been so busy since arriving that I’ve barely had a chance to touch the keyboard. So a little updating is required.
I had been dreading the training but in the end it actually turned out to be fun. A three-month crash course (the ghosts of Genghis Khan’s Mongol cavalry haunting the surrounding steppes). The Russian climate redefined my experience of what it is to be cold, making me grateful that I spent so little time outside. The cold killed more of Hitler’s soldiers in the Russian hinterland than Stalin’s army ever did. And now I understand why. Even the miserable vicissitudes of an English mid-winter, in which the sun never seems to climb above the rooftops of a grey and dreary land, cannot match this pitiless, penetrating cold. Climate change has sharpened the knife that seems to cut through every pore of your skin when you go outside. The weather is brutal. Thank god it’s something I’ve observed for the most part, rather than actually experienced. Winter wonderlands are lethal here.
I don’t want to bore you with details of the training. Suffice to say that three months have passed in what seems like as many weeks. The training, the briefest of initiations, has turned out to be nothing like the gung-ho nonsense of so many block buster sims. Too short a period of time to learn Russian in any depth; besides the induction has been a joint Russian/American enterprise, delivered half in one language, half in the other. At the end of the three months I am fully competent in absolutely nothing of course. If you include time spent at university it takes about a decade and a half to qualify as an astronaut and even then the training doesn’t stop. I have managed to learn only the most basic of fundamentals, barely enough to avoid being completely overwhelmed by the experience of spaceflight.
I am off to the launch site at the end of the week, to the tall towers and runways that will lead ultimately, two years hence, to our destination – Saturn lunar space. That I am to be part of that mission still strikes me as remarkable. Not bad for a kid who left school without a diploma of any kind.
Apologies for being such a poor correspondent. I’ve barely had a moment to myself these past weeks, certainly little enough time to update this rough log. At the end of each day I’ve fallen into bed, sometimes too tired to undress fully. Sleep - a bare six hours of it at most – has had to come first, before diary keeping. Once in orbit I will have more time for my journal and I promise you will get to know my companions as well as I hope to. After all, we have four years in which to become properly acquainted.
This is my last night in this snow-bound outpost. It seems like an extension of my first. So, farewell Russia and indeed planet Earth! Next stop, Earth orbit. I am bound for space but will there be space enough for me aboard Galileo?
Tomorrow I will find out.
See also: https://www.facebook.com/thescreamingplanet