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April 19, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:49
Edition 538 - Stephen Walker
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
Hey, beautiful day as I record this.
Temperature's about 16 degrees in London Town.
That's 61 Fahrenheit if you're in the US or other countries where they're using Fahrenheit.
All in all, a pretty nice British spring day.
I'm looking out here if I just stretch my neck.
The sky is completely blue.
And I've got to tell you, as you will know, looking at that scene is a real tonic if you've been locked away for a long time.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I'm going to do some shout-outs in the next edition here.
So if you've emailed recently, going to do some mentions here, you can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv, if you'd like to send me an email about your thoughts.
Just telling me about yourself and what you do and how you use the show is always nice for me.
As I continue in my isolation, it's just nice to know that there is a world out there.
So you can do that by going to the website, theunexplained.tv, following the link, and you can email me from there.
If you've made a donation to the online show recently, thank you very much for doing that if you have.
It all enables this to continue.
There might come a point at some point in the rest of this year where I have to take a bit of a break from things.
Basically, how do I talk about this?
Part of my radio life is that I've had to work pretty consistently.
And, you know, radio, unless you're at the very high end of the premiership, you don't get paid fantastic amounts.
So basically, the place where I live, have my being, do my recordings, is going to have at some point to have some vital work done.
And that will probably mean that somehow, I haven't worked out quite how, I'm going to have to move out into a hotel or something for a period while all of this is done.
It can't be left.
And I don't want to leave it anymore because, you know, you wouldn't want to.
So things are going to be uncertain for me for a little while.
It's not going to happen just yet.
But I will keep the output going.
And wherever I am, if I'm in a hotel room or somewhere, you know, I'm going to carry on trying to make recordings.
But, you know, we'll see how all of that goes as this year goes on.
You know, things that in life you put off and put off and put off, I can't put those things off anymore.
So that's just a little size of my life.
Thank you very much for telling me what you think about the shows, for giving me guidance.
Of course, I can't please everybody all of the time, but I think I'm more or less on the right path.
And I listen to what you say and I read all of the emails.
And if you have a guest suggestion, I'll take that into account.
And if your email specifically requires a reply, I'll make sure you get one.
And if you haven't had one, then please let me know again and I will make sure that you do.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam, for all of your hard work on the show over many, many years now.
We've been together doing this.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests on the online show.
It's a bit of a family here.
It's a team effort.
It's all very streamlined.
And it's been lovely to discover recently that I've been up there on the charts with the big corporate content.
You know, here I am making this little tiny podcast that's grown so much around the world in my apartment.
And I'm competing with the big boys with all of their money and all of their resources.
And that's down to you.
Thank you very much for supporting this.
And please continue so to do, as they say.
Now, the item that you're going to hear on this edition of the show is something that I'm taking from my radio show recently, just because I want to have it here and archived.
It's such a good guest.
Stephen Walker has written the story of the space race between the Americans and the Russians, that it resulted in Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space.
A week ago today was the 60th anniversary of that.
So it's very important that we record that.
And Stephen Walker's book is amazing.
He's had access to all sorts of people and all sorts of information and has stories that I don't think have been told before, and he tells them beautifully.
So Stephen Walker, his book is called Beyond, and he is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
And thank you to him.
In a busy week for him of promoting the book, doing interviews for giving me his time to speak for longer than most of those conversations.
So stand by for Stephen Walker.
Remember, if you want to get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And that's always useful for me to know those things.
And as I sit here in lockdown, it's just nice to paint a picture of the rest of the world out there in my silence and isolation, as they call it.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition.
And here is how I introduced Stephen Walker with the story of Yuri Gagarin.
This last week saw a very special and very important anniversary.
On the 12th of April 1961, Yuri Gagarin's space capsule completed one orbit around the Earth and then came back home, marking a major milestone in the space race, as they called it.
As he took off, you could hear Gagarin's muffled yet iconic Pohali, which means let's go in Russian.
I'm sure I pronounced that terribly.
His pioneering single-orbit flight made him a hero in the Soviet Union, an international celebrity, and a regular quiz question at my school.
A man has written the story of that space race, of Yuri Gagarin's achievement, and of all of the characters involved in this.
It's written like a screenplay.
And bearing in mind, this man worked a goodly portion of his career in television, explains a lot.
His name is Stephen Walker, and the book is called that he's written about this beyond.
And Stephen is online to us now from West London.
Stephen, thank you for doing this tonight.
No, I'm delighted to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Stephen, I have to say that I read your book yesterday and I did a journalist speed read.
You'll know all about those.
So you have to read very, very quickly and try to take in an awful lot very, very fast.
But the one thing that I slowed down and took in was the quality of what you've done.
Now, there are people in this world I've discovered doing this show over the years who know how to find contacts and do interviews And get all the information.
And then they fall down on the writing.
You actually have written a beautifully crafted story, and you've got to speak to all the right people.
So, kudos to you.
How did you do that?
Well, goodness me.
I mean, on the meeting the people side, it was, I was on a sort of extraordinary detective story, really.
I mean, I sort of started initially the progress was, the process was to start by actually finding for a document, a potential documentary to find original secretly shot material from the late 1950s and the early 1960s of the Soviet space program.
And I knew this stuff existed somewhere in Russia.
And I managed to kind of persuade a production company to commission me to go out there, actually on three occasions, and go on a hunt really for this stuff.
And at the same time, pick up interviews with people who were eyewitnesses.
I mean, this is a period of history, which is sort of in that twilight zone between memory and history.
You know, there are people who are still, thank goodnessly, alive still to remember it, though a number of the people that I interviewed have since, sadly, passed away.
So I did go to Russia and I met the most incredible people.
And I found myself in film archives kind of with rats and mice kind of eating away and gnawing away at old bits of footage from 1961 and goodness knows what.
And in the end, cut a long story short, we weren't able to actually get enough material because a lot of it had been lost or was just or stolen or eaten, frankly, by rodents.
But we were able to get certain amounts of stuff done.
And what we did subsequently was we were actually, I mean, this is the extraordinary thing is we were able to turn this into a book.
And that is what we did.
We turned this into a book.
I turned this into a book.
And it became an absolutely fascinating journey for me in Russia and in the United States of America.
And I met more people and I gathered more evidence.
And slowly, bit by bit, I created this story.
And the story that I created was one that is in a very, very tight time period.
It's not as a biography or anything like that.
This is a four-month tale.
And it moves between the United States and Russia and Kazakhstan, which is where the rocket missile complex is.
And it all kind of has these powerful personalities that I got obsessed with.
And it all narrows down to that point 60 years ago on April the 12th, 1961, when this guy, Yuri Gagarin, sits on top of a nuclear missile without the nuclear bit on top, and he blasts into space.
It is an extraordinary story.
And as you say, it ping-pongs back and forth between the Russian experience, which is incredibly different from the experience in the United States.
They both have their eyes on the prize in different ways.
But I think it's important to paint the picture as it is seen from both sides, because the danger, I think, as history unfolds, and your thoughts on this welcome, is that we will see the exploration of space in its early days as being the preserve of men in control rooms wearing shirts with American button-down collars and buzz cuts.
And of course, your book.
And slide rules.
And slide rules, exactly.
And little flickering black and white monitors.
But your story is very different because there are two sides, as they say, to every story.
There is the American side, which we all know about because it's America.
And then there's the Soviet side.
And it's very, very, very at variance.
Yeah, well, I mean, the key thing, this is what's so fascinating for me in this journey.
And I think it's exciting for readers as well, because the key difference is that the Soviet side is all conducted in total secrecy.
And the American side essentially is all conducted in the open.
Two different cultures, two different ideologies in the middle of the Cold War.
Very, very different approaches.
And what that means is, is that the American story is these guys who were preparing to be the first American astronaut and possibly the first astronaut in the world to go into space were very well known.
They were rock stars in their day.
I mean, they were all over the covers of magazines.
They had lots of money.
They drove Corvette cars.
They got up to all kinds of business.
All sorts of things were happening.
They lived rock star lives.
It's difficult for us to imagine how when these guys stood up in front of the press in 1959, the Mercury 7 astronauts, as they were called, to be introduced to the world, the entire press corps in this room, I mean, it's a ballroom, stood up and cheered and applauded.
These were America's gladiators.
These were America's heroes.
Now you flick across the Iron Curtain and you see this dark, weird kind of mirror image of this, which is sort of familiar, but it's also not.
Everything is in secret.
No press conferences, no appearances on magazines, no rock star fame at all, not much money either.
Instead of seven guys, you've got 20 guys.
You've got 20 men selected from Air Force units.
These are USSR Air Force units after an incredibly rigorous selection process.
And these guys have no, they're not even allowed to tell their own wives what they're doing for the first several months of training.
So their wives don't even know, unless they've told them illicitly, that their husbands are training to be the first to fly in space.
They have so little money because they're on sort of junior officer pay that they end up, the wives sometimes end up having to use floor polishers to clean the floors of kind of fellow cosmonauts in the same building.
They've got no cars.
They've got, whereas the Americans have their Corvette racing cars or sports cars, they have no refrigerators.
They have no telephones even.
I mean, it is, they take a bus from A to B. And whenever they go on various trips, which they have to do, like parachuting exercises in one part of the country or whatever, or simulator exercise in another part of the country, they have KGB guards who are surrounding them and make sure that they don't breathe a word to anybody.
So you've got a totally opposite, but sort of, I said, weird mirror Image, as I describe it in the book, of you kind of recognize the same elements, but because it's shrouded in secrecy, it's different.
And the reason why it's shrouded in secrecy is because to get the prize, to get there first, to get to space first, is so essential, is so important in this middle of the Cold War period that the Soviets do not want to give away what they are doing.
They want to surprise the Americans and they want to go when there's a gap and beat the Americans before the Americans know what have even hit them.
And that is the drama.
I mean, true story.
I mean, this is not fiction.
This is, but it sometimes feels like fiction.
This is the drama of that last four months that I tell in Beyond.
And it's very hard for the generation today who'll probably know from school a potted history of all of this, to understand the fact that at this point in the early 60s, the turn of the 50s, early 60s, the United States was actually on the back foot in this.
The Russians were making, although the United States didn't know an awful lot of it.
Yes, they did have spy missions and U-2 spy planes up there trying to find out.
But the Russians were actually doing rather better.
Yes.
I mean, the thing is, the Russians had one massive advantage over the Americans in terms of their technology.
And this is something the Americans couldn't get their heads around at this time.
This is something that Eisenhower, who was the president just before John F. Kennedy, couldn't get his head around.
This is something that Kennedy himself, who really is where my book starts with the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in January 1961, could not get his head around.
And that is that they had these enormous missiles.
And the reason why the Soviets had these enormous missiles, as I explain in the book, is because they have these very, relatively speaking, primitive hydrogen bombs to stick on top.
So you've got a very primitive hydrogen bomb, which has primitive mechanics, is primitive electronics, and is heavy.
And because it's heavy, it needs a great big, powerful rocket to kind of push it into the skies.
Whereas conversely and paradoxically, the Americans have actually quite advanced for their time, very light nuclear weapons.
So they don't need such powerful rockets.
So what that means is they may be winning the arms race.
They've got the better missiles because they've got the better nuclear warheads.
But what they don't have is such big rockets.
And so essentially, what is happening here with Yuri Gagarin or any of these guys is, I mean, this is a slightly kind of, you know, shorthand way of putting it, but essentially what is happening is, is that the most powerful missile in the world, this Soviet missile called an R-7, which is capable of basically launching a thermonuclear weapon all the way from the Soviet Union to New York City and destroying the whole of that city,
is being converted into a rocket capable of carrying a human being instead of a hydrogen bomb and into space instead of to New York City.
That's what's happening.
The man is essentially replacing the bomb.
Doesn't that make the Russian...
We've seen the footage.
But doesn't that mean that Russia's program then was much more risky?
It was very risky, and the Soviets had tons of rockets also exploding on the launch pad.
And my goodness me, the footage that I was chasing, as I was saying at the beginning in my little detective trail, actually has, I mean, I found incredible instances of what was once top, and for decades actually, top secret footage of all of these kind of explosions.
I mean, there were so many.
They just kept them secret.
That's all.
So the risk was huge.
They had this very dangerous weapon, dangerous in every sense of the word, dangerous for any human being sitting on top.
And you have to think, this is somebody, this is the first human being in existence to sit on top of a missile and be blasted somewhere, you know, possibly into oblivion, quite a high possibility, actually, of him being blasted into oblivion.
So it takes, it was a huge risk.
But the Soviets had to take that risk.
They are at this point a nation that wants to prove to a divided world that they represent the future.
It's very hard for us today to imagine what that world was like, where it is literally divided and the Cold War is very real and could turn hot at any moment.
So the first person to get into space doesn't just represent a massive technological win for whichever superpower manages to do it.
It also represents the future.
Come to us.
Come our way.
And if the Soviets get there first, what they're essentially saying to the world is the Soviet way, the communist way, our way is the better way.
Come to us.
And that's a real siren call in 1961 when the Vietnam War is about to happen, when Fidel Castro is in Cuba, when the Berlin Wall is literally within two or three months about to go up.
It's a real siren call.
So this is not just about a great technological achievement, which it is, or even an ideological achievement.
This is about the destiny of the planet.
That's really what it becomes.
And is it the truth that both sides would have been willing to sacrifice a lot, human lives, careers, resources, to get there?
Well, the Soviets were certainly willing to do so.
On the American side, I think the astronauts themselves were willing, if necessary, to sacrifice their lives in order to get there first.
And they were patriots, but they were also pilots, top test pilots who were willing to take those kind of risks if they had to.
I mean, they understood what risk meant.
You know, they were guys that flew these really hot, dangerous fighter jets at the time.
And then they put themselves in all kinds of risky situations.
But the difference is, is that the higher levels in America were terrified of taking those risks because the danger was that if an American astronaut blew smithereens on the pad at Cape Canaveral in front of 80 million viewers on live television, and there would have been about 80 million viewers on live television watching this at that Time that would be at the very least a spectacular own goal at that point.
So it's actually Kennedy in February 1961 is starting to get frightened and he's starting to urge caution.
He makes a press conference in which he says, you know, we do not want to lose an American life actually trying to get ahead of the Russians to space.
He says that.
And the Russians are watching.
And there is a critical moment in my book where there is a major debate.
I mean, it's more than a debate.
It's a rift inside NASA at the time, which is, do we go with our next flight and put a human on top of it?
Or do we go with our next flight and do one more test flight before we put a human on top of it?
And this becomes a huge battleground inside NASA through February.
And the battleground is being played out in the American press so that the Russians can read everything that's going on.
And they see it and they read it and they realize.
And when I say they, I'm really talking about one extraordinary man who's a big character we might talk about later in my book called Sergei Korolev, a very secretive man, fascinating character, who's the architect of the whole Soviet space program.
He's watching.
His wife is an English translator.
Everything is being translated.
And he sees an opportunity, which is literally a matter of days before the Americans send somebody up.
And it comes right down.
It's a photo.
It's like a grand national photo finish.
It comes right down to the wire.
And this is where the Soviet secrecy really aids them because they can take that risk and they can take it without the Americans knowing that they've taken it until it's too late.
So the Russians are aided by their secrecy, but they're also aided by the fact that the Americans are squabbling.
Very much so.
And it's very much kind of act two.
I mean, I've divided my book into sort of acts.
I mean, of course, it's a non-fiction book and there's kind of years of research in there, but actually it lends itself to this.
I mean, it plays out where actually without giving the game away, what really, this debate becomes huge.
And what fuels the debate, and this makes it particularly rich, actually, from a writer's point of view, what fuels it is that on one side of the debate in NASA are the astronauts themselves and the people training them that really want to go.
I mean, really want to go up there, particularly the man who finally did become America's first astronaut, a man called Alan Shepard, who subsequently went to the moon on Apollo 14.
He's really gung-ho to do this.
He says, but the Russians are so quick.
We've got to go.
We've got to go now.
You know, he goes to the highest levels.
But on the other side of the equation, you've got a man called Werner von Braun, who is the guy that eventually built the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo capsules to the moon, took Neil Armstrong to the moon, took Buzz Aldrin to the moon.
He's the biggest rocket ever built.
And he was a genius, but he had this very dark sort of Nazi past where he'd built V-2 missiles that were used to rain destruction on London and on Antwerp at the end of the Second World War.
And this guy has this dark history.
And Werner von Braun starts saying, no, we need to go cautiously.
And there are people at the time in NASA who say, this guy is still fighting World War II.
He is still undermining the Americans.
He is a German Nazi.
He was actually in the SS.
And what he is doing is he's destroying America's chance to win the race to space.
So the man who got America to the moon was suspected of being anti-American.
Absolutely.
And at very high levels.
So you've got the head of the guy, the guy that designed what we now call mission control was a man who passed away a couple of years ago called Christopher Kraft.
A fantastic character.
I mean, he's an amazing character.
And he designed what we, I mean, this had to be all invented.
It didn't exist before that.
So he actually, I mean, it's incredible this, but he actually says, Werner von Braun, one sometimes wonder which flag he's fighting for.
Wow.
So Stephen, I want to try and unpick the detail of the characters, the personnel involved here, before we get to the teams of astronauts.
You highlighted this.
On the one side, you have Werner von Braun, man who worked for Adolf Hitler and was the rocketry expert, designed the V2, V1 rocket bombs.
And then on the other side, you have Korolev on the Soviet side, who is beloved of Khrushchev.
Khrushchev apparently absolutely adored this man and would give him anything he wanted.
You do.
I mean, actually, these are the two...
This is a book about duels, okay?
A duel between the premier of the Soviet Union, this wonderful character, Khrushchev, as you say, who's just like a James Bond villain, really, in some respects.
He's a great character.
And of course, John F. Kennedy, but not quite the John F. Kennedy that we know, because the mythic John F. Kennedy that we kind of know is all based on what happened later.
This is a guy that's very new in the job.
He's very young.
He's 43 years old.
He's very new in the job.
So you've got that duel that's playing out at one level in this story.
And then if you like, at another level in the story, you've got this duel between the two geniuses, the rocket geniuses, the rocket men, if you like.
These are two men on opposite sides of the Cold War who are the designers, the architects, the gurus, the wizards, if you like, behind the space race on each side.
So on one side, what you have is this guy, Werner von Braun, as you rightly say, beloved of Hitler.
So beloved of Hitler, I have to say, that when Hitler saw film of one of these V-2 missiles that were kind of the first ballistic missile, really, well, definitely, that had ever been sort of developed for war, when he first saw film of this and believed this was how he was going to finally win the war with one of these vengeance weapons, he actually made Werner von Braun, who was also an SS officer, a professor on the spot.
He was instantly professor Werner von Braun.
Okay, so this is a guy, Werner von Braun, who is, you've got to imagine, he's very handsome.
He's a very kind of solid, impressive kind of figure who has no moral compunctions whatsoever about what his missiles are being used for.
The fact that there is actually concentration camp labor, which is being used to help build these missiles, is really of no interest to him whatsoever.
He just wants to build rockets.
He doesn't really care what these rockets are really doing, that they've actually got bombs that are destroying things.
What he wants to do is design them, because eventually what he wants to do is to send men into space.
So you've got him on one side, and he ends up working for the Americans.
There is this extraordinary secret, sort of essentially CIA-type operation called paperclip.
And in that operation, something like 150 to 200 of these Nazi rocket scientists are basically smuggled over to the United States under the noses of the British to go and start building missiles for the Americans at the beginning of the Cold War.
And Werner von Braun gets that, gets that access because he's hidden, as an insurance policy, at least 14 tons worth of blueprints of his V-2 missiles in a mineshaft in Germany.
So that's his insurance policy.
That's what gets him to America.
He basically says, I will give this to you if you give me my freedom and the freedom of my men.
And so he starts working for the Americans.
Could America not have done this without him?
Could America have done this without dirtying its hands in this way?
No, I think it would have been very, very difficult to do that.
I mean, actually, partly, I mean, they had money.
That's definitely true.
But it would have taken much, much longer.
I mean, you have to understand that the two things that Germany, Nazi Germany, excelled in technologically at the end of the Second World War were jet engines and rocketry.
Everywhere else was way behind.
The United States, it's hard for us to think about that now, but the US was way behind on both of those, and so was Britain.
In fact, if anything, Britain was slightly ahead on jets, but way behind on rocketry.
But America, they had jet fighters at the end of the war.
They were developing near-supersonic jet fighters at the end of the war.
And they had very supersonic rockets.
I mean, rockets that were traveling at 4,000 or 5,000 miles an hour.
So they had these rockets already.
And the American, this was short-circuiting everything.
So these guys go originally, they go to New Mexico, then they end up in Alabama, and they all become naturalized.
And bit by bit, Werner von Braun becomes a really famous man.
He ends up on a Disney TV series in the mid-1950s where he pushes space, space, space, you know?
And he's the guy that becomes the dreamer, the architect, the visionary that's going to take us outside the Earth and onto the planets, to the moon, to space stations, to Mars, all of those things.
And he's very public.
A Hollywood film is made about his life, all of that.
Flip to the other side, a bit like I was saying earlier on about the astronauts on one side and the cosmonauts on the other.
And you have his mirror image.
You have this guy called Sergei Kurolyov, who's one of the really big figures in my book, an incredible character.
This is a guy who's also fascinated by rocketry in the 1930s and 40s.
But instead of actually employing concentration camp labor, he is a concentration camp laborer.
He's actually sent to the gulag, to a really horrific labor camp in the late 1930s when he's suspected of sort of Trotskyite sabotage, you know, when Stalin is becoming completely paranoid.
And he ends up digging for gold in very poorly maintained mines in the middle of this camp in Siberia where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are killed.
He's tortured by the secret police, Stalin's secret police.
His jaw is smashed.
He loses all his teeth.
I mean, it's incredible.
He actually keeps for the rest of his life his aluminium mug with his name scratched with a knife into the side of this mug as a sort of a memento of the horror of those years.
So if ever there was a driven man, here he was.
Yeah, I mean, he's really extraordinary because he ends up sort of getting rehabilitated.
And then the kind of, again, you couldn't make this stuff up.
He ends up having to work in the 1950s in the rocketry world with the man who denounced him in the late 1930s to Stalin's secret police.
I mean, it's just extraordinary.
But he becomes, as you rightly say, he becomes Khrushchev's baby.
Once Stalin has gone and Khrushchev becomes the new premier, and it's actually a much more liberal regime when that happens.
I mean, Stalin is sort of horrific and Khrushchev is not nearly as horrific.
There is a relationship between these two men.
And Kurolev plays Khrushchev.
He plays him brilliantly.
And he plays on Khrushchev's need and desire to boast about Soviet achievements to the West.
We are better than the Americans.
We are greater.
We are the future.
And in the meantime, Khrushchev gets two things.
You know, it's a bonus.
It's a gift that keeps on giving.
He gets missiles, ballistic missiles that can do damage if necessary.
And he gets a way to get into space before the Americans.
He does, and it's a very good point because the missile gives him, This is the 1950s, mid to late 50s.
And what was happening is that this is a country that's been utterly devastated by war.
I mean, the Soviets lost 27 million people in World War II.
I mean, that's, you know, almost half the entire population of this country, of the UK.
And they also lost most of their major Western cities, which were bombed, devastated, occupied.
I mean, it's horrific.
So they had all of this stuff going on.
All of this was just awful for them.
And they also didn't have enough money to support a really big army.
So even though they presented themselves, you know, on that border, you know, in East Germany and West Germany as this really powerful army, all these tanks, and we see all those parades in Red Square and all the rest of it, in reality, they didn't have money.
So missiles were just a godsend because you can fight a war much more cheaply than you can if you have to maintain a standing army, or you can threaten to at least, you know, and make others back off.
So the first time is an amazing moment in the book.
Well, I say it's an amazing moment because I don't describe this.
It's a witness who describes this.
It's Khrushchev's own son and then Khrushchev himself describe the moment when they went into effectively Korolev's factory to see this missile that eventually Yuri Gagarin would fly on for the first time.
And the whole Politburo walks it and they just cannot believe what they're seeing.
This is a missile that is 140 feet high that can fly a third of the way around the world at thousands of miles an hour, carrying massive warheads.
And they are absolutely dazzled.
I think Khrushchev once point says, you know, we almost licked it.
We just see what it tasted like, you know?
So you've got all of that.
And then, as you rightly say, you've got the first satellite, Sputnik.
You've got the first dog in space, Lygia.
Exactly.
See, another one of those school quiz questions.
Korolev definitely a man with a plan.
I was surprised to see in the book that his plans were so advanced that he was ready for three manned missions in quick succession, starting with Yuri Gagarin.
Yeah, no, he really was.
I mean, you know, they put two men, three men.
I mean, if you, I mean, he put together, he's like an Elon Musk of his day.
Like, I mean, whatever that means.
I mean, Elon Musk, if you're listening, you know, buy the book.
But the fact is, is that what he has, he has this incredible vision of essentially what we're trying to achieve now, 60 years later.
He's talking about space stations a bit like the International Space Station.
He's got a plan for that.
He's already sending probes to the moon.
He actually photographs this, one of these probes, photographs the dark side of the moon, the first time anybody had ever seen what it looks like on the other side of the moon, the far side of the moon.
He sends probes to Venus.
He later sends probes to Mars.
This is in the late 50s, early 1960s.
He thinks about exploring the solar system and he dreams about it.
And his dreams go back to when he was four years old and his mother used to tell him fairy stories about a little boy sitting on a magic carpet and flying around the world and looking down at the views.
Prophetic indeed.
What about Yuri Gagarin?
How did he emerge?
They say, cometh the hour, cometh the man.
If there were so many people, what, 20 core cosmonauts, he had to be the one who was picked from them.
So that must have been very difficult for this man who was born, I understand, quite humbly, in a Russian village.
He was.
I mean, he has a very interesting biography in a way.
And although my book is not a biography at all, it's obviously incredibly important to get a sense of who this character really is.
I think the seminal experience with this guy, Yuri Gagarin, who comes from a peasant family, his father is a carpenter.
They live in a little country village about 100 miles west of Moscow, which I've been to.
His father was a brilliant carpenter.
He actually built the house himself and I've seen it.
It's beautiful.
It's built out of Russian birch.
And it's quite extraordinary.
And he lives in this village and something extraordinary happens to him as a very small boy.
In June 1941, the Germans invade Russia, the Soviet Union.
They cross the border in what is the biggest invasion force in history.
And they cross on a 1500-mile front.
And as they sweep across western Russia, they sweep across Gagarin's village.
And within 24 hours, they burn down most of the houses in the village.
And they also burn a lot of the cattle and all kinds of things.
And an SS unit moves in to Gagarin's family home, the one that was built out of birchwood by the father, and they kick the family out.
And the family are forced to live in a dugout built by the father for the next two and a half years.
And I visited this dugout and it's absolutely, I mean, it's horrific.
It's underground.
It's very cramped.
It's filthy.
It's horrific.
But there was a moment where everything changes for Yuri Gagarin.
And I think it changes him in the sense of why he was able to do what he did.
And perhaps one of the reasons why he was finally picked.
Because as a boy of seven, he had a younger brother called Boris.
He was five.
And one day he was walking out of the dugout and he saw an SS officer hang Boris, aged five, from an apple tree in their garden.
And the officer just walked away and left Boris swinging from a branch.
And he raced to Boris to try and cut him down.
And he failed.
He was only seven and he was trying to get his little brother down from the branch and he couldn't quite reach up to it and it was just awful.
So he then ran back to this bunker and down the steps into this filthy little closeted bunker where his mother was and screamed and said, Boris, they've hanged Boris.
And Anna, the mother, came rushing out and the two of them rushed back to this tree and they managed to cut Boris down.
And he survived, although actually he wasn't able to speak for months and months afterwards.
And everybody has said, people I've spoken to who knew this, who had been around when this happened, said this little boy, aged seven, changed completely in that moment.
He became a different person immediately.
And that resilience and that strength that we see that enables him to sit on top of effectively a nuclear missile, but without the nuclear bit on top, I think, and I'm not the only one to think that, that all goes back to that seminal moment when he was seven years old and nearly saw his brother put to death.
What an astonishing and moving story, and also yet another tale of man's inhumanity to man over the years, which produced Yuri Gagarin, who became, for his time, the most famous man in the world, the first man to do an orbit of the Earth, the first man in space 60 years ago.
Stephen Walker, we're talking with about this.
And Stephen, I believe this could be a screenplay at some point because you do tell the story so colorfully, I think.
It's such a nice thing to say.
Actually, I was rather pleased because we did get a review, I think it was in The Spectator a few days ago, that described it as cinematic.
So there we go.
Yes, it is.
It is.
You know, that's where and you know i only did one of those speed reads but the words leapt off the page and created images for me and i'll tell you one of the images that i had i never thought about what it was like before the launch before yuri gagarin was launched into space that first time you know i always think about what must it have been to sit atop the rocket and be communicating with the control room and all the rest of it but you tell the story um april the 11th the day before 1961 uh nedelin
Cottage Site 2, Teototum, Cosmodrome.
And you say it was an odd place for a man to spend his last night before leaving the planet, in part because of its incongruity, its piece of old Russian rusticity.
So just that little snapshot.
You know, we've all done big things in our lives, taken exams, maybe got married, all sorts of things.
And often an impactful thing is the night.
What do you do the day before?
Can you remember yourself the day before?
And you paint a picture of him the day before?
I mean, it's funny.
It's something, it's one of those things, without going into other things, I did.
I did write a book a few years ago called Shockwave about the dropping of the atomic bomb.
And I had a similar situation where I asked a man about the night before the bomb was dropped, and it turned into a love story, which ended up as a very important thread in the book.
This was also not a love story, but it was a fascinating, in a way it is almost a love story, actually.
Because what happens is that there is this, it still exists, there is this cottage.
I mean, it's bizarre, as I say in the book, and as you just read, there is this little kind of Russian-y cottage in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert, essentially, about two kilometers from this massive missile pad, this launch pad where Yuri Gagarin is going to potentially fly from the next day.
And it is so primitive that it does have a bath in it, which is one of the very few bars on the rocket missile complex at the time.
But it is very, very simple when you see it.
It is quite an extraordinarily weird place for somebody to spend their last night before leaving Earth, and possibly before being killed.
And in the bedroom are two beds.
On the left-hand side is a bed that was slept in by Yuri Gagarin, and on the right-hand side is a bed that was slept in by a man called German Titov, who is another major character in the book.
Titov was Gagarin's backup.
He was the number two.
And the selection had been made just two days previously on April the 9th.
It's quite an extraordinary thought that, that they only finally decide who's going to be the first man in space, the first man to reach, if you like, immortality, if he is successful, just two days before this very last night.
So the two men are sleeping side by side.
And even though Yuri Gagarin is the one that has been chosen, because he has this backup, there is a reason for that, because anything could still happen between now and the launch 12 hours later.
He could get ill.
He could have a panic attack.
His blood pressure could be too high.
He could fail the medical.
I mean, there's a number of things.
He could have a fall.
There's a number of things.
There's anything that could happen.
But the other thing that could happen is he may not have a good night's sleep.
And in order to test that, what they did, and it's one of the most extraordinary things I found out from a doctor, and I verified this is the case, is that secretly they had had, they being the people running this whole show, had had strain gauges fixed underneath the mattresses of both of these men in their beds, which were then fed through a secret hole.
And then the wires went over about 20 or 30 metres to another cottage, not dissimilar to the one they were sleeping in, and through a wall there where there were banks of doctors and psychologists actually watching monitors to see how often each of them moved in their beds in the night.
The idea being that if perhaps Gagarin moved much too much, he was clearly not sleeping.
Whereas if Titov didn't move, he clearly was.
And perhaps at the very last moment, Titov might be the man we're talking about today.
Did the two men know that they were being assessed in that way?
Because if I knew that, I would never sleep.
You'd never sleep?
No.
Do you know something?
I don't think he slept anyway.
I got the impression from people, even from what Gagarin said subsequently, he said, I didn't sleep a wink all night, but he kept very still.
Not that he realised that he was being monitored.
They had no idea they were being monitored.
But they did know that people might kind of pop their heads around the door from time to time.
I think the doors were open from time to time to check on them.
And obviously, if there was a lot of rustling and movement, that would actually give something away.
So Gagarin actually did once say, I kept very, very still through the night, but I didn't in fact sleep a wink.
Just in case I lost my place.
Sadly, we have to do lots of edits in this conversation.
I'm talking about just in our speech, because there's so much in the book.
And I recommend anybody who's interested in this, you have to get this book if you want the detail, if you want the full story.
But if we can flip forward to being on the launch pad, because I was amazed, Stephen, at the amount of time that Gagarin, clearly anybody would be nervous, had to sit in that capsule before they fired it off.
Yeah, I can't remember the exact answer.
It's a couple of hours, I think.
It's about an hour or two, yeah.
I mean, you've read it more recently than I have.
It's about a couple of hours, yeah.
I mean, he has to settle down in there.
And there is all kinds of crises that take place, which I won't give away, because otherwise no one's going to want to buy the book.
But there are all sorts of things.
There's a couple of really major things, or one particularly major emergency that happens when he's actually on the pad there.
he waits um and at one point he sings um and and that you can actually i mean i've actually managed when i was in russia to find the all the original radio communications from the launch pad to the bunker and you know the singing is there he he he whistling and he's singing and at one point his heart rate is actually quite low the moment that rocket goes all five engines of its first and core stage go at 907 a.m on
april the 12th, 1961, 60 years ago, his heart rate, not surprisingly, rockets with the rocket.
I mean, it really does.
It goes to 157 beats per minute from about 89 beats per minute.
I mean, it absolutely rockets.
And he's then subjected to forces that no human being has ever experienced.
I mean, unbelievable acceleration.
Well, if you say, yes, the acceleration, you say in the book, it was to very nearly 18,000 miles an hour.
Yeah, well, by the time he got into orbit, he was just under 18,000 miles an hour.
So what you're talking about is the, and I say this in the book somewhere, is that this is the equivalent of flying from New York to London in 12 minutes.
And yes.
That's how fast he's going.
A mark of the man, I think, is when they ask him during this launch process and he's getting up, they ask him how he's feeling.
And he asks them how they're feeling.
Yeah, how are you feeling?
I mean, they think they love all that.
You know, he has, I mean, it's the Russian right stuff.
I mean, the guy is cool.
I mean, you know, he is cool.
We have this sort of idea that Soviet and we have this sort of James Bond kind of, well, I do from my generation, you know, from Russia with love sort of attitude.
The reality is, is that he's cool.
I mean, he's terrified, unquestionably.
He'd written, and I quoted in the book, I mean, I've got this extraordinary letter that he wrote to his own wife to say, if I don't come back from this, I want you to live your life.
I don't want you to mourn me.
I want you to go on and have a life.
Because she was only in her mid-20s, his wife.
And, you know, and he makes this, he writes this very beautiful letter.
So he was, you know, he knew that there was a real chance he wasn't going to come back.
In fact, although I don't know he knew it to this extent, the chances were subsequently calculated at less than 50-50, which means that he had more chance of dying than not when he went on that rocket.
That's how risky this was.
Many of the systems on board his spacecraft and indeed on the rocket had not been tested.
There was no time.
In fact, at one point earlier on in the process, they even thought about not developing a spacesuit because there might not be time to do that and also beat the Americans.
By today's standards.
But the whole thing comes across in the book as a unique combination of white terror and sheer excitement and wonderment.
I mean, there's the terror of being launched up there, the G-forces on the body.
The fact that there is a point at which he might pass out.
There is a point that you get there.
I think it's called G-Lock or something like that.
Where you might pass out.
And if you don't pass out, then you're lucky and on you go.
But there is also the point where he looks back and becomes the first person to see this blue ball that we inhabit, the Earth.
I mean, I find that one of the most, I mean, what I try to do in the book, and it's why it'd be wonderful if your listeners want to read it, because what I'm doing, this is a roller coaster ride.
I'm putting you in that padded ball, human-sized cannonball that this guy is sitting in.
And I'm not making the stuff up.
This is stuff that I've got from lots and lots of different sources.
And really trying to create a picture for readers, a very visual picture, if I can, of what, and not just visual, but kind of all the sensations of what that must have felt like.
Maybe this is my own ride into space, you know, that will never actually happen, to see what that feels like, what that must have been like.
Because as you rightly say, and it's wonderful you've picked this point up, that there is actually an extraordinary moment, 11 minutes after launch, at 9.18 a.m.
Moscow time on that day, on April the 12th, 1961, when his little spherical capsule detaches from the rest of the rocket, which falls away, and it's rotating very gently, and he feels himself lifted off his seat, first experience of weightlessness in orbit, although he's got straps to hold him down, but he can feel the seat has no, he can't feel the back of his seat anymore.
And he describes this in a secret briefing, which only became declassified 30 or 40 years later, which I use in the book.
And then he turns his head to the right, where there's a porthole, and he looks out.
And his first words are on the radio, and you can hear the excitement in his voice.
He says, I can see the earth.
And he says it a second time.
I can see the earth.
And it's beautiful.
And that's not my word.
It's his word.
And what he sees is this, he describes it, this incredible blue of the horizon, the thin blue line, the atmosphere, the biosphere that protects us all, that's so beautiful, but also so fragile.
And he also describes the blackness of the sky, this black sky, blue planet.
And then he starts to see stars which don't twinkle because they're not in any sense interrupted by the atmosphere.
So they're absolutely rock steady.
And then at one moment, as the spacecraft rotates, he sees the sun sliding across the porthole window and filling his little ball that he's sitting inside with this kind of, as he describes it, radiant, unfiltered, pure light.
And it is, and you think, this is the first anything that's been alive on this planet in three and a half billion years since all life began that sees this.
I mean, this is the first to escape.
This is the first to leave the biosphere and look down and see us for what we actually really are, which is why this anniversary for me is so major.
It isn't just, oh gosh, the first man in space.
This is the first step into the beyond.
This is the first leap from the planet.
It's historically, I think, more important than the landing on the moon.
Maybe it doesn't feel like we're now, but I think it will in 100 years or 200 years.
It's the beginning of the journey that we are now on.
And what Gagarin saw from that capsule window was the first experience that a human eye had, or any eye, frankly, that's not alien, had of this beautiful, precious world that we inhabit.
I want to talk to you for another hour.
Sadly, we don't have it.
But we have to say that by 10.53 a.m., this is how compressed I must have felt like a hell of a roller coaster for this man.
The profundity of it.
By 10.53, not 10.55, as you say that a lot of history records it, by 10.53, he's back on the ground.
He doesn't land where they expect him to.
The Russians, they don't land like the Americans do next to an aircraft carrier with a band playing.
This man landed in a freshly plowed field, and the two people that came up to him were so scared they ran away from him.
And in the end, he has to find a phone to let mission control know where he is.
What a wonderful story.
It's just glorious because actually what these two people, it's actually a grandmother and a grandchild.
And they are, he lands in a plowed field, as you say, and they're picking potatoes.
And there's this wonderful moment where he finally convinces them that he's a Soviet comrade because they're terrified.
He comes out of the sky.
He's hundreds of kilometers off course for reasons which are explained in the book, another massive thing that goes wrong and nearly kills him.
And now he's finally made it back to Mother Russia, the soil of Mother Russia.
They run away.
He finally persuades them to come back to him.
And there's this wonderful moment where he does ask if there's anywhere nearby we can get to a telephone.
And they say, well, there is one in the collective farm or the collective village.
But the only way to get there is by horse.
But we can saddle up a horse for you or put a bridle and you can go in a horse and cart.
This is a guy who's been around the world.
The whole white heat of technology ends up on a horse and cart.
Well, he doesn't quite get there.
He's about to go there and suddenly a bunch of tractor glides.
It's just marvelous scenes.
Jeep turns.
It's really beautiful, actually.
It is the whole thing has a Wallace and Grommet quality to it.
I don't know if you know the Wallace and Gromit, you know, the greatest.
Yeah.
It is, it is, I mean, he doesn't find the cheese, but there is actually that quality to it.
And it's kind of what I love because there's a sort of an underdog quality about it as well, because you've got, you know, the America's got all this technology and it's incredible, but they're being very careful.
And I understandably and quite rightly, and they're taking it cautiously.
And the Russians, I mean, they're playing havoc with people's lives.
They test almost, you know, very little.
They basically bung a cannonball with a human inside it on top of their biggest ever missile and they bung him into orbit to get ahead of the Americans.
And as I said, he lands up on this field, almost taking a horse and car to find the nearest phone.
It's glorious.
It's a wonderful story.
And I have to say that I ended up feeling very pleased for him and very pleased for the Russians, even though, you know, my thoughts ever since I was a little boy were with NASA and the American space program.
I loved this.
This is a wonderful book.
We have only covered, as my Irish relatives would have said, we've only done the half of it.
So the book has to be read.
It is very cinematic.
It's a marvelous production.
And you should be rightly proud of this, Stephen Walker.
Thank you very much for talking with me.
Thank you very much, indeed.
Fantastic guest.
I thought your thoughts, welcome.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You can send me messages from there.
Stephen Walker was the man's name.
And the book, you will not be disappointed by.
It is remarkable.
It's a wonderful piece of writing.
It would make a great present for somebody.
It would make a great present for yourself.
It's called Beyond by Stephen Walker.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So on this sunny day until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
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