- Brennan, Gerald.
Public Loneliness.
Chicago: Tortoise Books, [2014] 2017.
ISBN 978-0-9986325-1-3.
-
This is the second book
in the author's “Altered Space” series of alternative
histories of the cold war space race. Each stand-alone story
explores a space mission which did not take place, but could
have, given the technology and political circumstances at
the time. The first, Zero Phase
(October 2016),
asks what might have happened had Apollo 13's service module
oxygen tank waited to explode until after the lunar module
had landed on the Moon.
The third, Island of Clouds
(July 2019), tells the story of a Venus fly-by mission
using Apollo-derived hardware in 1972.
The present short book (120 pages in paperback edition) is
the tale of a Soviet circumlunar mission piloted by Yuri
Gagarin in October 1967, to celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the Bolshevik revolution and the tenth anniversary of
the launch of Sputnik. As with all of the Altered Space
stories, this could have happened: in the 1960s, the Soviet
Union had two manned lunar programmes, each using
entirely different hardware. The lunar landing project was
based on the
N1 rocket,
a modified Soyuz spacecraft called the
7K-LOK, and the
LK one-man
lunar lander. The
Zond project
aimed at a manned lunar fly-by mission (the spacecraft would
loop around the Moon and return to Earth on a
“free
return trajectory” without entering lunar orbit). Zond
missions would launch on the
Proton
booster with a crew of one or two cosmonauts flying around the
Moon in a spacecraft designated
Soyuz 7K-L1,
which was stripped down by removal of the orbital module
(forcing the crew to endure the entire trip in the cramped
launch/descent module) and equipped for the lunar mission by
the addition of a high gain antenna, navigation system, and a
heat shield capable of handling the velocity of entry from a
lunar mission.
In our timeline, the Zond programme was plagued by problems.
The first four unmanned lunar mission attempts, launched between
April and November 1967, all failed due to problems with the
Proton booster.
Zond 4, in
March of 1968, flew out to a lunar distance, but was
deliberately launched 180° away from the Moon (perhaps
to avoid the complexity of lunar gravity). It returned
to Earth, but off-course, and was blown up by its self-destruct
mechanism to avoid it falling into the hands of another
country. Two more Zond launches in April and July 1968
failed from booster problems, with the second killing three
people when its upper stage exploded on the launch pad.
In September 1968
Zond 5
became the first spacecraft to circle the Moon and
return to Earth, carrying a “crew” of two
tortoises, fruit fly eggs, and plant seeds. The planned
“double dip” re-entry failed, and the spacecraft
made a ballistic re-entry with deceleration which might have
killed a human cosmonaut, but didn't seem to faze the tortoises.
Zond 6
performed a second circumlunar mission in November 1968,
again with tortoises and other biological specimens.
During the return to Earth, the capsule depressurised, killing
all of the living occupants. After a successful re-entry,
the parachute failed and the capsule crashed to Earth.
This was followed by three more launch failures and
then, finally, in August 1969, a completely successful
unmanned flight which was the first in which a crew, if
onboard, would have survived. By this time, of course,
the U.S. had not only orbited the Moon (a much more
ambitious mission than Zond's fly-by), but landed
on the surface, so even a successful Zond mission would
have been an embarrassing afterthought. After one more
unmanned test in October 1970, the Zond programme was
cancelled.
In this story, the Zond project encounters fewer troubles and
with the anniversary of the October revolution approaching in
1967, the go-ahead was given for a piloted flight
around the Moon. Yuri Gagarin, who had been deeply unhappy
at being removed from flight status and paraded around the
world as a cultural ambassador, used his celebrity status
to be assigned to the lunar mission which, given weight
constraints and the cramped Soyuz cabin, was to be flown by
a single cosmonaut.
The tale is narrated by Gagarin himself. The spacecraft is
highly automated, so there isn't much for him to do other than
take pictures of the Earth and Moon, and so he has plenty of
time to reflect upon his career and the experience of being
transformed overnight from an unknown 27 year old fighter
pilot into a global celebrity and icon of Soviet technological
prowess. He seems to have a mild case of
impostor
syndrome, being acutely aware that he was entirely a
passive passenger on his Vostok 1 flight, never once touching
the controls, and that the credit he received for the
accomplishment belonged to the engineers and technicians
who built and operated the craft, who continued to work in
obscurity. There are extensive flashbacks to the flight,
his experiences afterward, and the frustration at seeing
his flying career come to an end.
But this is Soviet hardware, and not long into the flight
problems occur which pose increasing risks to the demanding
mission profile. Although the planned trajectory will
sling the spacecraft around the Moon and back to Earth,
several small trajectory correction maneuvers will be
required to hit the narrow re-entry corridor in the Earth's
atmosphere: too steep and the capsule will burn up, too
shallow and it will skip off the atmosphere into a high
elliptical orbit in which the cosmonaut's life support
consumables may run out before it returns to Earth.
The compounding problems put these course corrections at
risk, and mission control decides not to announce the
flight to the public while it is in progress. As the
book concludes, Gagarin does not know his ultimate fate,
and neither does the reader.
This is a moving story, well told, and flawless in its
description of the spacecraft and Zond mission plan. One
odd stylistic choice is that in Gagarin's narration, he
speaks of the names of spacecraft as their English
translation of the Russian names: “East”
instead of “Vostok”, “Union”
as opposed to “Soyuz”, etc. This might seem
confusing, but think about it: that's how a Russian would
have heard those words, so it's correct to translate them
into English along with his other thoughts. There is
a zinger on the last page that speaks to the nature of
the Soviet propaganda machine—I'll not spoil it
for you.
The Kindle edition is free to Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
September 2019 