Opinion In space,nice guys finish first

Gagarin’s achievement,and the Soviet playbook that shaped it,made him the most celebrated Soviet hero since Lenin. His deification set the “right stuff” tone that NASA would follow with its own astronauts.

Gagarin was 5 feet 2 inches tall and nice as heck. He was chosen because of his willingness to follow orders,to be a small part of the technological immensity of the Soviet space programme. This makes him,a most modern spacefarer.

Gagarin was the model Soviet citizen. When I visited the Yuri Gagarin museum in Star City,near Moscow,the curator showed me his childhood report cards and a toy airplane he made at industrial school.

But for all his precocious talent,the space programme’s chief designer,Sergey Korolev,is reported to have chosen Gagarin for the mission partly because he was the only one of the original squad to remove his shoes before stepping inside a model of the Vostok I capsule in which he’d travel into space.

Gagarin’s willingness to go with the programme made him perfect for a mission in which he was human cargo. Beyond coming down alive,his assignment was to write down his observations (which he mostly failed to do,because he let go of his pencil in orbit,and it floated out of sight).

Like the chimpanzees and the mutts that went into space before them,Gagarin and other early spacemen were in part an experimental payload. There was concern about the unknown physiological and psychological consequences of space and zero gravity. Would breaching the infinite blow the crewman’s mind? Would weightlessness cause his eyeballs to change shape,his blood to stop circulating? Gagarin went up to find out.

Strangely,the first man to ascend into the cosmos was a skilled pilot forbidden to use his skills. The controls of Vostok I were locked; the capsule was manoeuvred from the ground.

But nothing about Gagarin’s personality prevented him from becoming a Soviet demigod. His museum holds gifts and honours bestowed on him during the 27-nation tour that followed his flight.

Gagarin was uncomfortable with the adulation and fuss. He wrote in his autobiography that his shoelace was untied while he walked the red carpet before the presidium of the Communist Party. When he found himself seated beside Queen Elizabeth II at a Buckingham Palace luncheon,he reached under the table and squeezed her knee — not out of lasciviousness but,Gagarin’s biographer,Lev Danilkin,told me,“to receive evidence that he was not sleeping.” (Her Majesty pretended not to notice.)

Contemporary space travellers have hewed closer to the real-life Gagarin than his larger-than-life image. Whatever bravado was tolerated during NASA’s earliest manned space programmes has been ironed out; in an era of large-crew,long-duration missions,it is the wrong stuff. There is no room for egos,swagger and machismo.

A recent list of desirable attributes in NASA astronauts includes empathy,fairness and a good sense of humour. It’s hard to say whether and when the US will send a human being to Mars,but Gagarin would be as perfect a choice today as he was in 1961.