Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess

Abstract

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 Francis French and Colin Burgess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Americans (and Russians, too, for that matter) have always found in their spacemen the faults they wished they had. Many of America's first astronauts drove too fast, drank too much, and left their pants in unexpected places, and when the public found out, they didn't mind so much. Soviet cosmonauts often came off as goodnatured farm boys-dim bulbs who took their knocks without complaint and, when necessary, died tending their machines in good socialist fashion. More recent works, about Apollo astronauts haunted by their mind-bending lunar travels or cantankerous Russians tending broken space stations, feed the same yearnings. If only we had their problems, readers dream. The earliest accounts of 1960s astronauts fawned over their seeming lack of introspection; more recent works, like Francis French's and Colin Burgess's Into That Silent Sea, suggest that spacemen felt their experiences more deeply than anyone realized. Rather than recounting the first five years of American and Soviet spaceflight in simple narrative form, the authors let the spacefarers (and would-be spacefarers like female aviator Wally Funk) speak for themselves through ten chronological character studies of figures familiar to spaceflight enthusiastslike first person in space Yuri Gagarin and the enigmatic and larger-than-life Project Mercury astronaut Gordo Cooper, who passed away while proofreading the manuscript. With unusual access to their sources, the authors enrich conventional accounts of these characters, walking a delicate line between history and hagiography. An account of the life and death of Gagarin begins the volume: a miraculous fairy tale of an uneducated Soviet youth's cruel upbringing in Nazi-occupied territory. Improbably finding himself a pilot cadet in 1955 (at a time when some American astronauts were already experienced engineers and combat pilots), polite, unflappable Gagarin became the first human being in space only six years later. Sadly for him, this feat ended his flying career; the seven years of life Gagarin enjoyed upon his return to Earth were punctuated by international celebrity, a drunken fall off a balcony, and a fatal airplane crash at the tender age of thirty-four. A cipher even in death, Gagarin epitomizes the black hole of astronaut biography: whether very deep or very dull, spacemen too often take their stories with them. From Russia with love, Silent Sea moves to Florida, where, through the eyes of people like nurse Dee O'Hara and helicopter pilot Jim Lewis, the authors recount the flights of the first Americans in space, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, both now deceased. …