Manned space flight is like a devalued coin nowadays - science fiction films have seen to that. The cinemas are full of movies about space travel greatly enhanced by special effects. Strangely enough, rarely anything ever goes wrong. Sci-fi spaceships appear to drive as smoothly as a family sedan even when IMAX theatres provide audiences with stomach-churning realism as the audience boards virtual rockets to the moon. Real space travel and all its attendant dangers has, as a result, become completely taken for granted. Is there a space shuttle in orbit at the moment, would you know? Just when was the last launch? Yes, the Russian Mir space station regularly makes the news - more often than not, Mir is presented as a comedy of errors by the Western media as one component after another breaks down.
The generations who watched the earliest space launches in the 1960s will undoubtedly remember some of extraordinary excitement and drama as man ventured into space - when brave and bold astronauts and cosmonauts were blasted into orbit while sitting atop converted nuclear missile launchers - little more than glorified fireworks.
Those pressing for success and "firsts" and record-breaking performances in the space race for wholly political motives sent crews aloft in jury-rigged capsules that were known to be dangerous. The Russian Vladimir Komarov was sent to his death in 1967 on a rocket that had more than 200 dangerous faults. The US Apollo spacecraft design that caused the deaths in January 1967 of Gus Grisson, Ed White and Roger Chaffee was so bad that the astronauts used to stick a mouldy lemon on top of their capsule simulator to show their contempt for its overall design.
Writers Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony have attempted to recreate the drama and heroism of those early years of space travel in a new book called Starman, which focuses on the short but remarkable life of the first man to rocket beyond the Earth's atmosphere, Yuri Gagarin. It details his childhood years in Nazi-occupied Russia, his determination to become a pilot and his eventual selection as one of the first 20 cosmonauts to undergo training in the nascent Soviet space programme.
The book catalogues the rigorous training regime undertaken by the earliest recruits as medics attempted to estimate the limits of human endurance, which they measured with crude and brutal experiments. The political context of the time is important to keep in focus: as the Cold War raged, Khrushchev and Kennedy battled for ideological advantage. These were the years of "Mutual Assured Destruction" delivered via nuclear weaponry. No school basement, public building, subway station or office block in the US was complete at the time without stockpiles of tinned foodstuffs, meant to bring survivors through the two weeks following a nuclear attack.
Yet the achievement of Yuri Gagarin, a farm-boy born on March 9th, 1934 in the village of Klushino, 100 miles west of Moscow, transcended the politics of the day because of its raw heroism. His 108minute flight on April 12th, 1961, catapulted him from obscurity and the secret life of a military-dominated space programme to international stardom. He became an overnight sensation, not only in his native Russia, but around the world. He received an estimated one million letters in the years after his historic flight, all of which remain on file in the cosmonauts' training centre outside Moscow, Star City.
Eventually, however, his celebrity fuelled his sad decline. His propaganda value to the political machine that sparked the space effort was so great that he was never to reach space again despite harbouring expectations of an eventual trip to the moon. Instead, he died while flying, in a crash 30 years ago next week.
Gagarin is described in recent interviews undertaken for the book as an engaging, likeable, determined but somewhat unremarkable country boy who initially went to work in a foundry to help earn money for his family. His love of flight and aircraft soon had him attached to a flying club and he eventually joined the military to become an air-force cadet.
He was first posted to Murmansk, within the frozen Arctic Circle, not long after the Soviets had successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957. By 1959, mysterious recruiting teams were dispatched to scour military bases for high-quality pilots. Among others, they found Gagarin.
Gagarin and his colleagues underwent a punishing programme of training and tests. They were locked up in isolation chambers, spun in the space-training centrifuge and blasted along rail-tracks on rocket sleds. All struggled to endure the programme and all merited equal praise for their efforts, but only one would become the first man to fly in space, and that honour eventually fell to Gagarin.
His selection over his nearest rival, Gherman Titov, was a reflection of the politics of the day. Gagarin was described as a likeable country boy with a winning smile, while Titov was a cold, almost aristocratic son of a school teacher. Nikita Khrushchev was also a farmer's son and this may well have won the day for Gagarin, the authors argue.
The pre-flight preparations and the eventual 108-minute flight are given near minute-by-minute exposition in the book. The return from orbit was anything but smooth as a technical fault caused his re-entry vehicle to spin wildly, none of which was reported as it would have reflected badly on the Soviet state and its scientists.
The authors also discuss the Soviet ruse which to this day still confuses many old enough to have remembered the flight. To win the coveted world flight altitude record, the Soviets had to demonstrate that Gagarin returned to Earth inside his capsule. For years, the claim was that a parachute brought both safely to earth, but in fact the cosmonauts on these early flights had to eject from the re-entry vehicle 7 kilometres up, drifting back to Earth under their own parachutes.
The cosmonaut was hailed as a national hero; the embodiment of the superiority of Soviet technology. He became an icon, a propaganda tool who was used remorselessly as he was carried off on tour after tour around the world. His wife, Valentina, sometimes travelled with him and sometimes remained at home with their two daughters, but the frequent and often prolonged separations did not help their relationship.
Nor did Gagarin prove anything but human as he tried to cope with the adulation that was rained down upon him or the temptations in the form of women and drink that landed at his feet.
A whole chapter is given over to what was described as the "Foros Incident", named after the Black Sea resort where it occurred. The authors provide both official and anecdotal versions of what took place. Gagarin was visiting a woman in a second-storey hotel room. As his wife arrived unexpectedly at the room searching for him, he made a hasty retreat, falling from the balcony. He gashed his forehead and was knocked unconscious, which led to repeated cancellations or re-schedulings of his round of international visits.
His transgressions did not help his campaign to return to flight-training or his hope for another trip into space. It was not thought advisable to let him do anything dangerous. As a combat pilot he was expendable, but as the first man in space, he was an essential diplomatic and social symbol who must be protected.
He was eventually promoted out of harm's way as head instructor for the cosmonaut team, and this made it impossible for him to fly. He was obviously depressed by this decision, the book reports, and he wrote to the state committee which appointed him: "I can't be prevented from flying. If I stop flying, I will have no moral rights to lead other people whose life and work are connected with flying."
His friend Igor Khoklov concurred: "Yuri couldn't live without flying. It was his whole life. A man can't live without his trade. He can't survive."
And so it proved in the end. Although he was eventually allowed back into the cockpit of a plane shortly before his death and he trained vigorously to get another flight into space, he never again sat atop a rocket. His position was unassailable in terms of his status as the first cosmonaut and his fame survived long after his death at 34, but he was also a victim of the Soviet system of the time. He was a close personal friend and favourite of Khrushchev, but when he was deposed in 1964 by his deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, Gagarin's position was clearly affected.
His ground-breaking flight was a triumph for the previous administration, not Brezhnev's, and the new First Secretary did not need such a powerful symbol under foot. The number of foreign trips sanctioned for Gagarin was curtailed and his lines of communications to the Kremlin were severed.
Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin died with an instructor in a spectacular high-speed air crash in March, 1968. The cockpit and engines were buried two metres deep in frozen soil and the force of impact ensured that only body fragments were recovered. Again, the book provides official and unofficial versions of the cause of the crash, the most likely being a near-miss by a supersonic Sukhoi SU-11, which threw Gagarin's Mig-15 into an unrecoverable spin.
The Soviet Union is now gone and a new form of government attempts to keep the Russian space programme going. Yet Yuri Gagarin's accomplishment remains important. While all cosmonauts and astronauts who train and take their chance at space flight deserve to be considered heroes for their efforts, there is and can only be one described as the first man into space. Gagarin won that title, allowing him to claim his position as first among space heroes.
Starman, The Truth Behind The Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony (Bloomsbury, £17.99 in UK)