Excerpt: Space Race

I lay back on my bunk and propped one foot against the jamb of the carriage window.  I was surprised to be back, even though I had been planning it for months. The central Kazakh Steppe rolled past: rocks, dirty sand and a thinning carpet of scrub the colour of dusty pine needles. Three sets of powerlines ran parallel to the train, their rise and fall in time with the slow clikkedy-clack. I was sure that the powerlines and I were headed to the same destination, a place very different to the Aral Sea – Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Baikonur is legendary amongst space enthusiasts. On 4 October 1957, it was from there that Sputnik, the first satellite, was launched into space. After detaching from the rocket, Sputnik (Russian for ‘fellow traveller’) orbited Earth repeatedly, emitting a neutral beep. This was a crisis for Americans, who were so suspicious they tried to decode Sputnik’s beep. They had become complacent in their assumed technological superiority over the USSR, who they saw as a country of potato farmers. Now they were shocked to discover the reds controlled the skies above. Cold sweaty panic runs through editorials of the time, some calling desperately for calm, while the New York Times warned that Sputnik was no ‘Star of Bethlehem’, that it was not a ‘forerunner to peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward Men’. This dichotomy of the nobility and courage of space exploration on one hand, while on the other the intimidation and threat of nuclear annihilation, characterised the Space Race Sputnik triggered. After all, the rocket launched was a modified intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

Four years later, on 12 April 1961, the Soviet Union sent the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space from the same Launchpad, now known as Gagarin’s Start. Affable Yuri, the son of a bricklayer and a milkmaid, a model Soviet citizen, became the smiling face of Soviet space exploration. This, combined with the victory over Fascism in 1945, were the twin moments of unambiguous joy in the history of the Soviet Union. For an instant the daily grind fell away, replaced with a return to the ebullience, the hope and promise of the first years of the revolution. You can see this moment encased in monuments throughout the former Soviet Union, all of which have a science-fiction quality to them: man rendered huge, superhuman through his own technical expertise, the stars now easily within reach.

Today, with the dominant space story American’s walk on the moon, it is difficult to imagine the Soviets winning for over a decade. During this interval more rockets were sent up, and more firsts were claimed, including the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, to be sent to the heavens, in 1963. Then the first human spacewalk in 1967, Aleksei Leonov, whose suit ballooned out, forcing him open a valve to empty space so he could fit back in the airlock.

Even after the Americans had landed on the moon, the Soviets launched Salyut in 1971, the first orbital space station from which the crew beamed nightly updates to enthralled citizens back home. And although the crew suffocated due to a malfunction upon re-entry, the mission was considered another victory for Soviet space exploration, which was now concentrated on colonising outer space. This culminated in 1986, with the permanent presence of Mir space station. After the Soviet collapse, the Americans and Russians began working together and soon American astronauts were aboard Mir. Then a new chapter began with the International Space Station (ISS) launched in 1998. And tonight, at 2 am, there would be another launch and the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket would ferry a crew of three (an American, a Russian and a Japanese man) to dock at the ISS, a beacon of international co-operation and a demonstration of the expertise and experience born in the Soviet Union. While Cold-War suspicion between American and Russia was creeping back on Earth, in space it seemed that for once the positive aspects of the propaganda survived the negative. And I was going to do whatever I could to see it.

The three other passengers in my cabin were asleep. All Russian, all truck drivers from the same company, they were taking the sixty-four-hour journey from Moscow to Almaty. Through the cracked window came a breeze that made the white curtain billow and the cabin was the perfect temperature for drowsing. I drifted to sleep and had some vague dream that I was on my way home from the sea.

I started awake and checked my watch. In two hours I would arrive at the village of Tyuratam and I had to plan. One more time I studied my meagre scraps of information: a satellite photo; a map of Baikonur city, its limits marked out as a thick red line that could represent anything from a theoretical border to a soaring concrete wall. The situation was complicated. The village of Tyuratam was Kazakh. Baikonur to the south was leased by the Russian government until at least 2050: for the time being it was as Russian as Red Square. I read back over the email correspondence with the tour agency. ‘Tyuratam is a railway stop with a few buildings, there is not even a shop to buy cigarettes. There certainly is no hotel there, I doubt there will be even a bench . . .’ So this is what nine months’ worth of email exchanges numbering in the hundreds had been reduced to. Me on a fly-blown train station in the middle of the Kazakh Steppe, waiting beneath a beating sun for fourteen hours without even a bench to sit on. Baikonur had begun as just another point along my route from Kyrgyzstan to Belarus, but soon it had been raised to a celestial body and I had spent six months trapped within its orbit. One way or another, tonight I would escape its pull.

My first pass at Baikonur had been planned for four months earlier after my visit to Osh, to coincide with a manned launch. This attempt was thwarted when I was informed that despite beginning my application the previous year, the tour agency had missed the application date. In their defence, they had not received the launch schedule until after the application was due and thus were put in the impossible situation of applying for a launch they were not sure existed. They were the last part of a machine that confirmed for me that while the literal wall in Berlin may have been jack hammered to dust, that other socialist barrier, Soviet bureaucracy, remained very much alive.

The application process, to be started no later than a month before the date of launch, was as follows: I liaised directly with this general tour agency located in Almaty, Kazakhstan. They contacted a freelancer in Moscow who dealt directly with another travel agency, the sole provider of tours to Baikonur. This second agency would then submit my application to the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. There it would be processed, and a copy forwarded to the FSB to be vetted for security clearance. My application would then be regurgitated back along this path and be returned to me either approved or rejected.

Once inside, updates on the progress of my application were impossible. Even worse, launch dates could be changed without warning, forcing a scramble to rebook train tickets. My first application was ground down between poorly fitted layers of bureaucracy so unwieldy and complex that I, in the throws of what grew to be an obsession, could only imagine as an infernal machine, through which my application would roll ball-bearing-like through blasts of steam, down helical paths, vulnerable to any number of calamities along the way. One recurring nightmare was of my photocopied passport page being snatched from the top of the stack by a breeze coming through a window carelessly left open, my facsimiled face deposited amongst the dust bunnies beneath a grey and dented filing cabinet.

Two months later, after Victory Day in Moscow, I was set to make a second pass. I had paid a deposit for the US$1000 tour, had booked train tickets and had a Kazakh visa with its shiny holographic sticker glowing in my passport. Two weeks earlier, the unmanned Progress M-27M/59P had launched, reached orbit but spun out of control. Video feed showed the grainy earth spinning sickeningly. This was a rare thing and warranted the delay but the hulking bureaucratic machine took so long to transmit the message I found out only a few days before my train was due to pull out of Moscow. The good news was that my security clearance was still valid.

This time, I had flown into Aktau, Kazakhstan, a godawful Soviet-era oil city on the Caspian Sea where the addresses are specified without names, instead located by three coordinates – apartment number, apartment block and micro-region. With train tickets once again booked, I waited in a flophouse for oil workers. The had email arrived as expected telling me, now, a few days before the launch, that no foreigners would be given access to Baikonur for the foreseeable future. I had read the email again and lay back on the bed that bowed in the middle. I could feel the cigarette burns on the pillowcase, hear the pipe drip into the lidless cistern and see the puddle of rusty water pool on the toilet floor. I’d begun packing immediately.

Again I started awake. Outside panned a few whitewashed huts, their tin roofs baking in the sun. A dirt road that ran by them was deserted but for a camel tethered to a fencepost. I guessed the temperature as thirty-five. My watch said midday. Fourteen hours seemed like a very long time to be out there. I didn’t really have any idea of what to expect at Tyuratam. Information was almost non-existent. The few I had spoken to who had been had all gone as part of highly organised tours and so they had not remembered details like where the permit checks were, or the height of walls surrounding the city. I knew I needed one permit for the city and one for the Cosmodrome. I also knew I had neither. What I did not know was when and where they would be checked. If they checked only when people entered and left Baikonur city then I had a plan. The city itself had one edge delimited by a bend in the Syr Darya River, the same river I had visited in Uzbekistan that lead to the Aral Sea. My hope was they relied on this as a natural barrier rather than a physical wall. I had seen the river during the height of the spring thaw and I was amazed it would even make it this far at that time of year. Now, at the height of summer, it would certainly be shallow enough for me to cross. If there was no way into the city I would find a hotel outside its limits or, on failing that, a room in a house o, on failing that, just a place to stash my bag. Then I would wait until sundown, walk into the desert and wait.

The train began to slow. I checked my watch. This was Tyuratam. When I stepped off the train it was into the bustle of a platform that was nothing like the one described in the email. People moved to and fro with purpose, women hawked smoked fish, drinks, dumplings, lollies, tissues, cakes, noodles and fruit on beds of ice on the platform. Men threw bulging bags to the waiting train. Over the loudspeaker, a woman’s voice boomed and reverberated through itself so to be completely incomprehensible. And I, blinking in the white sun, breathed a sigh of relief, immersed in the familiar life of a Central Asian train station with multiple benches.

I began to wheel my bag to the station building, thinking about what I would write to the tour agency when from out of the crowd a man asked me if I needed a taxi. I told him I needed a hotel. ‘There is one hotel, it is in the city,’ he told me. ‘I don’t have a permit to get into the city.’ ‘No! You don’t need a permit!’ he said loading my bag into the back of his black Mercedes. ‘Are you sure I don’t need a permit?’ I asked him as we drove over the grey dust roads, past the bus terminal, where passengers were clinging to the thin slivers of shade. ‘It’s no problem.’ I asked him what his name was and he replied something beginning with G. Perhaps it was Gilot. My mind was a crowd roaring solutions to the problems I anticipated. I tried to quieten it, reducing the problem to a simple binary choice. Either we got in or we didn’t. With access came a chance to see Star City, once among the most secret places in the Soviet Union. Even if we were refused, the driver would still have to find me a room before receiving a single Tenge. ‘Where are you from?’ Gilot asked me. ‘Australia. Will you watch the launch tonight?’ ‘What time is it?’ ‘Two’ ‘Ahh, I will be asleep!’

We had passed beyond the outskirts of Tyuratam and were now driving along a narrow corridor between two walls formed by tall concrete slabs, each about the height of three people. These walls were topped with spools of rusted barbed wire, above which peeked the corner of a brick factory, its windows smashed in. There was no way I would ever have been able to get over this wall. Soon we joined a queue of cars which led past a document check and into Star City. A Kazakh soldier in a blue camouflage jumpsuit and cap was making the checks. I pulled my passport out of my bag, then suddenly wondered what would happen if I could get in but not out again, or if I could get in, then out into the desert for the launch, but not return for my bag. I decided to make myself as conspicuous as possible, so I wound down the window and stuck my arm out. I did not want to get through on a fluke. I fingered my passport nervously and prepared my expression of disbelief at being turned away. Gilot pulled up, slowed down ever so slightly, nodded to the guard and drove right through. I was shocked. Was nothing sacred? Even the Space Race, man’s transcendent pursuit of the stars, was as crooked as a dog track.

Then I realised, after six months of planning and emails and flights and train tickets and racing to the Kazakh embassy to get another visa in time, I was in...