It took months to get permission to visit Star City, where Russian cosmonauts live and work. Beyond the steep walls and barbed wire, and a series of gates there is a training center for the space station. Gagarin's widow and daughters sleep in one of those apartments in the distance. The air is cold and clear this Sunday morning, as we trundle across the snow tucking into great empty buildings. No one is here. Just a tour guide and some guards. Everyone else has the day off.
I had hoped to glimpse an old heroic face, some well-earned wrinkles. There are cameras in my bag, loaded and ready. Each room is larger than the next, with training modules and duplicates of the space station. They are just cold metal and fresh paint. I wanted to see the people that make them, that find the courage to journey inside them. Man and machine.
There is a glass case that I notice, a thick crack running across it. I think that is Gagarin's hat perched inside it, but no it is Kamarov's, who came before him. They were friends, and their hats are identical. My mind wanders, wondering if they ever swapped them. Kamarov died on an early mission, which lead the way for Gagarin to succeed. I never knew his name before now, and there is is hat. Crisp and peaceful beneath the reflections.
Later, we are shown a curious old bus that was used for almost twenty years to drive the cosmonauts (already in their space suits) to every launch. A horse shoe is painted on the door, a good luck charm borrowed from some cowboys from across the ocean. Inside, it is all squeaky brown leather and brushed steel. I sit there for a minute, in the exact same spot as so many men and women, gazing out the same curved edge of window trying to piece some part of life together. I don't know what answers they found but the tour guide says a few last words that I chew on for the rest of the day.
"The cosmonauts all talk about being up there, looking down at the earth with these tiny little microbes that are people walking around with such terrible giant problems. They find great peace there, in the atmosphere. When they come back, they are all different. They are not worried about the details any more."
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