Once Around: Watching "First Orbit"
Apr. 14th, 2020 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAlthough keeping up with the fiftieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 13, seeing a reminder Vostok 1 had been launched nine years before that perilous mission yet during the same week on the calendar turned my thoughts towards a film I’d been aware of for a while without ever quite managing to watch. Enclosed protectively (although not sealed up airtight) in the capsule of my own dwelling during a long weekend, I made the effort at last to track down the online video of First Orbit, recorded by astronauts on the space station along an orbit recapturing both the path and the lighting of Yuri Gagarin’s flight.
I should admit first of all to not having spent a lot of time before watching real-time video from space. Aware of complaints over the years that “it’s the fault of national space agencies that the taxpaying public doesn’t find what they do more exciting,” I’ve wondered even so how much of “real life” looks “exciting” on a TV screen at normal speed with no editing. Still, the gradualness of motion in the video had me pondering transatlantic flights crossing Greenland and Labrador in its first minutes with the camera pointed straight down (from the subtitled transmissions included, I eventually gathered those first minutes represented Gagarin still under rocket power as orbital speed built up). More than that, I was aware I don’t have much of a vocabulary to articulate reactions to cinema. It had got my attention to see Philip Sheppard’s name in the credits for the music, remembering he’d provided the score for In the Shadow of the Moon; that did add something to the slow trip northeast.
The sun set sooner than I might have imagined, and the thought that circling the world means being half in the sun’s light and half blocked from it was something to mull over with the lower image quality of black-and-white clouds drifting by and occasional “blobby” stars joined by an overexposed moon. Gagarin’s recorded comments became much scarcer, too, leaving me with just the music and suppositions there would have been things to check on inside the capsule and the continuing novelty of free fall. However, the sun coming back up did have some impact with the anniversary day just happening to be Easter Sunday. The ground track continued to be over ocean, though, until all of a sudden it was over land; recognizing the Nile and Sinai brought a feeling of place to me at last for all that by that point the retro-rockets had been fired (the problem of not everything separating from the spherical re-entry capsule didn’t get mentioned in the film, which reminded me of last year’s Apollo 11 for not having a narrator spelling things out but wasn’t compressing time.)
I should admit first of all to not having spent a lot of time before watching real-time video from space. Aware of complaints over the years that “it’s the fault of national space agencies that the taxpaying public doesn’t find what they do more exciting,” I’ve wondered even so how much of “real life” looks “exciting” on a TV screen at normal speed with no editing. Still, the gradualness of motion in the video had me pondering transatlantic flights crossing Greenland and Labrador in its first minutes with the camera pointed straight down (from the subtitled transmissions included, I eventually gathered those first minutes represented Gagarin still under rocket power as orbital speed built up). More than that, I was aware I don’t have much of a vocabulary to articulate reactions to cinema. It had got my attention to see Philip Sheppard’s name in the credits for the music, remembering he’d provided the score for In the Shadow of the Moon; that did add something to the slow trip northeast.
The sun set sooner than I might have imagined, and the thought that circling the world means being half in the sun’s light and half blocked from it was something to mull over with the lower image quality of black-and-white clouds drifting by and occasional “blobby” stars joined by an overexposed moon. Gagarin’s recorded comments became much scarcer, too, leaving me with just the music and suppositions there would have been things to check on inside the capsule and the continuing novelty of free fall. However, the sun coming back up did have some impact with the anniversary day just happening to be Easter Sunday. The ground track continued to be over ocean, though, until all of a sudden it was over land; recognizing the Nile and Sinai brought a feeling of place to me at last for all that by that point the retro-rockets had been fired (the problem of not everything separating from the spherical re-entry capsule didn’t get mentioned in the film, which reminded me of last year’s Apollo 11 for not having a narrator spelling things out but wasn’t compressing time.)