Hidden in plain view

Abstract

It was a clear warm late summer’s evening when I first saw it. A bright star appeared from the west and steadily, silently crossed the night sky heading from the Wexford coast in south-eastern Ireland, bending over the sea toward England and Europe. ‘There’s a man up there!’ I was told (only the second person to fly into orbit) but this brief encounter with Vostok 2 and Gherman Titov was full of meaning. The Russian space programme, whose defining public characteristic was its secrecy, was not just something one followed in the newspapers: you could actually see it happening.