Yuri Gagarin — The First Human in Space
Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space on 12 April 1961, completing a single orbit of the earth in 108 minutes aboard Vostok 1. He was twenty-seven, a senior lieutenant in the Soviet air force, the son of a carpenter and a milkmaid from a village near Smolensk that had been occupied by the Germans during his childhood. He was selected from twenty finalists partly because he was short — five foot two — which mattered in a capsule of that size, and partly because Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, liked him. The flight was almost entirely automatic. Soviet doctors did not know whether a human could think or function in weightlessness, so the manual controls were locked behind a code sealed in an envelope. The capsule had no means of landing a human safely, so Gagarin ejected at about seven kilometres and parachuted down separately — a fact concealed for years, because the international aviation federation required a pilot to land with the craft for a record to stand. The service module failed to separate cleanly and the spacecraft tumbled violently through the first minutes of re-entry. He landed in a field near Saratov and was found by a farmer and her granddaughter, who were alarmed by the orange suit. He became the most famous man alive and was forbidden to fly again as too valuable to risk. He was killed in 1968 in a MiG-15 training crash, at thirty-four. The United States put Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight three weeks later and John Glenn into orbit in February 1962. Kennedy committed the country to the Moon six weeks after Gagarin flew, which is the clearest single consequence of the flight.
- Year: 1961 CE
- Category: Technology
