As those of us with an interest in space exploration look forward with excitement towards new Lunar and Martian exploration, it’s worth casting our minds back for a moment because today marks a special anniversary. Sixty years ago on April 12th 1961, the Vostok 1 craft with its pilot Yuri Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan. During the 108-minute mission he successfully completed an orbit of the Earth before parachuting from his craft after re-entry and landing on a farm near Engels, in the Saratov oblast to the south of Moscow.
In doing so he became the first human in space as well as the first to orbit the Earth, he became a hero to the Soviet and Russian people as well as the rest of the world, and scored a major victory for the Soviet space programme by beating the Americans to the prize. All the astronauts and cosmonauts who have been to space since then stand upon the shoulders of those first corps of pioneering pilots who left the atmosphere alone in their capsules, but it is Gagarin’s name that stands tallest among them.
In Russia the anniversary is being celebrated with particular fervour with special events, TV coverage, and a visit by President Putin to the landing site, and from space by the Russian cosmonauts in orbit on the ISS. Meanwhile space agencies closer to home are remaining tight-lipped, with NASA failing to mention that particular objective for ISS Expedition 65 crewmembers.
We consider that the politics of the Cold War should not be allowed to detract on our side of the world from the achievement of Gagarin and the engineers and scientists who placed him in orbit, thus we prefer to tell the whole story when dealing with space history. If you’d like to read a bit more Vostok history then we’d like to point you at the story of another Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
Header image: Нина ПЕТРИЩЕВА, CC BY-SA 4.0.
It marked the commencement of a new era of opportunities and troubles.
Why not to mention first chief designer of the Soviet space program – Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov? Especially how he was arrested by the NKVD, his experience in the Gulag and how he died…
You could never be too much of a hero to avoid the gulag.
He was in Gulag before he became a hero.
So he was rehabilitated, which in the USSR seems to mean they needed him for something.
I thought that Korolev died during surgery?
It was often said that those who died of a brain hemorrhage died of one precisely 9 mm in diameter.
And he died in a training jet in 1968.
And his name would show up on lists of famous ham radio operators. Though a check now seems to debunk that.
Sputnik went up in 1957, so getting someone ito orbit just under four years later seems amazi g.
The Russians are orbiting! The Russians are orbiting!
We can only know for sure, that Gagarin was the fist human to came back alive from space…
Look up the the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. It’s a sad story.
Also the Judica-Cordiglia brothers
The debunking of the “Lost Cosmonauts” has been done a while ago. There are not proof that cosmonauts died in secret orbital and suborbital launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts).
Well, technically he’s not the first human to go into space, he’s just the first to return safely.
By the criteria established by the FAI *at the time* his flight should not have counted because he did not land in his spacecraft. The Russians hid this detail from the world for quite some time. The FAI (rightly) changed their criteria post-facto, but you could argue his record should have an asterisk after it.
Sort of like Roger Maris…
Space race won! Americans run another lap just of the fun of it and win it again, this time for real.