Gagarin Enters Space: Humanity Takes Its First Step

Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit aboard Vostok 1 at 9:07 AM Moscow time on April 12, 1961, and 108 minutes later humanity was no longer bound to a single planet. The 27-year-old Soviet Air Force pilot completed one full orbit of Earth, reaching an altitude of 203 miles and a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. He ejected from the capsule at 23,000 feet and parachuted to a farm field near the Volga River, where a startled woman and her granddaughter were the first to meet the world's first spaceman. The flight was far more dangerous than Soviet propaganda admitted. Gagarin had no control over the spacecraft; the entire mission was automated because engineers were unsure whether a human could function in weightlessness. A sealed envelope containing the manual override code was stowed aboard in case the automatic systems failed. The reentry sequence malfunctioned when the service module failed to separate cleanly from the capsule, causing violent tumbling for ten minutes before the straps connecting the two modules burned through. The Soviet space program had rushed to beat the Americans, who were preparing Alan Shepard's suborbital flight for early May. Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev pushed the schedule despite two unmanned test flights that had experienced problems. Gagarin was selected from a pool of twenty cosmonauts partly for his compact five-foot-two frame, which fit the cramped Vostok capsule, and partly for his humble peasant background, which Soviet leaders considered ideal for propaganda purposes. Gagarin's flight electrified the world and humiliated the United States, which responded with President Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the Moon by decade's end. Gagarin became an international celebrity, touring dozens of countries as a goodwill ambassador. He never flew in space again. He died in a routine jet training flight crash in March 1968, at age 34, never seeing the Moon landing his flight had provoked.