TODAY IN HISTORY SIXTY YEARS AGO

Yuri Gagarin: The first man in space

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was having a rough time of it in April 1961

By Gregory McNamee, CNN 

4/12/2021

© Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Cosmonaut yuri gagarin during last minute checks of vostok i control systems before launch, 1961. (Photo by: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In office for less than three months, Kennedy was facing down what he and his advisers suspected to be an untrustworthy Central Intelligence Agency.

He would confirm his suspicion toward the end of the month, when Cuban rebels bankrolled by the agency invaded their Communist-held homeland. At a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others on April 12, Kennedy had stressed he wanted the invasion to be a Cuban operation as much as possible, and the CIA assured him that the rebels were up to the job.

The result, a week later, was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a military and political disaster that would only embolden Fidel Castro and his chief benefactor, the Soviet Union.

Kennedy blamed the Soviets for his bad April. In his inaugural address in January, he made an overture to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, inviting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to join the United States in "exploring the stars."

Khrushchev's answer came 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth aboard a spacecraft called Vostok 1. After parachuting from the craft near the Russian village of Smelovka, Gagarin landed a hero — and a major embarrassment for the United States, already stung by the Soviet first-in-the-race launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite four years earlier.

READ MORE: Famous firsts in space

The Vostok rocket was the brainchild of Soviet engineer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Embarrassed in turn by their failure to develop an atomic bomb before the Americans did, the Soviet leadership had poured a huge portion of the country's budget into scientific research, building a testing ground and rocket base in Kazakhstan that, wrote Stephen Walker in his new book "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space," was four times the size of Greater London. There, Korolev worked his magic, building a series of rockets over several years.

The CIA reported, accurately, to President Dwight Eisenhower that thanks to Korolev's powerful fleet of intercontinental missiles, the Soviets would be ready to put a satellite into space by 1958.

The Soviets were ahead of schedule by three months. And with Sputnik, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his frenetic classic of the space race, "The Right Stuff," "a colossal panic was underway, with congressmen and newspapermen leading a huge pack that was baying at the sky where the hundred-pound Soviet satellite kept beeping around the world. ... Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake."

Emboldened by the success of Sputnik, Korolev asked Khrushchev for permission to send "biological materials" into space. He had a long history of lofting dogs into the sky on massive rockets that had an unfortunate tendency to explode on liftoff. But in August 1960, one of Korolev's new generation of rockets lifted off with two dogs, 40 mice, a rabbit, a pair of rats, and a bottle full of fruit flies -- and this menagerie orbited Earth 18 times. All returned alive, after which Korolev extended his "biological materials" to include humans.

He began screening Soviet military pilots, thousands of them. The American astronauts in the competing Mercury program may have joked about being "Spam in a can," but it seems clear that Korolev wanted to have plenty of cosmonauts on hand in case another rocket blew up.

One of the cosmonauts was a former fighter pilot named Pavel Romanovich Popovich, a good-humored man who quickly made his way to the top of the class. He was a likely choice to travel on the first manned launch, but, as Walker noted, he was handicapped by being Ukrainian. For even in the supposedly internationalist and multiethnic Soviet Union, the Politburo made clear to Korolev that a Russian had to go up first. (Popovich would have his turn aboard Vostok 4 in August 1962.)

Enter Yuri Gagarin, who ticked all the boxes: He was the son of a carpenter who grew up on a collective farm and had survived the Nazi occupation — though, it would emerge, he was traumatized by the experience, which included the attempted execution of his 5-year-old brother.

Gagarin had gone to trade school, earning top marks, before joining the Soviet Air Force and undergoing pilot training. He excelled as an aviator, and while, as Walker recounted, the head of the Vostok training program exclaimed, "All six cosmonauts are terrific guys," Gagarin led the field from the moment he arrived for training. It helped, of course, that he was Russian.

So it was that on April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 lifted Yuri Gagarin into space, the first human being to travel there. His orbit, which lasted for an hour and 48 minutes, had a few unsettling moments. He lost radio contact with Earth for 23 minutes, during which time, Walker recorded, he amused himself by watching droplets of water float about in the cabin, released from his drinking tube.

He also had only the vaguest idea of where he was when he came back to Earth, at one point crossing over a corner of Antarctica before finally parachuting out over a collective farm like the one of his childhood. "Boys, let's be acquainted," he told the astonished farmers he encountered. "I am the first spaceman in the world, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin."

Khrushchev crowed about the Soviet victory over his capitalist rival. Gagarin was feted, celebrated and put up in the finest hotels the country could offer. Lonely amid all the hubbub, he drank heavily and unhappily. Finally allowed to return to active service after spending time as a delegate to the Supreme Soviet, he died in 1968 in what authorities described as a "routine training flight."

Four months after Gagarin's spaceflight on Vostok 1, cosmonaut Gherman Titov circled Earth 17 times on Vostok 2. It would be another six months before American astronaut John Glenn joined the extraterrestrial elite aboard Friendship 7.

Meanwhile, a frustrated John Kennedy, realizing that the United States would have to find another event in the space race in which to compete, sent a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, asking, "Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?"

Johnson conferred with NASA, returning with a projected price tag of $20 billion. Kennedy reversed an earlier round of budget-cutting, first extracting NASA's assurance that an American would be on the Moon by 1970. Kennedy then addressed the nation, saying, "We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share. ... No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

All of that turned out to be true, all the more so when NASA beat Kennedy's schedule by 164 days and, on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong, accompanied by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, piloted the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle to the surface of the Moon.

If only for his part in spurring on the space race 60 years ago, Yuri Gagarin deserves some credit for that transformative moment, too.

Yuri Gagarin wearing a suit and hat: Gagarin waves to crowds who have come to see him at the Soviet exhibition at London's Earls Court, July 11, 1961.

Gagarin waves to crowds who have come to see him at the Soviet exhibition at London's Earls Court, July 11, 1961.

Soviet cosmonaut made pioneering spaceflight 60 years ago

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV4/12/2021

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FILE - In this undated file photo, Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, first man to orbit the earth, is shown in his space suit. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space 60 years ago. The successful one-orbit flight on April 12, 1961 made the 27-year-old Gagarin a national hero and cemented Soviet supremacy in space until the United States put a man on the moon more than eight years later. (AP Photo/File)

MOSCOW (AP) — Crushed into the pilot’s seat by heavy G-forces, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin saw flames outside his spacecraft and prepared to die. His voice broke the tense silence at ground control: “I’m burning. Goodbye, comrades.”

Gagarin didn’t know that the blazing inferno he observed through a porthole was a cloud of plasma engulfing Vostok 1 during its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, and he was still on track to return safely.

It was his quiet composure under pressure that helped make him the first human in space 60 years ago.

Gagarin’s steely self-control was a key factor behind the success of his pioneering 108-minute flight. The April 12, 1961, mission encountered glitches and emergencies — from a capsule hatch failing to shut properly just before blastoff to parachute problems in the final moments before touchdown.

From the time 20 Soviet air force pilots were selected to train for the first crewed spaceflight, Gagarin’s calm demeanor, quick learning skills and beaming smile made him an early favorite.

Two days before blastoff, the 27-year-old Gagarin wrote a farewell letter to his wife, Valentina, sharing his pride in being chosen to ride in Vostok 1 but also trying to console her in the event of his death.

“I fully trust the equipment, it mustn’t let me down. But if something happens, I ask you Valyusha not to become broken by grief,” he wrote, using a nickname for her.

Authorities held onto the letter and eventually gave it to Gagarin’s widow seven years later after he died in an airplane crash. She never remarried.

Gagarin’s pioneering, single-orbit flight made him a hero in the Soviet Union and an international celebrity. After putting the world’s first satellite into orbit with the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the Soviet space program, rushed to secure its dominance over the United States by putting a man into space.

“The task was set, and people were sleeping in their offices and factory shops, like at wartime,” Fyodor Yurchikhin, a Russian cosmonaut who eventually made five spaceflights, recalled.

As the Soviet rocket and space program raced to beat the Americans, it suffered a series of launch failures throughout 1960, including a disastrous launch pad explosion in October that killed 126 people. Missile Forces chief Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin was among the victims.

Like Gagarin, Soviet officials were prepared for the worst. No safety system had been installed to save the cosmonaut in case of another rocket explosion at blastoff or after.

Authorities drafted three versions of a bulletin about Gagarin’s flight for the official TASS news agency: one announcing a successful flight, another in case of problems, and the third one for a mission ending in disaster.

Apart from potential engine failures and other equipment malfunctions, scientists questioned an individual’s ability to withstand the conditions of spaceflight. Many worried that a pilot could go mad in orbit.

Soviet engineers prepared for that situation by developing a fully automatic control system. As an extra precaution, the pilot would receive a sealed envelope containing a secret code for activating the capsule’s manual controls. The theory was that a person who could enter the code must be sane enough to operate the ship.

Everyone in the space program liked Gagarin so much, however, that a senior instructor and a top engineer independently shared the secret code with him before the flight to save him the trouble of fiddling with the envelope in case of an emergency.

Problems began right after Gagarin got into Vostok 1, when a light confirming the hatch’s closure did not go on. Working at a frantic pace, a leading engineer and a co-worker removed 32 screws, found and fixed a faulty contact, and put the screws back just in time for the scheduled launch.

Sitting in the capsule, Gagarin whistled a tune. “Poyekhali!” — “Off we go!” — he shouted as the rocket blasted off.

As another precaution, the orbit was planned so the spacecraft would descend on its own after a week if an engine burn failure stranded the ship. Instead, a glitch resulted in a higher orbit that would have left Gagarin dead if the engine had malfunctioned at that stage.

While the engine worked as planned to send the ship home, a fuel loss resulted in an unexpected reentry path and a higher velocity that made the ship rotate wildly for 10 agonizing minutes.

Gagarin later said he nearly blacked out while experiencing G-forces exceeding 10 times the pull of gravity. “There was a moment lasting two or three seconds when instruments started fading before my eyes,” he recalled.

Seeing a cloud of fiery plasma around his ship on re-entry, he thought his ship was burning.

A soft-landing system hadn’t been designed yet, so Gagarin ejected from the module in his spacesuit and deployed a parachute. While descending, he had to fiddle with a sticky valve on his spacesuit to start breathing outside air. A reserve chute unfolded in addition to the main parachute, making it hard for him to control his descent, but he landed safely on a field near the Volga River in the Saratov region.

Gagarin was flown to Moscow to a hero’s welcome, hailed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and greeted by enthusiastic crowds cheering his flight as a triumph on par with the victory in World War II. In the years before he died at age 34, he basked in international glory, visiting dozens of countries to celebrate his historic mission.

“The colossal propaganda effect of the Sputnik launch and particularly Gagarin’s flight was very important,” Moscow-based aviation and space expert Vadim Lukashevich said. “We suddenly beat America even though our country hadn’t recovered yet from the massive damage and casualties” from World War II.

Gagarin was killed in a training jet crash on March 27, 1968. Not quite 16 months later, the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the space race, putting an astronaut on the moon.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union ended the era of rivalry. Russia’s efforts to develop new rockets and spacecraft have faced endless delays, and the country has continued to rely on Soviet-era technology. Amid the stagnation, the much-criticized state space corporation Roscosmos has focused on a costly plan to build its new, rocket-shaped headquarters on the site of a dismantled rocket factory.

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Associated Press journalists Kostya Manenkov and Kirill Zarubin in Moscow contributed to this report.