1961

First man in space

On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri
Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space.
During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also
became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space
capsule in 89 minutes.Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187
miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only
statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space
was, Flight is proceeding normally; I am well.
After his historic feat was announced, the attractive and unassuming Gagarin
became an instant worldwide celebrity. He was awarded the Order of Lenin
and given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Monuments were raised to him
across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor.
The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space
was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space
flight for May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded
the U.S. space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn
made three orbits inFriendship 7. By that time, the Soviet Union had already
made another leap ahead in the space race with the August 1961 flight of
cosmonaut Gherman Titov inVostok 2. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more
than 25 hours in space.
To Soviet propagandists, the Soviet conquest of space was evidence of the
supremacy of communism over capitalism. However, to those who worked on
the Vostok program and earlier on Sputnik (which launched the first satellite
into space in 1957), the successes were attributable chiefly to the brilliance of
one man: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Because of his controversial past, Chief

Designer Korolev was unknown in the West and to all but insiders in the USSR
until his death in 1966.
Born in the Ukraine in 1906, Korolev was part of a scientific team that
launched the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. In 1938, his military
sponsor fell prey to Soviet leader Joseph Stalins purges, and Korolev and his
colleagues were also put on trial. Convicted of treason and sabotage, Korolev
was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. The Soviet authorities came to
fear German rocket advances, however, and after only a year Korolev was put
in charge of a prison design bureau and ordered to continue his rocketry work.
In 1945, Korolev was sent to Germany to learn about the V-2 rocket, which
had been used to devastating effect by the Nazis against the British. The
Americans had captured the rockets designer, Wernher von Braun, who later
became head of the U.S. space program, but the Soviets acquired a fair
amount of V-2 resources, including rockets, launch facilities, blueprints, and a
few German V-2 technicians. By employing this technology and his own
considerable engineering talents, by 1954 Korolev had built a rocket that could
carry a five-ton nuclear warhead and in 1957 launched the first
intercontinental ballistic missile.
That year, Korolevs plan to launch a satellite into space was approved, and on
October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was fired into Earths orbit. It was the first Soviet
victory of the space race, and Korolev, still technically a prisoner, was officially
rehabilitated. The Soviet space program under Korolev would go on to
numerous space firsts in the late 1950s and early 60s: first animal in orbit,
first large scientific satellite, first man, first woman, first three men, first space
walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact
Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. Throughout this time, Korolev
remained anonymous, known only as the Chief Designer. His dream of
sending cosmonauts to the moon eventually ended in failure, primarily
because the Soviet lunar program received just one-tenth the funding
allocated to Americas successful Apollo lunar landing program.

Korolev died in 1966. Upon his death, his identity was finally revealed to the
world, and he was awarded a burial in the Kremlin wall as a hero of the Soviet
Union. Yuri Gagarin was killed in a routine jet-aircraft test flight in 1968. His
ashes were also placed in the Kremlin wall.