Figure 9. Yuri Gagarin is in the bus on the way to the launch pad on the morning of April 12, 1961, about to make the world’s first human flight into space. Behind him, seated, is his backup, Gherman Titov. Standing are cosmonauts Grigori Nelyubov and Andrian Nikolayev.
“Here we go!” Gagarin said as Vostok 1 lifted off. He was the first person to see Earth from a height of more than 100 miles, and he watched the continents, islands, and rivers slide by as he orbited at 17,500 miles per hour. When he tried to write up what he was seeing and doing in orbit, his pencil floated away. By any standard the flight was risky. The unknowns were very real. They included the safety and reliability of the technology, the still forming processes and procedures, and the ability of any human to withstand the forces of launch, weightlessness, reentry, and landing.
Because of concerns that Gagarin might be incapacitated by the stress of the flight, Vostok 1 was controlled from the ground. The launch was successful, and after slightly less than one orbit the Vostok capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere. As intended, Gagarin safely ejected from the capsule at 4.4 miles and parachuted to a landing near the capsule. The success of the mission and the subsequent elevation of Gagarin to heroic stature represented a high point for the USSR. Gagarin’s accidental death in a military jet crash in 1968 was a blow to the Soviet psyche thereafter.
Despite its outward success, Gagarin’s Vostok 1 flight had several serious problems. Since the end of the Cold War, increasing access of information has confirmed what some analysts believed all along: that Gagarin’s flight had nearly been a disaster when the capsule spun dangerously out of control while beginning the reentry sequence. Gagarin told officials during a postflight debriefing, “As soon as the braking rocket shut off, there was a sharp jolt, and the craft began to rotate around its axis at a very high velocity.” It spun uncontrollably as the equipment module failed to separate from the cosmonaut’s capsule. After ten minutes the spacecraft stabilized somewhat from its dizzying spin. Nevertheless, Gagarin ejected from the capsule and parachuted safely to Earth. The first people to see him were a mother and her child, who stared bewildered at this man who had just fallen out of the sky. “I am one of yours, a Soviet,” Gagarin reassured them. “I’ve come from outer space.”
The United States, already shaken by Soviet firsts in space beginning with Sputnik 1 in 1957, could only react to the Soviet accomplishment and would not match it until John Glenn’s flight ten months later. By the fall of 1961 a “space race” between the two nations was in full force.
The Soviet Union guarded the secret of Gagarin’s parachuting from the capsule for many years. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the official body recording aerospace records, required that for a record to be awarded the pilot must land with the vehicle. To ensure the Soviet record, the Soviet Union perpetuated the lie that Gagarin had landed with Vostok 1, not admitting the truth until 1971. To claim circumnavigation of Earth, the Soviets also lied about the location of the launch and landing sites; in reality the orbit was not quite the entire circumference of Earth.
The Soviets were also the first to undertake a rendezvous in space. On August 12, 1962, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 reached orbits that passed within several miles of each other but did not have the actual maneuvering capability to perform a true orbital rendezvous. At closest approach the cosmonauts were able to see the glint of sunlight off the distant spacecraft. The same was true of Vostok 5 and Vostok 6, launched June 16, 1963, to repeat the experiment. As Vasily Mishin, Korolev’s deputy and a longtime senior official in the Soviet space program wrote in his memoirs:
The group flight . . . well, a day after the launch, the first craft was over Baikonur. If the second craft were launched now with great precision, then they would turn out to be next to each other in space. And that’s what was done. . . . The craft turned out to be 5 kilometers [three miles] from each other! Well, since, with all of the secrecy, we didn’t tell the whole truth, the Western experts, who hadn’t figured it out, thought that our Vostok was already equipped with orbital approach equipment. As they say, a sleight of hand isn’t any kind of fraud. It was more like our competitors deceived themselves all by their lonesome. Of course, we didn’t shatter their illusions.
The success of the Soviet Union in space in the earliest years of the space age catapulted it into an unprecedented global limelight. In a closed society such as the Soviet Union, these successful flights collectively signaled a capability that impressed the world’s population.
By the first years of the 1960s the Soviet space program had come to resemble, more than anyone appreciated at the time, the personality of Sergei Korolev: cautious, pragmatic, intensely driven, and firmly dedicated to the systematic exploration of space. His commitment to safety prompted him to emphasize technology that could be enhanced and built on rather than used and then discarded, an approach that quickly became a hallmark of Soviet/Russian space operations to the present. Only Voskhod, forced on Korolev by Khrushchev as a prestige program, represented a different tactic; there three cosmonaut seats were substituted for the ejection system so that the Soviet Union could beat the United States in launching a three-person crew into space.
The United States responded after Gagarin’s flight with the beginning flights of the Mercury program, but it was only a salve on an open wound when Alan B. Shepard rode a Redstone booster in the Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft to become the first American in space during a fifteen-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. A second suborbital flight, launched on July 21, 1961, had unique problems. Upon landing, the capsule’s hatch blew off prematurely from the Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, and sank into the Atlantic Ocean before it could be recovered. In the process the astronaut, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, nearly drowned before being hoisted to safety in a helicopter. Not until July 20, 1999, did Oceaneering International, Inc., recover Liberty Bell 7 from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Curt Newport, financed by the Discovery Channel, brought the spacecraft up from a depth of nearly fifteen thousand feet, three hundred nautical miles east-southeast of Kennedy Space Center. Though less pathbreaking that Gagarin’s flight, those two suborbital missions proved valuable for NASA technicians, who found ways to solve or work around literally thousands of obstacles to successful spaceflight.
Comparisons between the Soviet and American flights were inevitable after these first flights (Box 2). Gagarin had orbited Earth; Shepard had been more like a cannonball shot from a gun than a space venturer. Gagarin’s Vostok spacecraft had a mass of more than five tons; Freedom 7 had a mass of a little more than a ton. Gagarin had been weightless for eighty-nine minutes, Shepard for only five. “Even though the United States is still the strongest military power and leads in many aspects of the space race,” wrote journalist Hanson W. Baldwin in the New York Times not long after Gagarin’s flight, “the world—impressed by the spectacular Soviet firsts—believes we lag militarily and technologically.”
BOX 2: KEY FIRSTS IN HUMAN EXPLORATION, 1958–1975
First human in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, flies a one-orbit mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, April 12, 1961.
First American in space, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., flies a suborbital mission aboard the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7, May 5, 1961.
First daylong human spaceflight mission, Vostok 2, with cosmonaut Gherman Titov aboard, August 6, 1961.
First American in orbit, John H. Glenn, Jr., makes three orbits aboard the Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7, February 20, 1962.
First long-duration spaceflight, cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev spending four days in space aboard Vostok 3, August 11–15, 1962.
First double (rendezvous) flight, Vostok 3, with cosmonaut Nikolayev aboard and Vostok 4, with cosmonaut Pavel Popovich aboard, August 12, 1962.
Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky sets a record aboard Vostok 5 by orbiting Earth eighty-one times, June 14–18, 1963.
First woman in space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, flies forty-eight orbits aboar
d Vostok 6, June 16–19, 1963.
First multiperson mission into space, Voskhod 1 carrying cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Boris Yegorov, and Konstantin Feoktistov, October 1964.
First spacewalk or extravehicular activity, by Alexei Leonov during the Voskhod 2 mission, March 1965.
First American spacewalk, by astronaut Edward White during Gemini 4, June 3, 1965.
First docking of two spacecraft in Earth orbit, Gemini 8 with an Agena target vehicle, March 16, 1966.
First human circumlunar flight, Apollo 8, December 24–25, 1968.
First human landing on the Moon, Apollo 11, July 20, 1969.
First human Moon landing in which the lunar rover allows astronauts to journey far from the touchdown site, Apollo 15, July 26–August 7, 1971.
First rendezvous and docking in space of American and Soviet spacecraft, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, July 15–24, 1975.
As these issues were being resolved, NASA engineers began final preparations for the orbital aspects of Project Mercury. In this phase NASA planned to use a Mercury capsule capable of supporting a human in space not just for minutes, but eventually for as long as three days. As a launch vehicle for this Mercury capsule, NASA used the more powerful Atlas rocket instead of the Redstone. But the decision was not without controversy. Apart from the technical difficulties to be overcome in mating the rocket to the Mercury capsule, the biggest complication was a debate among NASA engineers over the appropriateness of the Atlas for human spaceflight. It was an exceptionally lightweight rocket, made of aluminum pressurized to keep it from crumpling in gravity. Wernher von Braun’s rocket team distrusted such a revolutionary design, but was overruled by Robert Gilruth and his engineers at the Space Task Group. Fortunately, the rocket proved more than up to the task of launching the first Americans into orbit.
Most of the concerns had been resolved by the time of the first successful orbital flight of an unoccupied Mercury-Atlas combination in September 1961. On November 29 the final test flight took place, this time with the chimpanzee Enos occupying the capsule for a two-orbit ride before being successfully recovered in an ocean landing. Not until February 20, 1962, however, could NASA accomplish an orbital flight with an astronaut. On that date John Glenn became the first American to circle Earth, making three orbits in the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. The flight was not without problems, however; Glenn flew parts of the last two orbits manually because of an autopilot failure, and he left his retrorocket pack (which normally would be jettisoned) attached to the capsule during reentry because a warning light indicated a loose heat shield.
Glenn’s flight provided a healthy boost in national pride, compensating for at least some of the earlier Soviet successes. The public, more than celebrating the technological success, embraced Glenn as a personification of heroism and dignity. Hundreds of requests for personal appearances by Glenn poured into NASA headquarters, and NASA learned much about the power of the astronauts to sway public opinion. The agency leadership allowed Glenn to speak at some events, but more often it substituted other astronauts, and declined many invitations altogether. Among other engagements, Glenn did address a joint session of Congress and participated in several ticker-tape parades around the country. NASA thereby discovered a powerful public relations tool that it has employed ever since.
Three more successful Mercury flights took place during 1962 and 1963. Scott Carpenter made three orbits on May 20, 1962, and on October 3, 1962, Walter Schirra flew six orbits. The capstone of Project Mercury was the May 15–16, 1963, flight of Gordon Cooper, who circled Earth twenty-two times in thirty-four hours. The program accomplished its purpose: to orbit successfully a human in space, explore aspects of tracking and control, and learn about microgravity and other biomedical issues associated with spaceflight. But when the Mercury program ended in 1963, the United States had still not caught up to the Soviet Union in world opinion; a majority still believed that the Americans trailed the Russians in space accomplishments.
The First Woman in Space
For the first decade after Sputnik the Soviet Union’s space program seemed to succeed in almost every aspect of space exploration it attempted. The Soviets scored another success with the flight of Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963. Tereshkova joined the cosmonaut corps on February 16, 1962, after Sergei Korolev persuaded Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to approve a plan to put a woman in space. Unlike the male cosmonauts, who had all been experienced pilots, Tereshkova and the other four women shortlisted for Vostok missions—Valentina Ponomaryova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Irina Solovyova, and Zhanna Yorkina—were chosen from more than four hundred parachutists. Tereshkova soon rose to preeminence among the women in her training group, and she gained the nod to fly on Vostok 5. She trained hard for months in preparation for her mission, excelling at weightless flights, isolation and centrifuge tests, engineering courses, more than 120 parachute jumps, and pilot training in MiG-15 jet fighters. Korolev considered her a particularly suitable candidate for the mission because of her humble background as a worker in a textile factory in the Soviet Union. Moreover, her father had been a war hero, killed in the Finnish continuation campaign of the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets termed World War II.
Originally Korolev planned to have two female cosmonauts in orbit simultaneously, Tereshkova in Vostok 5 and Ponomaryova in Vostok 6, but this plan was altered in March 1963. The two spacecraft would still be launched days apart to be in orbit simultaneously, but Valery Bykovsky was the cosmonaut in Vostok 5, and Tereshkova was bumped down to Vostok 6. Tereshkova watched Bykovsky’s launch on June 14 and followed him into orbit two days later.
Like Gherman Titov, Tereshkova experienced nausea during much of the flight, even vomiting, but she successfully completed forty-eight orbits over three days—a greater total of time spent in space than all of the American astronauts combined to that date. She returned to a hero’s welcome, and, like Yuri Gagarin before her, she was sent around the world as a goodwill ambassador.
But while Tereshkova’s feat seemed to signal a greater equality between men and women, in both the Soviet space program and under the Soviet system more generally, in reality it represented neither of these things. Tereshkova’s mission was essentially a publicity stunt to achieve another space first. No other woman flew in space during the space race, although other women trained and were eager to fly. In 1969 the cadre of women cosmonauts was disbanded. The next woman in space, Svetlana Savitskaya, would not get into orbit until August 19, 1982, more than nineteen years after Tereshkova. Savitskaya was followed the next year by the first American woman to fly in space, Sally K. Ride, who orbited Earth aboard the Space Shuttle mission STS-7.
Tereshkova went on to a distinguished career as a Soviet politician, serving in the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union between 1966 and 1974 and in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1974 to 1989. She also served on several delegations on behalf of the USSR. With the end of the Soviet Union, Tereshkova went on serve in the Russian State Duma in 2011 and remained a member through 2017. Although seventy-one years old at the time, she was a torchbearer for the 2008 Summer Olympics when the torch passed through Saint Petersburg en route to Beijing for the start of the Games.
As the Soviets were sending Tereshkova into space, many in the United States also believed women should have the opportunity to become space explorers. Shortly after the public unveiling of the Mercury Seven astronauts in the United States, William “Randy” Lovelace II, one of the life scientists who had been involved in the selection, began investigating whether women could perform in similar selection tests as well as their male counterparts. After meeting American aviator Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb in 1959, Lovelace invited her to take the same tests as the Mercury astronauts, and was astounded by her aptitude. Uncertain whether Cobb might be an anomaly, Lovelace secured private funding from veteran pilot Jackie Cochran, the head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program in World War II, to bri
ng eighteen other experienced female pilots to his clinic for secret testing.
The women arrived alone or in pairs for four days of tests, including experiments on centrifuges to simulate the strains of launch and reentry. All the women were skilled airplane pilots with commercial ratings, and they fared well on the tests. When word of the experiments leaked to the press, the top twelve, along with Jerrie Cobb, were dubbed the “Mercury 13.” Some of them believed that their participation in the tests could lead to their becoming NASA astronauts themselves, but NASA had no direct involvement in Lovelace’s work. Indeed, when NASA’s leadership learned of the experiments, it soon declared that it had no plans to employ women astronauts.
This did not dissuade the American media, which had a field day with the women’s outstanding test results. Some of the choice headlines included: “Astrogals Can’t Wait for Space,” “Spunky Mom Eyes Heavens,” and “Why not ‘Astronauttes’ Also?” There was a great deal of excitement about America’s first “lady astronauts,” and several of the women were interviewed for television programs and for photo spreads in magazines and newspapers around the United States.
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