Page 13 - Apollo Moonships

The Tools for The job 11
COSMONAUT YURI GAGARIN
A thoughtful Gagarin is seen on the bus on the way to the launch on April 12, 1961. After his space flight aboard Vostok 1, Gagarin became a Soviet hero and a worldwide celebrity. He died in a plane crash in 1968 when he piloted a fighter jet.
THE SOVIETS WERE AHEAD
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union began an overlapping confrontation in ideological, political, military, economic, and spatial fields. During this confrontation, known as the Cold War, both sides used their ballistic missile technology, developed in the 1950’s, to try to be the first to access space, an achievement obtained by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, with the Sputnik 1, a small metallic satellite designed to broadcast radio signals. Between 1957 and 1961, the Soviets launched several stunning space missions. On April 12, 1961, however, the Soviet Union really shocked the world by launching the first successful manned space mission in history, led by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) aboard the spacecraft Vostok
1. Gagarin’s flight consisted of a single Earth orbit performed in 89.34 minutes at an altitude of 196 miles (315 km). Vostok 1 was not designed to land softly (even using parachutes, the vessel descended to the ground at 33 ft/s, twice the normal speed), so Gagarin was jettisoned once the spacecraft reentered into the Earth’s atmosphere and reached an altitude of 2300 feet from the ground. Gagarin’s feat was followed by other successful Soviet orbital missions, including the launch of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, on June 16, 1963. Tereshkova piloted her Vostok 6 spacecraft for five days, gathering more orbital flight hours than all American crews who had flown to space at that time.
GAGARIN’S FLIGHT
Artwork of the Vostok 1 spacecraft carrying Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin around the Earth as the first human in space on April 12, 1961 The Vostok 1 spacecraft, large enough for a crew of one, consisted of an equipment module (cone-shaped) and a descent module (spherical).