biography of yuri gagarin

Biography of Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space

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Yuri Gagarin (March 9, 1934–March 27, 1968) made history on April 12, 1961, when he became both the first person in the world to enter space and the first person to orbit the Earth. Although he never again went to space, his achievement was one of the most significant events of the " space race " which eventually saw men land on the moon.

Fast Facts: Yuri Gagarin

• Known For : First human being in space and first in Earth orbit
• Born : March 9, 1934 in Klushino, USSR
• Parents : Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin, Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina
• Died : March 27, 1968 in Kirsach, USSR
• Education : Orenburg Aviation School, where he learned to fly Soviet MiGs
• Awards and Honors : Order of Lenin, Hero of the Soviet Union, Pilot Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union; monuments were raised and streets named for him across the Soviet Union
• Spouse : Valentina Gagarina
• Children : Yelena (born 1959), Galina (born 1961)
• Notable Quote : "To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage single-handed in an unprecedented duel with nature—could anyone dream of anything greater than that?"

born in Klushino, a small village west of Moscow in Russia (then known as the Soviet Union). Yuri was the third of four children and spent his childhood on a collective farm where his father, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin, worked as a carpenter and bricklayer and his mother, Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked as a milkmaid.

In 1941, Yuri Gagarin was just 7 years old when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Life was difficult during the war and the Gagarins were kicked out of their home. The Nazis also sent Yuri's two sisters to Germany to work as forced laborers.

Gagarin Learns to Fly

In school, Yuri Gagarin loved both mathematics and physics. He continued on to a trade school, where he learned to be a metalworker and then went on to an industrial school. It was at the industrial school in Saratov that he joined a flying club. Gagarin learned quickly and was obviously at ease in a plane. He made his first solo flight in 1955.

Since Gagarin had discovered a love of flying, he joined the Soviet Air Force. Gagarin's skills led him to the Orenburg Aviation School, where he learned to fly MiGs. On the same day he graduated from Orenburg with top honors in November 1957, Yuri Gagarin married his sweetheart, Valentina ("Valy") Ivanovna Goryacheva. The couple eventually had two daughters together.

After graduating, Gagarin was sent on some missions. However, while Gagarin enjoyed being a fighter pilot, what he really wanted to do was to go to space. Since he had been following the Soviet Union's progress in space flight, he was confident that soon his country would send a man into space. He wanted to be that man, so he volunteered to be a cosmonaut.

Gagarin Applies to Be a Cosmonaut

Yuri Gagarin was just one of 3,000 applicants to be the first Soviet cosmonaut. Out of this large pool of applicants, 20 were chosen in 1960 to be the Soviet Union's first cosmonauts; Gagarin was one of the 20.

During the extensive physical and psychological testing required of the chosen cosmonaut trainees, Gagarin excelled at the tests while maintaining a calm demeanor as well as his sense of humor. Later, Gagarin would be chosen to be the first man into space because of these skills. (It also helped that he was short in stature since Vostok 1's capsule was small.) Cosmonaut trainee Gherman Titov was chosen to be the backup in case Gagarin was unable to make the first space flight.

Launch of Vostok 1

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin boarded Vostok 1 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Although he was fully trained for the mission, no one knew if it was going to be a success or a failure. Gagarin was to be the very first human being in space, truly going where no man had gone before.

Minutes before the launch, Gagarin gave a speech, which included:

You must realize that it is hard to express my feeling now that the test for which we have been training long and passionately is at hand. I don't have to tell you what I felt when it was suggested that I should make this flight, the first in history. Was it joy? No, it was something more than that. Pride? No, it was not just pride. I felt great happiness. To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage single handed in an unprecedented duel with nature—could anyone dream of anything greater than that? But immediately after that I thought of the tremendous responsibility I bore: to be the first to do what generations of people had dreamed of; to be the first to pave the way into space for mankind. *

Vostok 1 , with Yuri Gagarin inside, launched on schedule at 9:07 a.m. Moscow Time. Just after lift-off, Gagarin reputedly called out, "Poyekhali!" ("Off we go!")

Gagarin was rocketed into space using an automated system. Gagarin did not control the spacecraft during his mission; however, in case of an emergency, he could have opened an envelope left on board for the override code. He was not given the controls because many scientists were worried about the psychological effects of being in space (i.e. they were worried he would go mad).

After entering space, Gagarin completed a single orbit around Earth. The Vostok 1's top speed reached 28,260 kph (about 17,600 mph). At the end of the orbit, Vostok 1 reentered the Earth's atmosphere. When Vostok 1 was still about 7 km (4.35 miles) from the ground, Gagarin ejected (as planned) from the spacecraft and used a parachute to land safely.

From launch (at 9:07 a.m.) to Vostok 1 touching down on the ground (10:55 a.m.) was 108 minutes, a number often used to describe this mission. Gagarin landed safely with his parachute about 10 minutes after Vostok 1 came down. The calculation of 108 minutes is used because the fact that Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft and parachuted to the ground was kept secret for many years. (The Soviets did this to get around a technicality about how flights were officially recognized at the time.)

Right before Gagarin landed (near the village of Uzmoriye, near the Volga River), a local farmer and her daughter spotted Gagarin floating down with his parachute. Once on the ground, Gagarin, dressed in an orange spacesuit and wearing a large white helmet, terrified the two women. It took Gagarin a few minutes to convince them that he too was Russian and to direct him to the nearest phone.

After his successful first flight into space , Gagarin never again was sent into space. Instead, he helped train future cosmonauts. On March 27, 1968, Gagarin was test-piloting a MiG-15 fighter jet when the plane plummeted to the ground, killing Gagarin instantly at the age of 34.

For decades, people speculated about how Gagarin, an experienced pilot, could safely fly to space and back but die during a routine flight. Some thought he was drunk. Others believed that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev wanted Gagarin dead because he was jealous of the cosmonaut's fame.

However, in June 2013, fellow cosmonaut, Alexey Leonov (the first man to conduct a spacewalk), revealed that the accident was caused by a Sukhoi fighter jet that had been flying too low. Traveling at supersonic speed , the jet flew perilously close to Gagarin's MiG , likely overturning the MiG with its backwash and sending Gagarin's jet into a deep spiral.

Nearly as soon as Gagarin's feet touched the ground back on Earth, he became an international hero. His accomplishment was known around the globe. He had accomplished what no other human being had ever done before. Yuri Gagarin's successful flight into space paved the way for all future space exploration.

• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “ Yuri Gagarin .” Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Biography.com , A&E Networks Television. “Yuri Gagarin.”
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Yuri Gagarin: Facts about the first human in space

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space when he orbited Earth in 1961 aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule.

Yuri Gagarin FAQs

Childhood and cosmonaut selection, vostok 1 mission, soyuz 1 and death, additional resources.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human in space. In 1961, he orbited Earth aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule, the first-ever crewed spacecraft. As a result, he became an international celebrity and received many awards for this achievement, both within and outside the Soviet Union.

Vostok 1 was Gagarin's only spaceflight. He was on the backup crew for the Soyuz 1 mission but wasn’t allowed to go to space after that mission ended in a fatal crash because officials worried that Gagarin, a national hero, would be killed. Though he was eventually allowed to continue flying regular aircraft, he died five weeks after being cleared to fly again, when his flight-training airplane crashed. The exact cause of the crash is still unknown.

Related: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1: How the 1st human spaceflight worked (infographic)

Who was the first man in space?

Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, was the first person in space and the first to orbit Earth. 

How old was Yuri Gagarin when he died?

Yuri Gagarin was 34 when he died. 

How many times did Yuri Gagarin go to space?

Gagarin went to space only once, aboard the Vostok 1 capsule. He was also the backup crewmember for the Soyuz 1 mission. 

Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the Soviet Russian village of Klushino to parents who worked on a collective farm, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Beginning in October 1941, German soldiers occupied Klushino as part of their advance on Moscow during World War II. The occupation lasted 21 months, according to the BBC . In 1946, his family moved to the nearby town of Gzhatsk (now named Gagarin), where he went to secondary school and studied math and physics, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History .

After six years of secondary school, Gagarin went to technical school in Saratov, where he also joined a local flying club and began learning to fly a plane. He went on to attend the Soviet Air Force Academy and graduated in 1957. He was one of 20 Soviet fighter pilots chosen as cosmonauts, in part because of his small size, according to ESA. To fit in the small Vostok capsule, cosmonauts couldn't be taller than 1.75 meters (5 feet 9 inches), according to Star Walk , and Gagarin was 1.57 m tall (5 feet 5 inches), according to ESA. In fact, in a 1961 interview , Gagarin described the capsule as quite roomy, especially compared with airplane cockpits of the time.  

Alongside other cosmonauts, Gagarin participated in intensive preparation for spaceflight, including various physical and psychological experiments. A doctor doing psychological testing on him praised his "high degree of intellectual development," noting his attention to detail, strong imagination, quick reaction time and skill in doing mathematical calculations, according to ESA.

" Vostok " means "East" in Russian, as opposed to the Western world, signifying the mission's importance in the Cold War-era space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The crewed part of the capsule was spherical, with an inside diameter of about 7 feet (2 m), according to The Planetary Society . The spacecraft launched on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan.

In response to a statement from ground control that everything seemed to be working fine, Gagarin famously replied "Poyekhali!" — an informal phrase meaning "Off we go!" in Russian, according to ESA.

Gagarin orbited Earth in the capsule for about an hour before the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere . For the most part, the flight went smoothly, though Gagarin lost communication with ground control several times. The two parts of the spacecraft also failed to correctly separate for a while during reentry, and the spacecraft shook violently. But when the capsule was about 4 miles (6 kilometers) above the ground, Gagarin parachuted back to Earth as planned, landing on farmland outside the city of Engels, Russia.

After the mission, Gagarin became an overnight international celebrity; the Soviet Union had kept his spaceflight secret until it was successful. Gagarin was known not only for his accomplishments but also for his charismatic personality and smile, according to the BBC. Though he was barred from visiting the United States, he traveled the world and received many honors, The Telegraph reported . This included the title " Hero of the Soviet Union ," the nation's highest honor.

On April 23, 1967, the Soyuz 1 mission launched with cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov as its sole crewmember, with Gagarin as the backup. During the spacecraft's landing, the parachute failed to deploy, instantly killing Komarov when it hit the ground. Though Gagarin had nothing to do with the crash (and even reportedly tried to get the launch postponed due to safety concerns), the Soviet Union barred him from spaceflight after the crash, out of fear that their national hero would be killed, according to the BBC . Officials also originally also banned him from flying regular aircraft.

After completing additional training, Gagarin was eventually allowed to continue flying. But on March 27, 1968, the plane he was test-piloting crashed, killing him and flying instructor Vladimir Seryogin, according to ESA.

It is unclear exactly what caused the crash. An investigation by the KGB , the former Soviet security and intelligence agency, found that the aircraft went into a spin, possibly maneuvering sharply to avoid a weather balloon. According to the report, the two pilots couldn't regain control; they believed they were at a higher altitude than they actually were because of the inaccurate weather information they'd been given. The report is difficult to confirm, and there are many theories about the crash, including conspiracy theories that Gagarin's death was orchestrated by Soviet officials.

You can learn more about the first man in space with these pieces from Scientific American and Astronomy.com . Space Center Houston's on this day in history details Gagarin's historic flight to space. 

Bibliography

 BBC News. (2011, April 8). Yuri Gagarin: 'I was never nervous during the space flight.' [video]. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-12983333

Dowling, S. (2021, April 12). Yuri Gagarin: the spaceman who came in from the cold . BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210409-yuri-gagarin-the-spaceman-who-came-in-from-the-cold  

European Space Agency. (2007, February 4). Yuri Gagarin . www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_in_space/Yuri_Gagarin

European Space Agency. (2007, February 4). The flight of Vostok 1. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_in_space/The_flight_of_Vostok_1

Lapenkova, M. (2018, March 27). Fifty years on, Yuri Gagarin's death still shrouded in mystery . Phys.org. http://www.phys.org/news/2018-03-fifty-years-yuri-gagarin-death.html

McKeever, A. (2022, April 12). How the space race launched an era of exploration beyond Earth . National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-race-early-human-spaceflight-history-missions?loggedin=true&rnd=1699322304385 .

Orange, R. (2011, April 12). Yuri Gagarin: 50th anniversary of the first man in space . The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/8443777/Yuri-Gagarin-50th-anniversary-of-the-first-man-in-space.html  

Star Walk. (2021, April 11). 60th anniversary of the first human space flight . https://starwalk.space/en/news/60th-anniversary-of-the-first-human-space-flight

Swopes, Brian. “Pilot-Cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union.” This Day in Aviation. 14 Apr. 2023, https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/yuri-alekseyevich-gagarin/ . Accessed November 7, Nov. 2023.

The Planetary Society. (n.d.). Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight . Retrieved November 7, 2023, from https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/vostok-1

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Rebecca Sohn is a freelance science writer. She writes about a variety of science, health and environmental topics, and is particularly interested in how science impacts people's lives. She has been an intern at CalMatters and STAT, as well as a science fellow at Mashable. Rebecca, a native of the Boston area, studied English literature and minored in music at Skidmore College in Upstate New York and later studied science journalism at New York University. 

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Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia).

His parents, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked.

After starting an apprenticeship in a metalworks as a foundryman, Gagarin was selected for further training at a technical high school in Saratov. While there, he joined the 'AeroClub', and learned to fly light aircraft, a hobby that would take up an increasing part of his time. In 1955, after completing his technical schooling, he entered flight training at the Orenburg Military Pilot's School.

While there he met Valentina Goryacheva, whom he married in 1957, after gaining his pilot's wings in a MiG-15. After graduation, he was assigned to Luostari airbase in Murmansk Oblast. He became a lieutenant in the Soviet air force on 5 November 1957, and was promoted to senior lieutenant on 6 November 1959.

After Soviet Union decided to launch a human being to space, a secret nationwide selection process was started in 1960 and Gagarin was chosen with 19 other pilots. Gagarin was further selected for an elite training group known as the 'Sochi Six', who would make up the the first cosmonauts of the Vostok programme.

Gagarin and the other prospective cosmonauts were subjected to experiments designed to test physical and psychological endurance; he also underwent training for the upcoming flight. Out of the 20 selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov, because of their performance in training, as well as their physical characteristics — space was at a premium in the small Vostok cockpit and both men were rather short. Gagarin was 1.57 metres tall.

In August 1960, when Gagarin was one of 20 possible candidates, an air force doctor evaluated his personality as: "Modest; embarrasses when his humour gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends."

Gagarin was also a favoured candidate by his peers. When the 20 candidates were asked to anonymously vote for which other candidate they would like to see as the first to fly, all but three chose Gagarin. One of his colleagues, cosmonaut Yevgeni Khrunov, believed that Gagarin was very focused, and was demanding of himself and others when necessary.

Gagarin kept physically fit throughout his life, and was a keen sportsman. Cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky wrote: "Service in the air force made us strong, both physically and morally. All of us cosmonauts took up sports and PT seriously when we served in the air force. I know that Yuri Gagarin was fond of ice hockey. He liked to play goal keeper... I don't think I am wrong when I say that sports became a fixture in the life of the cosmonauts."

Flight to space

In April 1961, Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, launching to orbit aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1). After the flight, he became a global celebrity, touring widely to promote the Soviet achievement.

In 1962, he began serving as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He later returned to the Star City training facility, where he spent some years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in June 1962, and then to colonel in November 1963. Soviet officials tried to keep him away from flying aircraft, being worried of losing their hero in an accident.

Gagarin had served as back-up pilot for Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1. When Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was ultimately banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

Death in crash

On 27 March 1968, Gagarin took off with MiG-15UTI fighter with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin for a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, but the flight ended tragically: their plane crashed near the town of Kirzhach. Gagarin was laid to rest in the wall of the Kremlin on Red Square.

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Remembering yuri gagarin 50 years later, johnson space center.

“Poyekhali!!” With that one Russian word, meaning “Let’s go!” on April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to become the first human to travel in space.  Upon his return from his history-making single orbit of Earth, the Soviet Union treated Gagarin as a national hero.  Completing many goodwill tours, he became an international celebrity.

For several years, Soviet officials were hesitant to assign him to a second space flight for fear of losing him in an accident.  He became the deputy training director of the cosmonaut training center, helping other cosmonauts prepare for their space flights, and successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on space plane design at the prestigious Zhukovski Air Force Academy.  Gagarin persisted in his desire to return to space and eventually he was assigned as Vladimir Komarov’s backup for the first Soyuz mission.  After Komarov’s death in the Soyuz 1 accident in April 1967, Soviet officials felt justified in their caution and allowed Gagarin to fly aircraft only with a flight instructor.

On March 27, 1968, while on a routine training mission from Chkalovskiy Air Base near the Star City cosmonaut training center with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin, the MiG-15UTI jet in which they were flying crashed in inclement weather, killing both pilots.  Gagarin was 34.  His ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall and are ritually visited by space flight crews prior to their departure for Baikonur.

Upon hearing the news, the NASA Astronaut Office sent a message of condolences to the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., saying in part: “We join you in mourning the loss of Yuri Gagarin.  Nothing will dim the memory of his achievement in becoming the first pilot to fly in space.”

After his death, many prominent space facilities were renamed in his honor.  Outside of Moscow, the facility where cosmonauts train for their spaceflights was renamed the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.  Once a secret facility, today international crews, including U.S. astronauts, train there for missions to the international space station (ISS).  At the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launch pad from which Gagarin began his historic journey is known as the Gagarin Start.  The pad is still in use today to launch multinational crews to the ISS.

To symbolize the current cooperation in space between two former rivals, in 2012 the Dialogue of Cultures – United World Foundation donated a bronze statue of Gagarin to the city of Houston, along with a bronze monument to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.  The side-by-side sculptures stand outside the building that once housed the original headquarters of the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center), before the Clear Lake facility was completed.

Yuri Gagarin: First Human in Space

On April 12, 1961, the era of human spaceflight began when the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in his Vostock I spacecraft. The flight lasted 108 minutes.

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Yuri Gagarin

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The cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went down in history as the first human ever to enter space . From humble beginnings he would attain the rank of senior lieutenant fighter as a pilot in the Soviet Air Forces before being accepted into the Soviet space programme in March of 1960.  It was little over one year later, on 12 April 1961, that he was launched into orbit from Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan, where he spent 108 minutes aloft , orbiting the globe once in his craft, Vostok 1.

Officially, he came back to Earth in his capsule. Though it subsequently emerged that he actually parachuted to safety when it was still 7 kilometres from the ground.

Despite that glitch, this was another technological and PR victory for the Soviet Union just three and a half years after they launched Sputnik 1 , the first artificial satellite. Gagarin was the ideal poster boy. Good looking, charming, modest and the ideologically unimpeachable son of a carpenter and dairy farmer working on a collective farm, he became the human face of the Soviet system on the western side of the Iron Curtain. He undertook a world tour, was feted by foreign leaders and became a hero to schoolchildren around the globe.

The US managed to shoot a human – Alan Shepard, who later went on to walk on the moon – into space weeks later on 5 May, and then only on a short sub-orbital flight. But the gauntlet was picked up: on 25 May President John F. Kennedy announced to a special session of the US Congress the intention that an American would walk on the moon before the decade was out. This was the beginning of what became the Apollo programme.

Full name : Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin

Birth : 9 March 1934, Klushino, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

Death : 27 March 1968, Novosyolovo, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut famous for being the first human ever to enter space, spending 108 minutes orbiting the globe in the Vostok 1 spacecraft.

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April 12, 2021

First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut

It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind— Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond.

Walker discusses his new book  Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space , out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy—happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively.

Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event; how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission; and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.

By Pakinam Amer

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space.

Getty Images

Pakinam Amer: It was at 09.07 am Moscow time on April 12, 1961 that a new chapter of history was written. On that day, without much fanfare, Russia sent the first human to space and it happened in secrecy, with very few hints in advance.

Yuri Gagarin, 27-year-old Russian ex-fighter pilot and cosmonaut, was launched into space inside a tiny capsule on top of a ballistic missile, originally designed to carry a warhead. 

The spherical capsule was blasted into orbit, circling the Earth at a speed of about 300 miles per minute, 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

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Accounts vary on exactly how long Gagarin spent circling our blue planet before he re-entered the atmosphere, hurtling towards Earth, gravity rapidly pulling him in.

Some say it was 108 [ one hundred and eight ] minutes. Stephen Walker, my guest today and the author of a new book on Gagarin’s historic feat and the world it happened in, puts at 106 [ one hundred and six ].

Give or take a few minutes, that space venture aboard Vostok 1 — orbiting the earth at a maximum altitude of roughly 200 miles and putting the first man in space — still set the record for space achievement.

It sparked a space race between the US and Russia that, 8 eight years later, put other men on the moon for that small step hailed as a giant leap.

It is said that Gagarin whistled a love song as his capsule prepared for launch

One man, five feet five, in an orange space suit, strapped into a seat inside a capsule attached to a modified R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. … 

… 106 minutes or 108, man’s first pilgrimage around the planet we call home

... a solitary journey that is still celebrated as monumental and game-changing 60 years on.

This is Pakinam Amer, and you’re listening to Science Talk, a Scientific American podcast. And today, my guest Stephen Walker and I will talk about a legendary astronaut and a super secret space mission that changed everything.

Stephen Walker: [I] came across a book that was written by a guy called [Vladimir] Suvorov who had kept a diary, a secret diary of the secret Soviet space program which he was filming from about 1959 right the way through into the 60s and it was fascinating because it was so secret that he wasn't even able to tell his wife what he was doing but he was away filming all this stuff and he says in his diary this felt like science fiction.

It was just so incredible what was happening in secret and I thought myself I want to find the footage because if I can find that footage which is apparently shot in color and on 35 millimeter I can appraise that footage and turn it into a theatrical feature film which gives you the inside image, the inside sight into this incredible first step to space to the beyond.”

That was Stephen Walker, British director and New York Times bestselling author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima. And this was his attempt to dust off decades-old footage showing months of preparing Vostok 1 to put a Soviet citizen into orbit before the Americans.

Stephen traveled to Russia, tracked down eye witnesses who worked at the top secret rocket site in the USSR, shot the interviews in high-definition and gathered some raw, never-before-seen insider material shot between 1959 and 61, that he describes as pristine.

But he couldn’t get access to the rest of the footage. What he had was great but wasn’t enough for a full feature film.

So instead, he wrote a book.

It’s called Beyond and it’s published by HarperCollins.

Pakinam Amer: So Stephen, you’re one of those people who actually wrote a book in lockdown.

Stephen Walker: It was incredibly exciting in a way but it was weird, because all this other stuff was going on outside. And I didn't see it. Really. Of course, I did see it. But when people talk about Corona for me at that point, I wasn't thinking about the Coronavirus, I was thinking about the corona spy satellite system that the Americans had in 1961, which I talk about in my book where they were spying on secret Soviet missile complexes. I mean, I was in a different world. I was literally in 1961. And I was also in 2020. It was a really weird experience>

Pakinam Amer: But you began weaving the yarn in 2012?

Stephen Walker: Yeah, I mean, I've done lots of other things since then. I did three trips to Russia. One in 2012. One in 2013. I think I actually had another in 2014 or 2015. The last one was actually a short trip to St. Petersburg, where I met this incredible couple and one of things is wonderful about the Soviet space program at that time, was that actually very unlike NASA, which seemed to have a real major problem about women being anywhere near NASA.

I mean, actually women were not even allowed in the launch blockhouses at Cape Canaveral in 1961. They were forbidden to get in them … There was one woman, a wonderful woman, I interviewed called Joanne Morgan, who was the only woman engineer of all of them [who was allowed] in the launch Center at Kennedy Space Center in 1969. For the moon landing, she's the only one woman and everybody else is a guy. And back in 61, she was telling me over crab cocktails in Cape Canaveral. She told me that you know, she was actually not even allowed to go into the launch of the launch blockhouse, she was forbidden to go in.

Whereas actually in the USSR, oddly enough, it wasn't like that. And I interviewed this couple called Vladimir and Khionia Kraskin, and they're in my book. And they were this wonderful husband and wife in their 80s. And they entertained me in this wonderful little Soviet-style flat in Saint Petersburg, and told me glorious stories about how they were both engineers, telemetry engineers, that have moved there with their child to this weird place in the middle of the Kazakh Steppe, you know, where this new rocket cosmodrome was being built.

And they actually were working right at the epicenter of the Soviet space program, and for that matter, the Soviet missile program, and these were their glory days. It was quite an incredible thing to sort of talk to them both about and they were there when Gagarin launched and with all of that stuff, they were there all the way through it. It was wonderful; it was so Russian, we ended up sitting and drinking vodka until four o'clock in the morning.

I interviewed them on camera, and we had this wonderful, it was quite glorious. This guy had actually out of chocolate wrappers from Ferrero Roche chocolates had constructed a two-meter-high replica of the R-7 rocket that took Yuri Gagarin into space and it was in his sitting room. It was Incredible. It was all made out of chocolate, you know, gold wrappers, it was beautiful.

And, and so I kind of fell in love with these people. And I also sort of felt, you know, I want to tell their stories because they just aren't being heard by anybody. It's all moon, moon, moon, lunar, lunar, lunar. And that's great. Don't get me wrong, it's really important. It's a landmark. It's all of that I get it. But this is an amazing story. And these are amazing stories that people don't know about, and they are really exciting, and really dramatic and really touching and really moving and really, you know, epoch changing, in my opinion.”

Pakinam Amer: Stephen, when I read your book, it almost felt like a novelization of that era. It's a very intricate and intimate account of the people who were involved in that space mission. A very rich account, not just of the orbit itself, but of the tensions reminiscent of the cold war between the US and the Sovient Union, then the space race. But yours is primarily a human story. What inspired you to write it, decades down the line?

Stephen Walker: It is a major philosophical leap for humankind, this is not just advanced Soviet v. America, it really isn't. And to think of it in those terms, is to miss the essential point. Because what I believe

is that the first human being in space is one of the most epoch call moments in all human history.

For essentially three and a half billion years since, or any life began on this planet, anything, okay? This man is the first to leave, he is the first human eye to look down on the biosphere from outside, he is the first--to use the words of Plato--he is the first to escape the cave that we are all in. He steps into the beyond; it is that very first step outside. Nobody had seen this before.

It is one of the things that when you actually put yourself back into that world at that time, and Gagarin very quickly became the most famous man on the planet. You understand why? Because what this is all pre-moon, none of that had happened is this guy was seeing something that no one else in all history whether a human or anything had ever seen. When he looked out in that porthole window, he saw the stars, he saw the earth. And he saw a sunrise in fast motion, and a sunset in fast motion. He saw the incredible fragility of the earth. He saw what we're all destroying, frankly, right now, he saw all of that. And he was the first to see it.

So for me, that is a philosophical psychological quarter, which will be emotional, it is somebody stepping out of the cave into the sunlight as it were to pursue the metaphor and blinking in the light and going, Oh, my God, what's this? What's this that's out here? What is this? He was the first to do it at incredible risk.

It happened because of the politics. It happened because of the race. It happened because of the iron curtain. We know all of those things are valid at all that but actually, in the end, the event, the achievement, better than that the moment is bigger than all of those things way, way, way bigger than all of those things, three and a half billion years. And something changes on April the 12th 1961, at you know, ten past nine in the morning, Moscow time. And that's this. And that's the story.

So for me, it's everything. That's the first thing that kind of animated me to write the book. And I felt that I even had a sign above my desk saying, “remember, Stephen, three and a half billion years, remember,” I kept thinking that when I started to get into the politics too much or got a bit lost in whatever details, as one always does, and pull back from it. What is this really about?

And the other thing that I thought was really important about this. And it animated my writing too. I'm not interested in writing history books that end up in library stacks for decades. I mean, I'm a filmmaker. I want to reach people. And what I tried to do in this story was tell people about people. What interests me most of all, I'm interested, obviously in the technical achievement and really interested in the politics. Of course I am. I couldn't write this book if I wasn't. But what I'm really, really interested in people.

Who was this guy? What was this rivalry like between him and this guy, Titov? He was [the Soviet] number two.

There's an incredible story there, which I kind of talked about, where you get these two men who are both competing to be the first human in space. They are best friends. They are next door neighbors. And they have a child each the same kind of age little infant child, but Titov's child Igor dies at the age of eight months, right in the middle of their Cosmonaut Training, and the Gagarin husband and wife with their own child about the same age, a little girl ...  they are incredible to him. They are and his wife, Tamara, they are locked in embrace, they are supportive, they are wonderful. And I know this because I interviewed Titov's wife in Moscow. And she told me all of this, it was quite incredible. She was in tears when she told me this stuff.

And yet, these two men with this love with this tragedy that they kind of shared and helped each other through living next door and on adjoining balconies and crossing over each other's balconies to spend time with each other and late nights talking and drinking vodka and all those sorts of things. They're also rivals for immortality, effectively. And we're not really talking about Titov today, we're talking about Yuri Gagarin. So he lost, he lost. And yet underlying that rivalry is love.

And to me, that becomes human that becomes rich and interesting. It's not just ‘Oh, who came first,’ it's actually a real, it's a relationship of brothers, with all the complexities that fraternal relationships like that would have, you know, the rivalry, the kind of male rivalry, but also the love and the connection in the background. So it's complicated, difficult, it doesn't fit easily into boxes, but a very, very human mix of emotions that drives forward. So characters, people who make the story, this pivotal moment in human history happen, is what really excites me.

Pakinam Amer: Stephen painted an interesting picture of the world where Gagarin’s extraordinary mission happened. How back then, the Soviet Union and the United States were head to head, taking colossal risks in the race to be first in space.

Before Gagarin’s mission, the Soviet Union had already blasted the first satellite in into space, Sputnik 1.

Only three weeks after Gagarin’s earth orbit, American astronaut Alan Shepard--part of the so-called Mercury-7--was launched into space aboard a rocket called Freedom 7.

Less than a year later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962.

But Gagarin’s leap into the unknown, being a first, was terrifying.

No one knew what would happen to a person once they’re launched into space. Would they go mad? Can their body withstand it?

Like Stephen aptly describes, there was no textbook for that mission … anywhere. So what exactly were the challenges …

Stephen Walker: The challenges are physiological and psychological, the physiological challenges, some of which had been kind of looked at and dealt with some of the animal flights they do, which I write about in the book with dogs in a Soviet Union and with monkeys, and then finally, obviously a chimpanzee called Ham in the United States. But what actually, they didn't know really was what a human physiology would do in that environment.

So what you're talking about are unbelievable, first of all, acceleration forces in a rocket. Nobody, let's just get this really clear. From the beginning. Nobody had sat on top of a nuclear missile, replacing the nuclear bomb, and then firing it upwards, nobody.

And this particular missile, the R-7, was the biggest missile in the world, it was much bigger than any missile the Americans had, it was powerful enough to fly from Kazakhstan, to New York with a thermonuclear weapon on top of it... It was astonishingly radically advanced for its time. And no human had sat on top of one with a million pounds of thrust and lit the fuse and see what happens.

So they didn't know. I mean, it could blow up straight there on the pad. It could be that the physiological experiences, the actual acceleration, or G-forces could be too much for a body to withstand. And once this rocket had actually got into orbit, and the capsules there, nobody knew what weightlessness would do to a human body.

There were real fears that a human wouldn't be able to breathe properly, even obviously, in an oxygenated atmosphere. The human being wouldn't be able to swallow, for example, that weightlessness would do really, really strange things to the heart, they wouldn't beat properly. You know, nobody knew because nobody experienced weightlessness of any kind for more than a few seconds in one of those aeroplanes that simulated weightlessness with his parabolas, they kept flying. But that was only for about 20 seconds. This is going to be much, much longer than that.

So they just didn't know. They were tremendous concerns about how he'd get down again, everybody knew that a capsule returning through the atmosphere would build up massive amounts of friction, the temperatures would reach 1500 degrees centigrade, even more, you know, would it burn away? Would whatever protection he had in the form of a heat shield, or in the design of the capsule itself? Would it work already burn up as he came down? You know, would that be a problem?

And then, beyond all of those problems, there was, as I said, the psychological problem. And the psychological problem basically boiled down to very simple sentence, or rather a very simple question, but with a very simple answer. And that was, would he go insane? Was he going mad in space, because the real fear, and it was a real fear at that time.

And there were, there was psychological textbooks that were written about something called space horror , was that the first human being divorced from the planet below divorce from life or life as we know it divorce for all of that sailing alone, and this is ultimate loneliness or isolation, in the vacuum of space in his little sphere, might go mad.

So they had to think about that, too. And what they thought about as I described in my book was a very Soviet response, they decided that flight will be completely automated. So the guy wouldn't have to do anything at all inside it, except essentially endure it, whatever “endure” actually meant. But they then decided at the last moment, that if actually, something did go wrong, and he needed to take manual control, then how are they going to let him have manual control.

And they came up with this extraordinary solution, which is just utterly mad, where they basically had a three digit code, which you press on, like, the kind of thing you have in a hotel safe on the side of his capsule, and you press these three numbers, which I think will one to five; it's in the book, and that would unlock the manual controls. But then they worried that he might go so crazy that he might just do that anyway, take control, and God knows what he'll do, you know, destroy himself, defect to America, in his spacecraft.

These were proper discussions that took place, literally a few days before he flew. And in the end, what they decided to do was to put the code in an envelope, and seal the envelope, and glue it somewhere in the lining of the inside of his spacecraft. The idea being somehow-- this is crazy logic, it's not even logic-- that if he was able to find it, open it, read the code and press the correct numbers, then he won't be insane. And that was seriously discussed in a state commission of the top politicians, KGB people and space engineers, one week before Yuri Gagarin flew in space.

That's, that's what they dealt with, because they were they didn't know space, horror, insanity. So you're, again, it comes back to my saying at the very beginning, everything here is a first everything is an unknown, nobody's done it before. Nobody. And what increases that feeling of isolation that would have made the possibility of insanity a real one. Why they were so frightened was because they didn't have reliable radio communications with the ground.

They didn't have what the [American] Mercury astronauts would have, which was a chain of stations basically, in circling the globe, where they would always have somebody to talk to, and we're very used to the moon landings and there's all those, you know, communications with beeps on the end, and even with Apollo 13, the one that went wrong, they're always communicating with Mission Control in Houston. But for Gagarin's flight, I would say a substantial part of his flight.

I'm not sure if you'd actually say the majority, but a substantial part of his flight hidden nobody's talked to. He had nobody to talk to, except a microphone with a tape recorder that was installed inside his cabin. And as I say, in the book, it turns out that whoever installed the tape in the tape recorder didn't put enough tape in. So he ran out halfway around the world. And he sat there and made probably one of the few independent decisions that he made in the cabinet, in that Vostok spacecraft, which was to rewind the tape to the beginning, and then record over everything he just said. This is the first mind in space and that's what happened.

You can't really make this stuff up.

Although the radio communication with the first human who stepped beyond our planet involved few words, what we know for instance was that Yuri’s first spoken words were, “The Earth is blue, how wonderful,” Stephen includes part of the transcript of the tape that Yuri recorded during orbit aboard the capsule, as he looked out of the porthole of his capsule.

“The Earth was moving to the left, then upwards, then to the right, and downwards … I could see the horizon, the stars, the Sky,” Gagarin said. “I could see the very beautiful horizon, I could see the curvature of the Earth.”

Pakinam Amer: You’ve heard from Stephen Walker, filmmaker and author of Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space. His book is on sale today. You can get it through HarperCollins, its publisher, or wherever you buy your books. For more information visit www.stephenwalkerbeyond.com

That was Science Talk, and this is your host Pakinam Amer. Thank you for listening.

It’s been 60 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in outer space

• By Daniel Ofman

Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, first man to orbit the earth, is shown in his space suit. Photo undated.

Sixty years ago on Monday, the Earth sent its first human into outer space — Russia’s Yuri Gagarin.

On this day in 1961, Gagarin’s space capsule completed one orbit around Earth and returned home, marking a major milestone in the space race. As he took off, you could hear Gagarin’s muffled yet iconic “ Poehali, ” which means “Let’s go” in Russian.

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. Gagarin’s steely self-control was a key factor behind the success of his pioneering, 108-minute flight.

The World’s Marco Werman spoke to Stephen Walker, who has just published a book about Yuri Gagarin called “Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space.”

Marco Werman: Stephen, tell us a little more about Yuri Gagarin. Before he became known as the first man in space, who was he?

Stephen Walker: Well, it’s a really interesting question. He was actually brought up in a little village just to the west of Moscow. And in 1941, Nazis invade Russia, and they swallow Gagarin’s village. And something very seminal happens to Gagarin, which I think determines, in some respects, the course of his life. At the age of 7, he is horrified to see that his little brother, Boris, age 5, is being hanged from an apple tree by an SS officer, and he tries to cut his brother down from this branch. But he’s very small. He can’t do it. So, he races back, yells at his mother, Anna, who comes racing out, rushes across and cuts down little Boris from this tree just in time. And that experience seared Gagarin for life. It gave him kind of an inner toughness and inner resilience, which is why he was able to sit effectively on top of the world’s biggest nuclear missile, waiting to be blasted into space.

Right. And as we know, the Americans were stunned when the space capsule orbited the Earth. So, I casually told the story of this day in 1961, earlier, basically the rocket launch; Gagarin went up, did an orbit and then came back down alive. But that doesn’t quite capture the intense drama of the day, does it?

Not at all. This rocket — it’s called an R-7 — is unbelievably dangerous. The chances of Yuri Gagarin getting back alive were less than 50-50. Almost everything you can think of goes wrong. No one knows what happens to a human being in space. And then, of course, the rocket itself is so dangerous because many of them have blown up. The Russians were desperate to get ahead of America, which means they took risks. So, it’s an incredibly dramatic tale of this 106 minutes that sort of changed the world.

What was the mission of the Soviet rocket and what did Gagarin himself think at the time about it?

Well, the mission was basically to see if a human being could survive in space and fly in orbit around the Earth. And there is this secret briefing given by Yuri Gagarin the day after his flight, and he tells the story of what happened 11 minutes after launch. Gagarin separated from the rest of his rocket, and he started very gently to spin. And then, he turned to the little porthole on his right and he saw the Earth. He had escaped the biosphere.

Incredible perspective. How was Gagarin received once he touched down some 90 minutes later?

Well, he actually landed hundreds of kilometers, of course. So, he ejects from this capsule at about 20,000 feet and the capsule lands separately. And Gagarin by parachute lands in a potato field. And there’s no one there except an old lady and her granddaughter who were picking potatoes. So, he goes up to them and they run away. They’re absolutely terrified. They see this, kind of, orange spacesuit. He manages to convince them he’s a comrade, he’s Soviet, he’s safe, and he says, “I need to get to a phone. Have you got any way of my getting to a phone?” So, they offer him the use of a horse. This guy’s been around the world at 18,000 miles an hour. And they’re talking about putting him on a horse to get to a telephone. It’s just crazy. Just before the horse arrives, some tractor drivers turn up, very curious. They’ve heard about him on the radio, on the kind of state radio, because it’s now being broadcast. And then within minutes, this jeep arrives with soldiers and they all start taking photographs. And there is a photograph of him, which is in my book, and it’s just wonderful. He’s just been around the whole planet and he’s landed in this potato field. And there’s this photograph. It’s quite extraordinary. 

I mean, it speaks of the high ambition and also the low reality of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The USSR, as you said, Stephen, was determined to beat the US in getting a human into space. What was the reaction in the West when Yuri Gagarin went up and came home, and specifically in the United States?

Absolute shock. I mean, there is a press conference which President Kennedy, remember new in the job, gave that afternoon, and he looks completely and utterly shell shocked. He says he extends his congratulations to Khrushchev, who was the premier of the USSR at the time and also to the man who was involved. He can’t even say his name, but it is a real bad moment for him and for the American space program. You’re looking at somebody who is on the back foot. And we know this because two days later, Gagarin was celebrated in a, basically, parade that was millions of people, the biggest party really in Moscow’s history.

And at the very time that Gagarin was being celebrated and having the hero of the Soviet Union gold star medal pinned to his chest, we know that Kennedy was in the Cabinet Room at the White House with his advisers, and Kennedy is tapping his teeth with his pencil, which is always a sign of nervousness with him. And he says, “What can we do? What can we do to catch up? How do we leapfrog them?” And he comes up with a wonderful line. He says, “Even if the janitor in the White House has an answer, I want to hear that answer.” And this is when the moon idea really starts to take hold. And what I hope I have managed to do is to put readers right in the center, in the epicenter, of events, the little fly on the wall, that gives us an often very jaundiced view, but really fascinating inside story of what was really happening and how different that was from the presentation to the world of what was happening.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

How yuri gagarin was picked to be first in space.

NASA had the Mercury Seven. The Soviets had the Vanguard Six.

Stephen Walker

Sixty years ago, early on the morning of April 12, 1961, Soviet air force pilot Yuri Gagarin launched from Kazakhstan on Vostok-1, narrowly beating out American Alan Shepard (by three weeks) to become the first person to travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere into the dark silence of space. Gagarin’s story gets a fresh look in Stephen Walker’s riveting and thoroughly researched new book Beyond , from which the following excerpt is taken.

DEEP IN A birch forest in the Shchyolkovsky District northeast of Moscow, far from the main highway to the city and hidden from prying eyes, stood a small, old-fashioned two-story building half-buried in the snow. Everywhere the snow lay on the ground, even more thickly than it did eight thousand kilometres away in Washington. It had piled on the building’s steeply pitched roof, on the overhanging porch of its front door, and on the tangled branches of the birch trees, accentuating the heavy silence of the forest.

Apart from its curious location, there was nothing especially remarkable about the building itself. Perhaps its very anonymity helped to disguise its true purpose. For this nondescript edifice sitting in the middle of the forest in fact housed one of the most secret institutions in the USSR. Its code name was Military Unit 26266, but it was also known by its initials TsPK or Tsentr Podgotovki Kosmonavtov: the Cosmonaut Training Centre. And it was here on this particular Wednesday, January 18, 1961—two days before President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in Washington and the day before Alan Shepard’s selection as America’s first astronaut—that six men were competing to be the first cosmonaut of the Soviet Union, if not the world.

Like NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts in Langley, Virginia, the six men were also sitting in a classroom. But the similarities ended there. They were all obviously younger than the Americans, in their twenties and not thirties. They were all wearing military uniforms, not the casual Ban-Lon shirts favored by the Mercury pilots. And, discounting Gus Grissom, they were all visibly shorter, short enough to fit inside the Vostok spherical capsule replacing the thermonuclear warhead on top of the R-7 missile that they all hoped one day soon to fly in space.

Unlike the Mercury Seven, the Soviet pilots were not expecting an imminent decision on who would fly first. Instead, they were sitting an examination. Later that afternoon they would each be interrogated by a committee responsible for their training. The same committee had already assessed their performance the previous day in a crude simulator of the Vostok capsule. This simulator, the only one in the USSR, was not located in the forest but in a palatial pre-revolutionary building in Zhukovsky on the opposite side of Moscow, codenamed LII and otherwise known as the Gromov Flight Research Institute. For up to fifty minutes, under the watchful eyes of their examiners, each of the six men had practised procedures in the mock-up of the Vostok’s cockpit on the second floor of what had once been a tuberculosis sanatorium under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat for Labour.

The building in the birch forest where the men were now sitting their examinations was the first structure in what would become, over time, a vast, heavily guarded complex closed to the outside world and dedicated solely to the training of the USSR’s cosmonauts. In 1968 it would change its name to Zvyozdny Gorodok—Star City—but that was still far in the future. Until then the area itself was known as Green Village, a nod perhaps to the acres of trees that shrouded it. When the new Cosmonaut Training Centre was established on January 11, 1960, by order of the commander of the Soviet Air Force, Chief Marshal Konstantin Vershinin, Green Village was chosen as the best site for its construction. It had many advantages. It was shielded by its forest but not far from Moscow. It was also only a few kilometres from Chkalovsky air base, the largest military airfield in the Soviet Union. And it was close to OKB-1, the secret design and production plant at Kaliningrad where the Vostok capsules were being built.

The six men had been training for ten months since March 1960, although the classroom building had only been in use since June. They had also used other anonymous centres in Moscow and continued to do so. In years to come, many of them would move into specially built residential blocks in Star City, but in January 1961 they were living near the Chkalovsky air base in basic two-room apartments with their wives and children if they had them, or in even more basic bachelors’ quarters if they did not.

These were a far cry from Alan Shepard’s comfortable house in Virginia Beach’s leafy suburbs or indeed anything the American astronauts and their families would have willingly put up with, but by Soviet standards they were privileged accommodations. Meanwhile nobody in Chkalovsky outside their closed circle knew why the six men were there or what they were training for. Nor did their parents, their friends, or their former colleagues in the air force. Even their own wives were not encouraged to ask too many questions. Unlike the Mercury Seven, who were famous throughout America if not the world, the six men existed only in the shadows.

There was another key difference from the Mercury Seven. These six were not the only cosmonauts being trained. There were another fourteen. In a selection process that was even more ruthless than that undergone by the American astronauts, twenty men had been chosen from an initial pool of almost 3,500 military pilots. The Soviet space programme had ambitions to conquer the cosmos, or at least that part of it encircling the earth, and they needed the manpower to do it. All twenty men had begun their training in the spring of 1960, just two months after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had urged his chief space engineers that they “should quickly aim for space. There’s broad and all-out levels of work in the USA and they’ll be able to outstrip us.” By then the Mercury Seven had already been training for almost a year. The Soviets needed to catch up quickly and these twenty cosmonauts were the answer. But other than those broad hints in the tightly controlled press about “Soviet men” soon visiting space, the facts would be either hidden or deliberately misrepresented. The rockets, the capsules, the designers, the engineers, the training centres and launch locations, and of course the cosmonauts themselves—all of it would remain behind closed doors.

By the autumn of 1960 the Soviet manned space programme had become a top national goal, not least because back then NASA appeared to be aiming to send an American into space as early as December of that year. To speed things up and prioritise training on the single simulator, a shortlist of six front-runners was filtered from the original twenty. They would fly first, before the others. In essence, they were the premier league team that would take on the Mercury Seven, with the difference being that the Soviets knew about their American rivals, whereas the Americans knew nothing about the Soviets. To those permitted to know, this group of six was given a name. Perhaps in deliberate imitation of the Mercury Seven, they were called the Vanguard Six.

Depending on who’s telling the story, the criteria for selecting the Vanguard Six appears to have been quite different. Dr. Adilya Kotovskaya, a specialist in pathophysiology who supervised centrifuge tests with the cosmonauts, claimed that the men were chosen simply in order of their ability to endure terrific accelerations—similar to those they might one day experience in a rocket launch—without passing out. One of the six, Andriyan Nikolayev, a quiet, heavyset, dour bachelor, proved the most resilient at this. He sailed through Kotovskaya’s crushing centrifuge rides.

Another cosmonaut, Aleksey Leonov, who four years later would execute the world’s first spacewalk , recalls a different rationale behind the selection: It was based entirely on weight and height. As both were critical for the Vostok, only the shortest and lightest men were chosen. Leonov himself was slightly too tall to make the grade. Everybody in this first group had to be under five foot seven. The smallest, at just five foot five, was an open-faced, married twenty-six-year-old former foundry student with blue eyes and a winning smile reminiscent of John Glenn’s. His name was Yuri Gagarin. He too made it to the Vanguard Six.

A third was Grigory Nelyubov. A dark-haired, handsome pilot the same age as Gagarin, Nelyubov was one of the very few among the twenty cosmonauts to have flown the USSR’s first supersonic jet fighter, the MiG-19. Nelyubov possessed a remarkably sharp mind—possibly the sharpest in the entire cosmonaut group—as well as lightning reactions. In some respects he resembled Alan Shepard, including perhaps a tendency to arrogance and a lack of self-criticism that was often noted by his instructors. Some thought him narcissistic. Many actively disliked him. A few believed he would be chosen to fly first. But Nelyubov had not initially been picked for the Vanguard Six. He had replaced another cosmonaut, Anatoly Kartashov, who had been badly injured on Dr. Kotovskaya’s dreaded centrifuge in July 1960. For reasons that were never explained, something had gone wrong and Kartashov was subjected to excessive accelerations as he spun too rapidly around the centrifuge hall. A fellow cosmonaut, Dmitry Zaikin, remembered the result. “The blood vessels in his back,” Zaikin said, “just blew off.” Kartashov was suspended without appeal. Nelyubov was put in his place.

These decisions could be brutal—and final. In the same month as Kartashov’s accident, another original member of the Vanguard Six, Valentin Varmalov, was enjoying a rare day of relaxation in Medvezh’i Ozera, a stretch of shallow lakes near the training centre. With him was Valery Bykovsky, a cosmonaut whose competitiveness was notorious. Varmalov challenged Bykovsky to dive into one of the lakes. Bykovsky took up the challenge at once, grazing his head on the bottom. He cautioned Varmalov. But when Varmalov dived in, he hit the lake bed hard. He was raced to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a displaced cervical vertebra in his neck. He was placed in traction—and suspended from the programme without appeal. Bykovsky stepped into his shoes.

Two other men completed the Vanguard Six. Pavel Popovich was a Ukrainian ex-fighter pilot and by almost all accounts one of the most popular members of the cosmonaut corps. Everybody loved Pavel. His humour was infectious, and he had a terrific sense of fun. “He made you want to live,” said his daughter Natalya, who was four when Popovich sat his cosmonaut exams. If he had an opposite number in the Mercury Seven it would probably have been Walter Schirra, the man who liked playing pranks. Popovich loved singing too, mostly Ukrainian folk songs, and at the drop of a hat he would happily croon in his beautiful baritone the lush, sentimental lyrics he had learned as a child in his tiny village of Uzin near Kiev, including his favourite, “The Night is so Moonlit, so Starry, so Bright”:

The night is so moonlit, so starry, so bright There’s so much light you could gather the pine needles Come, my love, weary with toil If just for one minute to the grove . . .

“We all wanted to be first,” said Popovich years later, just as Alan Shepard and John Glenn had said. But it would take more than love songs for Popovich to become the USSR’s first cosmonaut. Two issues held him back. To begin with, he was Ukrainian, not Russian. Even as the Soviet Union’s propagandists paid lip service to the socialist ideals of ethnic equality, Popovich’s origin was a handicap. The first to go up would have to be a Russian—only nobody would officially say so.

His other issue was his wife. Marina Popovich was a brilliant pilot in her own right who had attempted to join the Soviet air force when she was just sixteen to fly in one of three female pilot regiments that then existed, a state of affairs almost unimaginable in the United States at the time. By 1961 she had already been an outstanding flying instructor for three years. Later she would become one of the USSR’s top test pilots. She was glamorous, beautiful, clever, headstrong, sometimes hot-tempered and also a mother. Taken all together, this was a problem. Lieutenant General Nikolai Kamanin, the chief of cosmonaut training, wrote that Popovich “gives the impression of being tough but is too soft with his wife. Family troubles hold him back.” And, Kamanin added somewhat darkly, “We will take measures to help him.”

Gherman Titov was the final member of the six. A man with movie-star good looks, Titov was athletic, excellent at games and gymnastics, an amateur violinist and a passionate pilot who had graduated with top grades from aviation academy in 1957 and who went on to fly fighter jets in Leningrad. It was there that he met his wife Tamara, who was a waitress at the base cafeteria. They got married within four months. “He was a fighter pilot,” she says. “He did everything fast.”

Born in a log cabin in Siberia, Titov had been brought up by a strict, demanding father who was also the local schoolteacher. His father is said to have named his son Gherman after the lead character in Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades,” and the father’s love of Pushkin was comprehensively inherited by the son. Titov could recite whole passages of Pushkin’s works from memory in the same way that Popovich could sing Ukrainian love songs. But his habit of doing it in the middle of training sessions was also guaranteed to exasperate his hard-bitten proletarian instructors. His erudition was both impressive and a liability. He was almost too educated, too bourgeois, too clever, and prone to question rules. Colonel Yevgeny Karpov, who had been appointed to run the training centre, was often driven to distraction by Titov’s resistance to taking orders, especially from doctors like himself. “He would hear the doctors out, then often do things his own way or ignore their instructions altogether,” Karpov said. “When they insisted . . . he became irritated.” But Karpov also admired Titov’s directness and his refusal to invent excuses for himself whenever he got into trouble. It was a constant refrain: hot-headed, sceptical, a man who sometimes broke the rules if he thought they were petty or stupid; but also brilliant, attractive and consistently able. He was another prime candidate for the first flight.

The Titovs lived next door to Yuri Gagarin and his wife Valentina in their Chkalovsky apartment block. The two cosmonauts often spent time with each other, climbing over the partition between their narrow balconies on the fifth floor as the quickest, if not always safest, way to move between apartments. Their friendship deepened later in their training when, in the autumn of 1960, the Titovs’ baby son, Igor, died at the age of seven months from heart complications. Gagarin and Valentina, who had a one-year-old daughter of their own, did everything they could to help the couple cope with a loss so traumatic that Tamara Titova was unable to speak about it to the author almost sixty years later.

In an interview in the 1990s, Titov paid tribute to Gagarin’s warmth and support at that time: “Without being mawkish or sentimental he simply behaved like a truly close and real friend. I was grateful to him and, although I did not know him very well at the time, began to like him a great deal.” As they sat their examinations in January 1961, the bond between the two cosmonauts was very strong, even while they were both competing for the same ultimate prize.

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

THE FINAL SCORES of the Vanguard Six were awarded the same day that they finished their written papers. All of them were graded “excellent.” Kamanin was one of the examiners. “Who among these six will go down in history as the first person to fly in space?” he wrote in his diary that night. “Who will be the first of them to pay with his life in making this daring attempt?” While making the questionable assumption that the USSR would win the race against the Americans, both sentences betray the implicit paradox at the heart of this adventure: to fly in space was quite possibly to die in space. “There is still,” continued Kamanin in the same entry, after reviewing all the failures of previous Vostok flights with dogs on board, “no guarantee of a safe landing.”

Back in December, in one of many striking parallels with the Mercury Seven, all twenty cosmonauts were asked to vote on which of their peers should fly first. A majority had voted for Yuri Gagarin—one source claims twelve of them did so, another as many as seventeen. But even after these examinations were over and the results known, the decision was still not made. Given the tortuous and often murky hierarchies of Soviet political life, such a decision would anyway have been unthinkable. In Langley, Virginia, Bob Gilruth, head of the Space Task Group responsible for Project Mercury , could summon his seven astronauts into a classroom and tell them, simply and on his own authority, who would be first. Things were done differently in the USSR. Unlike the Mercury Seven, the Vanguard Six would have to wait—and they would have to wait until almost the very last moment.

But even as they waited, unsure which one of them it would be, the examining committee “tentatively,” and without telling the cosmonauts, recommended a ranking. In third place was Grigory Nelyubov. In second place Gherman Titov. And in first place the examiners chose Gherman’s close friend, next-door neighbour and confidant, the winner of the peer vote and the man with the winning smile: Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.

Excerpted by permission from Beyond, by Stephen Walker, HarperCollins, 2021. Follow the author on Twitter @SWalkerBEYOND or visit his website at www.stephenwalkerbeyond.com .

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“Let’s go!” — Remembering Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, 60 years later

Last month, three smartly dressed spacemen took time from their training to pause for a moment of reflection. As their greatcoats held back the chill of an early Moscow spring, they laid a splash of red blooms at a grave embedded in the brickwork of the city’s Kremlin Necropolis.

Earlier, in the half-gloom of a tiny office, they surveyed a faded world map, archaic telephones, and a clock perpetually halted at the instant of its former owner’s death. These three space farers — Oleg Novitsky, Pyotr Dubrov, and Mark Vande Hei — surely felt the presence of Yuri Gagarin. And before they left Earth last Friday, they paid tribute to that unassuming hero who, 60 years ago, kicked off a space adventure that will likely never end.

Yuri Gagarin’s early life

Gagarin’s upbringing betrayed little of the icon he would become. Born into peasant stock in the Russian village of Klushino in March 1934, his formative years were brutalized by World War II. He learned to read from old military manuals, pestered his father into helping him build miniature gliders, and found work as an apprentice foundryman. A love of aviation drew him to the Soviet Air Force, where he flew MiG-15 fighters over Murmansk — until he was hired for cosmonaut training in March 1960.

In true Soviet propagandist fashion, the ordinariness of this fresh-faced twentysomething helped him win selection as the world’s first space traveler. According to his backup, cosmonaut Gherman Titov, Gagarin was “a lad who made his dream come true, all by himself.” And while Titov was a poetry-loving teacher’s son, Gagarin represented the ideal communist pin-up: a humble farm boy who rose up from rags to reach the stars.

Yuri flies to space

On April 12, 1961, Titov and Gagarin breakfasted on meat puree and toast with blackcurrant jam. They then donned their orange pressure suits before being bussed to the Baikonur launch pad on the windswept Central Asian steppe. (Legend maintains that Gagarin answered the call of nature by relieving himself against one of the bus tires.) Once the pair arrived at the launch site, and unable to share the Russian going-away tradition of three kisses on alternate cheeks, Gagarin and Titov instead clinked their helmets together in brotherly solidarity.

Inside the spherical cabin of his Vostok 1 capsule (nicknamed the sharik , or “little ball”), Gagarin’s harness was tightened, his ejection seat armed, and his oxygen hose fastened. The spaceship was meant to function autonomously, for fear that separation anxiety might cause the cosmonaut to go mad once in space. But Gagarin was also furnished with a three-digit, not-so-secret code, which would disengage the autopilot and cede control of the craft over to him, if necessary.

At 9:07 A.M. Moscow Time, the rocket — a converted R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, known as Semyorka , or “Little Seven”— roared to life before climbing toward the heavens. “Poyekhali!” shrieked Gagarin, which translates to “Let’s go!”

Gagarin later recalled “an ever-growing din,” partly muffled by his helmet, as the R-7 climbed higher. The g-forces he experienced during ascent made speaking difficult. His heart rate soared from 66 to 158 beats per minute. By 9:18 A.M., he was safely in orbit. Before his very eyes, a tiny Russian doll comically floated in mid-air, an indicator of weightlessness, which started a tradition that endures to this day. In fact, last week, a toy kitten rode to space with Novitsky, Dubrov and Vande Hei for the same purpose.

Reaching 203 miles (327 kilometers), Gagarin smashed the World Aviation Altitude Record. And as Vostok 1 progressed eastwards, tracking stations peppered across Siberia — from Novosibirsk to Kolpashevo and Khabarovsk to Yelizovo — serenaded him with musical greetings. At Yelizovo station on the Kamchatka peninsula, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was treated to the first crude television image beamed from space. “I could not make out his facial features,” Leonov remembered, “but I could tell from the way he moved that it was Yuri.”

At 9:32 A.M., as Vostok 1 cut across the South Pacific and headed for the Strait of Magellan, Radio Moscow broke the electrifying news. “The world’s first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, was launched into orbit from the Soviet Union.” And although U.S. listening posts were already aware of the mission, the tensions of the Cold War meant the announcement was still incredibly jarring. A struggling nation full of simple farmers (or so many observers in the West thought) had achieved the singular technological triumph of the 20th century.

Less than two hours later, as Vostok 1 plunged back to Earth, Gagarin ejected from the craft and safely parachuted to the ground. The spot where his feet found terra firma, near the small town of Engels, is today marked by a 40-foot-tall (12 m) inscribed obelisk. The pioneering astronaut’s launch pad at Baikonur, known as Gagarin’s Start, also still remains in use.

The beginning of a new era

Vostok 1 was a transformative moment. Over the next six decades, 504 men and 65 women representing 41 sovereign nations and a half-dozen religious faiths would venture to space, with their ages ranging from 25-year-old Gherman Titov to 77-year-old John Glenn. Twenty-four of these astronauts have voyaged to the Moon, with 12 of them actually leaving their footprints on the dusty surface. Additionally, 42 men and women have spent more than a year of their lives in space.

Gagarin, however, saw little of this unfolding adventure. Fearing for his life, officials barred Gagarin from a second spaceflight after the Soyuz 1 crash claimed the life of his fellow cosmonaut and close friend, Vladimir Komarov. Gagarin, the highly prized Soviet poster-boy, eventually battled his way back to active-duty cosmonaut status. He might have even flown again, but before that chance presented itself, he tragically died in an airplane crash in March 1968. Gagarin was 34 years old.

Now, as the world prepares for a new space race not based on a simmering Cold War, America’s Artemis Program aims for boots on the Moon by 2024. And later this year, the four crew members of Inspiration4 hope to carry out the first all-civilian spaceflight inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

And that’s only the start of the commercial spaceflight to come: Houston-based Axiom is planning private missions (and add-on modules) to the International Space Station beginning in the next few years. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo draws ever nearer to making suborbital tourism a reality, aiming to commence commercial operations around the start of 2022. And the dearMoon project hopes to see the first-ever lunar tourists fly to the Moon aboard a SpaceX Starship in just two years’ time. Others, including Bigelow Aerospace, envisage inflatable, Earth-circling habitats designed for commercial research. And China and Russia have even outlined plans to collaborate on a Moon base later this decade.

The future seems brighter than ever, if we’re willing to embrace it. And as Gagarin, the man who started it all, once said: “Poyekhali!” Let’s go.

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An updated list of space missions: Current and upcoming voyages

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What Really Happened to Yuri Gagarin, the First Man in Space?

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: May 16, 2023 | Original: April 12, 2016

Becoming the First Man in Space

The son of a carpenter, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino in Smolensk, Russia in 1934. At 16, he moved to Moscow to apprentice as a foundryman in a metal works but soon transferred to a technical school in Saratov. There, Gagarin joined a flying club and took to the skies for the first time. He graduated from the Soviet Air Force cadet school in 1957 and began serving as a fighter pilot. He married his wife, Valentina, that same year; they went on to have two daughters.

In 1960, Gagarin was selected along with 19 other candidates for the Soviet space program. The program winnowed the cosmonauts down to two—Gagarin and fellow test pilot Gherman Titov—as finalists to make the program’s first flight into space. Some thought Gagarin made the cut due to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s preference for his more modest background (Titov was the son of a schoolteacher).

At 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961, when Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spacecraft lifted off  from Baikonur cosmodrome, he uttered the surprisingly informal, immediately iconic exclamation “Poyekhali!” (Translation: “Let’s go!”) His flight, a single orbit around the Earth, was uneventful, but the landing ended in near-disaster when the cables joining the Vostok’s descent module and service module failed to separate properly, causing massive shaking as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Gagarin ejected before landing, parachuting down safely near the Volga River.

Hero of the Soviet Union

Gagarin became an international celebrity, toured the world and was showered with honors by his country. Krushchev’s government awarded him the Order of Lenin and named him a Hero of the Soviet Union. Gagarin’s triumph was a painful blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961. What’s more, a U.S. astronaut wouldn’t match Gagarin’s feat of orbiting the Earth until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in Friendship 7. (By that time, Titov had already become the second Soviet to make it to space, making 17 orbits of Earth over 25 hours in Vostok 2 in August 1961.)

Gagarin struggled with drinking on the heels of his fame, but by the late 1960s had returned to his training. He was chosen as backup pilot for the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission (in which two Soviet spacecraft were supposed to rendezvous in space), and watched in horror as his friend Vladimir Komarov died when his parachutes failed to open on re-entry in April 1967.

A Hero’s Tragic End

Less than a year later, on March 27, 1968, Gagarin himself was killed when a two-seater MiG-15 fighter jet he was flying with Vladimir Seryogin, crashed outside a small town near Moscow during a routine training flight. Gagarin’s ashes were placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall, while his hometown of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in his honor.

An official investigation into the accident concluded that Gagarin swerved to avoid a foreign object—such as a bird or weather balloon—sending the plane into a tailspin that ended with its crash into the ground. But many aviation professionals viewed this conclusion as implausible, and rumors continued to swirl around the crash. Some thought Gagarin might have been drinking, or that he and Seryogin might have been distracted by taking photographs from the plane’s window. Others suggested a cabin pressurization valve could have failed, causing both pilots to suffer hypoxia. More outlandish theories included sabotage for political motives, suicide or even collision with a UFO.

The Truth, Declassified

Gagarin’s friend and fellow Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, was in the area on the day of the crash and served (along with Gherman Titov) on the board that investigated the accident. In 2013, Leonov announced on the Russia Today TV network that another report on the crash, recently declassified, confirmed the real story: A second plane being tested that day, a Su-15 jet, mistakenly flew far lower than its planned altitude of 33,000 feet, instead passing close to where Gagarin’s plane had been flying, around 2,000 feet. Such a large aircraft would be able to roll over a smaller one (like the MiG-15) in its wake if the two planes came too close to each other.

After running various computer simulations, the report concluded that the only viable explanation for the crash was that the Su-15 flew too close to Gagarin’s plane that day, flipping it and forcing it into an unrecoverable spiral dive toward the ground. When asked why the report remained classified for so long, Leonov replied “My guess would be that one of the reasons for covering up the truth was to hide the fact that there was such a lapse so close to Moscow.” Leonov agreed not to identify the test pilot of the Su-15, who was 80 years old at the time, as a condition of being able to go public with the truth nearly five decades after the history-making cosmonaut’s fatal crash.

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First Man Up

He was a Soviet hero, a space pioneer (and a bit of a boozehound) who risked it all to save a doomed comrade. An excerpt from “Starman,” a new biography on the rise and fall of Yuri Gagarin, featured in the pages of our upcoming Spring Men’s issue.

April 12, 1961: 108 minutes

An hour before the launch, the chief Soviet spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev came on the link. ‘‘Yuri Alexeyevich, how are you hearing me? I need to tell you something.’’

‘‘Receiving you loud and clear.’’

‘‘I just want to remind you that after the one-minute readiness is announced, there’ll be about six minutes before you actually take off, so don’t worry about it.’’

‘‘I read you. I’m absolutely not worried.’’

‘‘There’ll be six minutes for all sorts of things, you know.’’ He meant that a minor instrument problem had created a six-minute delay in the launch sequence.

Then the cosmonaut Pavel Popovich came on the line. ‘‘Hey, can you guess who’s this talking to you?’’

‘‘Sure, it’s ‘Lily of the Valley!’’’

‘‘Yuri, are you getting bored in there?’’

‘‘If there was some music, I could stand it a little better.’’

Concerned for every last detail of the flight, Korolev took care of this personally, ordering his technicians to find some tapes or records and set something up straight away.

‘‘Haven’t they given you some music yet?’’ he asked a few minutes later.

‘‘Nothing so far.’’

‘‘Damned musicians. They dither about and the whole thing is sooner said than done.’’

‘‘Oh, now they’ve done it. They’ve put on a love song.’’

‘‘Good choice, I’d say.’’

8:41 a.m. Gagarin felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut, the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. ‘‘Yuri, we’re going down to the control bunker now.’’

8:51 a.m. The music stopped. Korolev’s deep, stern voice on the link, all seriousness now. ‘‘Yuri, the 15-minute mark.’’ This was the signal for Gagarin to seal his gloves and swing down the transparent visor on his helmet. In these last minutes before liftoff there was no NASA-style 5-4-3-2-1 ‘‘countdown’’ on the public-address system (and no public-address system). The rocket would be fired at the appointed instant: 9:06 a.m., Moscow time.

‘‘Launch key to ‘go’ position.’’

‘‘Air purging.’’

‘‘Idle run.’’

‘‘Ignition.’’

All kinds of vibrations now, high whinings and low rumbles. At some point Gagarin knew he must have lifted off, but the exact moment was elusive, identified with precision only by the electrical relays of the gantry’s hold-down arms as they moved aside, the four clamps disconnecting from the rocket’s flanks within a single hundredth of a second of each other. Gagarin lay rigid in his seat and tensed his muscles. At any moment something could go wrong with the booster, the hatch above his head might fly away, and his ejection charges would punch him out into the morning sky like a bullet. This ‘‘life-saving’’ jolt might kill him — crunch his spine; snap his neck like a chicken’s; the hatchway’s rim might snag his knees and tear them right off. He had to be prepared. The G-load climbing. No emergency ejection yet. …He didn’t remember it later, but they told him he shouted out, ‘‘Poyekhali!’’

‘‘Let’s go!’’

‘‘T-plus 70.’’

‘‘I read you, 70. I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing. All is well.’’

‘‘T-plus 100. How do you feel?’’

‘‘I feel fine. How about you?’’

Two minutes into the flight Gagarin was finding it a little hard to speak into his radio microphone. The G-forces were pulling at his face muscles. There was a strange moment when all the weight lifted and he was thrown violently forward against his straps. A shudder told him that the rocket’s four side-slung boosters were falling away. It paused in its acceleration, as if taking a big breath before the final spurt. Then the central core picked up the pace and the sensation of great weight returned.

Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of rubles’ worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground.

Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never traveled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘‘the eerie silence of outer space.’’ The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system.

Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upward out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball before drifting downward out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again — the horizon not straight but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.

Traveling eastward, ever eastward, flying at eight kilometers per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.

‘‘How are you feeling?’’

‘‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!’’

September 1961: A Bad Landing

Crimea is almost an island. It juts out into the Black Sea, connected to Ukraine by two peninsulas as delicate as veins. The northernmost territories of the island are pleasant but dull. The south is a different matter. There are beautiful mountains, sun-dappled forests, sheltered beaches speckled with palms. The weather is still fine in October, and the almond trees are back in bloom by February.

In its 1960s heyday, the Tesseli dacha at Foros was a luxury sanitarium complex designed to accommodate only the most privileged group bookings. Warm seas, fresh meat and fruit, fine wines, perhaps a certain freedom from everyday restraints: all of these pleasures were available, and more.

Call her “Anna”; perhaps there were two Annas. Anna Rumanseyeva, a young nurse, was on duty at Tesseli on Sept. 14, 1961, when Gagarin and his cosmonaut comrades came to stay. She speaks with intimate knowledge of another nurse called Anna, also working at Foros when Gagarin came to stay. Maybe the two Annas are one and the same person? It is not important.

“There are some people in life, especially men, who are constantly looking for adventure,” she says. “I would say Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was this kind of person.”

Yuri and his wife, Valentina, arrived at the sanitarium with their second daughter, Galya, 6 months old and still in need of her mother’s constant attention.

Gagarin seemed desperate for distraction. In the second week, he took some of his companions out to sea in a small motorboat. The Foros staff pleaded with him: it was against the rules, he did not know the local conditions, the wind was offshore, the weather could be difficult, he should not go. But he went anyway, taking the boat far from shore and driving it recklessly, making tight turns to splash his passengers with spray.

The swell picked up, just as he had been warned. The boat was carried over the horizon and out of sight of the shore, and a larger motorboat had to be sent out to make a rescue. When they hauled him back ashore, Gagarin went to the medical station for assistance.

In the rough conditions he had turned the boat’s steering wheel so hard that his hands were bloodied and cracked. But the pain, and the unpleasantness of his foolish adventure, did not entirely divert his attention from the pretty blond-haired nurse who attended to his blisters.

Anna Rumanseyeva recalls a party held the next day, in which Gagarin, his wife and the other “Anna” were present: “ ‘Anna’ said she went into a room and sat on a sofa. Yuri Alexeyevich — I don’t know what was on his mind. He was drunk. Perhaps he wanted to talk? I don’t think he had any other thoughts. Anyway, he went into the room. He closed the door but didn’t lock it with a key. Valentina Ivanovna went into the room immediately after him.”_

“You know, his wife Valentina was quite a complicated woman,” says the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov. “She protected Yuri from every kind of temptation which came as a result of his position. . . . Anyway, Valentina discovered that the First Cosmonaut had disappeared, and she decided to find out where he was, and he showed the true colors of goodness and of a gentleman. He showed genuine nobility and jumped out of a window on the second floor.”

Both women leaned over the balcony’s edge to take a look and saw Gagarin sprawled on the ground, motionless. “At that time, there were wild grapes growing on the balconies,” Anna Rumanseyeva explains. “They may have caught him as he jumped. He hit a curbstone with his forehead. It was not a good landing. On his return from space he landed successfully. Here, unsuccessfully.”

Then they took him inside, where the doctors applied local anesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip. The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment, and she remembers him asking her just one question. “Will I fly again?”

April 1967: Falling to Earth

By the spring of 1967, development of the Soyuz spacecraft, which was intended to eventually put a Soviet man on the moon, was moving toward that crucial first flight. On April 22, the Soviet propaganda departments felt confident enough to let slip some rumors to the international press agency UPI. “The upcoming mission will include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history — an attempted in-flight hookup between two ships and a transfer of crews.”

The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov says, “The first manned test of the Soyuz was assigned to Vladimir Komarov, with Yuri Gagarin as the backup, and another Soyuz spacecraft was being prepared for Yuri to fly at a later date.”

Komarov’s launch was supposed to be followed a day later by another Soyuz with three more crewmen aboard. It seems likely that the Brezhnev administration wanted the docking to take place on or around May Day. The year 1967 had a special significance in the Communist calendar; it was the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution. The concept of making a “union” between two spaceships collaborating in orbit was highly symbolic, especially for a ruling government obsessed with symbols.

But as the deadline for the mission drew near, technicians knew of 203 separate faults in the spacecraft that still required attention. Yuri Gagarin was closely involved in this assessment. By March 9, 1967, he and his closest cosmonaut colleagues had produced a formal 10-page document, with the help of the engineers, in which all the problems were outlined in detail. The trouble was, no one knew what to do with it. Within Soviet society, bad news always reflected badly on the messenger.

As many as 50 senior engineers knew about the report, but none of them felt sufficiently confident to go into the Kremlin and do what had to be done: request that Leonid Brezhnev play down the symbolism of the pending launch, so as to allow a decent delay for technical improvements.

The cosmonauts and bureaucrats eventually adopted an age-old technique. They recruited a nonpartisan messenger from outside the Soyuz program to deliver the document for them: Yuri Gagarin’s K.G.B. friend Venyamin Russayev.

“Komarov invited me and my wife to visit his family,” says Russayev. “Afterward, as he was seeing us off, ‘Komarov said straight out, ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight.’ As I knew the state of affairs, I asked him, ‘If you’re so convinced you’re going to die, then why don’t you refuse the mission?’ He answered, ‘If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’ . . . Komarov said he knew what he was talking about, and he burst into such bitter tears.”

Russayev could not be of much help on his own. Back at his desk in the Lubyanka the next morning, after a sleepless night, he decided to ask advice from one of his K.G.B. seniors, Major-General Konstantin Makharov, a man he respected.

“I went to Makharov’s office and told him there was a serious problem with the rocket. He listened to me very carefully, and then he said, ‘I’m going to do something. In the meantime don’t leave your desk today. Not even for one second.’ I kept my promise, and I’d only been back at my desk for a short while when he sent for me again. He gave me a letter, prepared by a team mobilized by Yuri Gagarin. Most of the cosmonauts took part in the research. Makharov told me to take the letter upstairs and see Ivan Fadyekin, head of Department Three.”

This “letter” consisted of a 10-page document describing all 203 problems in the Soyuz hardware. As soon as he saw it, Fadyekin dodged the responsibility straight away. “I don’t have the expertise for this.”

He redirected Russayev to a much more dangerous man in the Lubyanka: Georgi Tsinev. Tsinev was a close personal friend of Leonid Brezhnev; in fact, he was related by marriage, and they had fought alongside each other in the war. If anyone could deliver an important message straight into the hands of the First Secretary, Tsinev could.

Unfortunately for Russayev, things were not quite that simple. Tsinev was rising fast within the K.G.B., helped along by his powerful patron in the Kremlin. He was not going to allow any irritations to disturb that cozy relationship. “While reading the letter, Tsinev looked at me, gauging my reactions to see if I’d read it or not,” Russayev explains. “He was glaring at me very intently, watching me like a hawk, and suddenly he asked, ‘How would you like a promotion up to my department?’ He even offered me a better office.”

Tsinev kept hold of the document, and it was never seen again. Within weeks, Fadyekin was transferred to a junior consular office in Iran, merely for the crime of glancing through it. Makharov was fired immediately, without a pension, and Tsinev took over as chief of an entire counterintelligence department. Russayev was stripped of any responsibility for space affairs and transferred to an insignificant staff training department outside Moscow, well away from the Lubyanka. “I kept my head down like a hermit for the next 10 years,” he says.

April 23, 1967: Crash and Burn

Early on the morning of April 23, 1967, the Soyuz was propped up against the gantry at the Soviet launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, according to the original schedule. The journalist Golovanov noticed Gagarin behaving very strangely. “He demanded to be put into the protective spacesuit. It was already clear that Komarov was perfectly fit to fly, and there were only three or four hours remaining until liftoff time, but he suddenly burst out and started demanding this and that. It was a sudden caprice.”

Russayev and others insist that Gagarin was trying to elbow his way onto the flight in order to save Komarov from almost certain death. Rumors about the dialogue between Komarov and ground control have circulated for many years, based on reports from the National Security Agency staff monitoring the radio signals from an Air Force facility near Istanbul.

In August 1972 a former NSA analyst, interviewed under the name Winslow Peck (real name Perry Fellwock), gave a very moving account of the interception: “[The Soviet premier Alexei] Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a videophone conversation, and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero. . . . The guy’s wife got on too. He told her how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids.”

As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey picked up his cries of rage as he plunged to his death, cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.

The parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay. A backup parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue.

Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.

Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut “requiring urgent medical attention.”

Russayev says a heel bone was found among the ashes.

Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells.

The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, “I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally.” He was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov’s launch.

Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. “I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.” Russayev goes on, “I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’ ” Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. “I told him, ‘Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.’ ”

One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.

Adapted from “Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin,” to be published in April by Walker & Company.

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