FIRST MAN IN SPACE:

April 12, 1961

On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri
Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space. During
the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the
first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space capsule in 89
minutes. Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was
guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to
Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, "Flight is proceeding
normally; I am well."After his historic feat was announced, the attractive and
unassuming Gagarin became an instant worldwide celebrity. He was awarded the
Order of Lenin and given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Monuments were
raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor.The
triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a
great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for
May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S. space
program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in
Friendship 7. By that time, the Soviet Union had already made another leap ahead
in the "space race" with the August 1961 flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov in
Vostok 2. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more than 25 hours in space.To Soviet
propagandists, the Soviet conquest of space was evidence of the supremacy of
communism over capitalism. However, to those who worked on the Vostok program
and earlier on Sputnik (which launched the first satellite into space in 1957),
the successes were attributable chiefly to the brilliance of one man: Sergei
Pavlovich Korolev. Because of his controversial past, Chief Designer Korolev was
unknown in the West and to all but insiders in the USSR until his death in
1966.Born in the Ukraine in 1906, Korolev was part of a scientific team that
launched the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. In 1938, his military
sponsor fell prey to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's purges, and Korolev and his
colleagues were also put on trial. Convicted of treason and sabotage, Korolev
was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. The Soviet authorities came to fear
German rocket advances, however, and after only a year Korolev was put in charge
of a prison design bureau and ordered to continue his rocketry work.In 1945,
Korolev was sent to Germany to learn about the V-2 rocket, which had been used
to devastating effect by the Nazis against the British. The Americans had
captured the rocket's designer, Wernher von Braun, who later became head of the
U.S. space program, but the Soviets acquired a fair amount of V-2 resources,
including rockets, launch facilities, blueprints, and a few German V-2
technicians. By employing this technology and his own considerable engineering
talents, by 1954 Korolev had built a rocket that could carry a five-ton nuclear
warhead and in 1957 launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile.That
year, Korolev's plan to launch a satellite into space was approved, and on
October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was fired into Earth's orbit. It was the first Soviet
victory of the space race, and Korolev, still technically a prisoner, was
officially rehabilitated. The Soviet space program under Korolev would go on to
numerous space firsts in the late 1950s and early '60s: first animal in orbit,
first large scientific satellite, first man, first woman, first three men, first
space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first
to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. Throughout this time,
Korolev remained anonymous, known only as the "Chief Designer." His dream of
sending cosmonauts to the moon eventually ended in failure, primarily because
the Soviet lunar program received just one-tenth the funding allocated to
America's successful Apollo lunar landing program.Korolev died in 1966. Upon his
death, his identity was finally revealed to the world, and he was awarded a
burial in the Kremlin wall as a hero of the Soviet Union. Yuri Gagarin was
killed in a routine jet-aircraft test flight in 1968. His ashes were also placed
in the Kremlin wall.