first human to journey into space

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This Day In History : April 12

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Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space

On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space. During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space capsule in 89 minutes. Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, “Flight is proceeding normally; I am well.”

After his historic feat was announced, the attractive and unassuming Gagarin became an instant worldwide celebrity. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union . Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor.

The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S. space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits 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.

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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.

AP/File photo

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."

Cover of Stephen Walker's biography on Yuri Gagarin, "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space."

Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers LLC

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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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.

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Sergei Korolev: the rocket genius behind Yuri Gagarin

I t remains the one untarnished triumph of Soviet science. On 12 April 1961, a peasant farmer's son with a winsome smile crammed himself into a capsule eight feet in diameter and was blasted into space on top of a rocket 20 storeys high. One hundred and eight minutes later, after making a single orbit of our world, the young pilot parachuted back to Earth. In doing so, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to journey into space.

The flight of Vostok 1 – whose 50th anniversary will be celebrated next month – was a defining moment of the 20th century and opened up the prospect of interplanetary travel for our species. It also made Gagarin an international star while his mission was hailed as clear proof of the superiority of communist technology. The 27-year-old cosmonaut became a figurehead for the Soviet Union and toured the world. He lunched with the Queen; was kissed by Gina Lollobrigida; and holidayed with the privileged in Crimea.

Gagarin also received more than a million letters from fans across the world, an astonishing outpouring of global admiration – for he was not obvious star material. He was short and slightly built. Yet Gagarin possessed a smile "that lit up the darkness of the cold war", as one writer put it, and had a natural grace that made him the best ambassador that the USSR ever had. Even his flaws seem oddly endearing by modern standards, his worst moment occurring when he gashed his head after leaping from a window to avoid his wife who had discovered a girl in his hotel room.

To many Russians, Gagarin occupies the same emotional territory as John F Kennedy or Princess Diana. The trio even share the intense attention of conspiracy theorists with alien abduction, a CIA plot and suicide all being blamed for Gagarin's death in 1968.

At the same time, his flight's anniversary will give Russians a chance to reflect on the former might of the Soviet empire. Ravaged by a war that had killed more than 26 million of its citizens, the USSR learned, within a generation, how to orbit satellites, aim probes at the moon and finally put a man into space. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the might of the Soviet people. At least, that is what was claimed at the time.

In fact, Gagarin's flight was anything but a collective affair. In the years that have followed the USSR's disintegration, it has become clear that his mission was a highly individualistic business with one man dominating proceedings: Sergei Korolev, the chief designer – a shadowy figure who was only revealed to have masterminded the USSR's rocket wizardry after his death in 1966. The remarkable story of his genius, his survival in the Gulags; his transformation into one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union – and his interaction with his favourite cosmonaut, his "little eagle" Yuri Gagarin, is the real story behind that flight on 12 April 1961. Gagarin became the face of Soviet space supremacy, while Korolev was its brains. The pair made a potent team and their success brought fame to one and immense power to the other. Neither lived long to enjoy those rewards, however.

The man who would lead the world into the space age, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, was born on 12 January 1907, in Zhitomir, in modern-day Ukraine. His mother Maria left her husband Pavel while Sergei was young and remarried – though Korolev went on to have a good relationship with his stepfather. Like Gagarin, he was besotted with flying and aeronautics and studied in Moscow under Andrei Tupolev, the distinguished Soviet aircraft designer. Tupolev described his young student "as a man with unlimited devotion to his job and his ideas".

Korolev qualified as a pilot and began designing gliders to which he added rocket engines. In 1933, he successfully launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket in the USSR. He prospered for he was hard-working and loyal to the Soviet system. It was not enough. On 27 June 1938, four secret service agents broke into his apartment and arrested him as a spy. Korolev was beaten. He asked for a glass of water and a jailer smashed the jug in his face. In the end, Korolev was forced to admit to crimes of treason and sabotage and was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour at the Kolyma gold mine, the most notorious of all Gulag prison camps. Korolev never found out why he had been picked out.

He survived Kolyma but lost all his teeth, his jaw was broken and he may have suffered a heart attack. He was, as his biographer James Harford says, just another "egregious example of the incredible stupidity, not to speak of callous cruelty, of the purges of Joseph Stalin". More than five million Soviet men and women were arrested and either shot, jailed or sent to the Gulags during the Great Purge that was unleashed in the 30s.

After five months, Korolev was released from Kolyma – probably because Tupolev intervened on his behalf – and he spent the next five years in jail in Moscow working, officially, on aircraft and rocket design with other imprisoned engineers. Then, in 1945, he was made a colonel in the Red Army and sent to Germany. It was a remarkable change in his fortunes and it occurred for a simple reason: the Russians had captured Nazi stores of V2 rocket components and wanted to use them to develop their own missile system. Korolev's credentials were ideal.

The V2's guidance systems, turbo-pumps and engines were of startling sophistication, Korolev realised. However, the rocket's designer, Werner von Braun, and his team had defected to the Americans, with several complete V2s. This gave the US a huge advantage in the race to develop missiles from the Nazis' technology. But Korolev was a gifted engineer and designer – and an obsessive worker. "I can never forget, on going home, if there is something wrong with a technique," he told a colleague. He slept for only a few hours a night, lived frugally and on 21 August 1957 launched the Soviet R-7 rocket, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, on a 4,000-mile journey from Baikonur cosmodrome, in modern-day Kazakhstan, to the Kamchatka peninsula. He had beaten the USA by 15 months.

"His ability to inspire large teams, as well as individuals, is proverbial," says Harford in Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon . "He had a roaring temper, was prone to shout and use expletives, but was quick to forgive and forget. His consuming passion was work, work, work for space exploration and for the defence of his country. One wonders how he maintained such an unswerving loyalty to a system that had treated him so cruelly."

Von Braun may have built the V2 and later the Saturn V rocket that took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon, but his achievements were dwarfed by those of Korolev. The chief designer – he was never named in state communiqués because of official disapproval of "the cult of personalities" – developed the first intercontinental missile and then launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1. He also put into space the first dog, the first two-man crew, the first woman, the first three-man crew; directed the first walk in space; created the first Soviet spy satellite and communication satellite; built mighty launch vehicles and flew spacecraft towards the moon, Venus and Mars – and all on a shoestring budget.

However, it was the launch of the first man into space that truly marked out Korolev – and Gagarin – for greatness.

Yuri Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934, in Klushino, in the Smolensk region, 100 miles west of Moscow. His father and mother worked on the local collective farm, he as a storeman, she with a dairy herd, according to Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony in their book Starman: The Truth behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin . In October 1942, the village was overrun by retreating German troops. The Gagarins were thrown out of their home and had to dig a shelter to survive the winter. Later Yuri's brother Valentin and sister Zoya were deported to labour camps in Poland.

Remarkably the family survived and in 1950 Yuri was sent to Moscow to train as a steel foundryman before enrolling in the newly built technical school in Saratov, where he took up flying, eventually becoming a military pilot. He was stationed in Murmansk and flew MiG-15 jets on reconnaissance missions.

In October 1959, a set of recruiting teams began visiting air bases across the Soviet Union. Nothing was said about the nature of their mission. In any case, most pilots failed the tests they were set. A privileged few, including Gagarin, were selected and sent to Burdenko military hospital in Moscow where the pilot recalled being examined, intensely, by groups of doctors. "They tapped our bodies with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the vestibular organs in our ears," Gagarin recalled. "They tested us from head to toe."

Korolev – who had already stunned the world with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first satellite – was now preparing for his ultimate achievement: putting a human in space. After his earlier experiment with the ill-fated Laika, he had successfully flown a dog into orbit and returned it safely to Earth. And if a dog could do it, it was surely time for a human. However, at the time, doctors – both in the east and the west – were unsure about how the human frame would respond to the intense forces of launch and then the weightlessness of orbit. Hence their obsession with astronauts' fitness. In the end, 20 pilots were selected – only for them to find that the early version of the Vostok capsule that Korolev had come up with was so cramped, only those under 5ft 6in could get in it. The slightly built Gagarin fitted in nicely. Many of the others did not.

In the end, only Gherman Titov provided real competition for Gagarin. He was a brilliant pilot, intense, self-possessed and, as befits a teacher's son, was well-educated and fond of quoting poetry. A week before Vostok's lift-off, the choice was whittled down to the two of them.

Titov was convinced he would win but days before launch was told it would be Gagarin who would be going. Titov never got over being the second, largely unremembered man in space – he flew Vostok 2 on 6 August 1961 – and in 1998, shortly before his death, he still spoke bitterly about his rival: "Some people will tell you I gave him a hug [when his selection was announced]. Nonsense. There was none of that."

Behind the scenes, powerful forces had been backing Gagarin. Khrushchev knew spaceflight was a potent propaganda weapon. "Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers' sons while Titov was middle-class," argue Bizony and Doran. "If Gagarin could reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev's rise to power from similarly humble origins was validated."

So it was the peasant workers' son who headed for glory on the morning of 12 April 1961. He took the bus to the launch pad with Titov in tow – just in case there was a last-minute emergency. Both were wearing spacesuits. Then Gagarin stood up to go. "According to Russian tradition, one should kiss the person going away three times on alternating cheeks," cameraman Vladimir Suvorov recalled. "But they were wearing spacesuits with helmets attached, so they simply clanged against each other."

Gagarin squirmed into his capsule and waited. There was no countdown – a silly, American affectation according to Korolev who, at 9.06am, simply pressed an ignition key and the R-7 rose slowly from the pad. Gagarin shouted: " Poyekhali !" ("Let's go!")

"After the launch, there was complete silence in mission control apart from an operator repeating, every 30 seconds, that 'the flight is normal'," recalls Mikhail Marov, one of Korolev's research engineers. "Then he announced the ship had reached orbit and there was huge shout of joy." Marov – a fellow of the Russian Academy of Science who subsequently headed several space missions – today remembers Gagarin's talking quietly and calmly. "I can see clouds. I can see everything. It's beautiful," he told mission control. Around 9.50 Vostok began its sweep over America. Half an hour later its engine was retrofired and the capsule began its descent. Every manoeuvre had been controlled by Korolev from the ground.

"Those minutes seemed like eternity," Marov recalls. Then it was announced that Gagarin had landed safely. The Soviet press agency Tass immediately broadcast details of the flight and within minutes, crowds began to fill the streets of Moscow. "They looked like surging seas," says Marov. "I have never seen such enthusiasm of ordinary people. They took Gagarin's triumph as a personal victory."

In fact, his flight came perilously close to being a personal loss. As it began its descent, Gagarin's capsule should have separated from the main spaceship but a cable did not detach. The capsule began to spin and tumble "like a yo-yo" as one engineer later described it, exposing unprotected areas to the searing heat of re-entry. The temperature inside rose dangerously. "I was in a cloud of fire rushing toward Earth," Gagarin recalled. Ten minutes later the errant cable burned through; the two modules separated; and Gagarin's capsule ceased its wild rotation. The cosmonaut, who had nearly lost consciousness, blew open its hatch and was ejected, as planned, to make a parachute descent. He landed close to the village of Smelovka, near Saratov in southern Russia. "I saw a woman and a little girl coming toward me. I began to wave my arms and yell. I said I was a Soviet and had come from space."

News of Gagarin's flight swept round the globe. "Man in space!" the London Evening News announced that day while the following morning's Guardian proclaimed: "Russia hails Columbus of space: World's first astronaut home safely." In the US, which had its own space ambitions, the news was less welcome. Reporters pressed Nasa for a quote and phoned press officer John "Shorty" Powers at 4.30am. Powers, outraged at the call, snarled: "What is this! We're all asleep down here!" Next morning's US headlines included the classic: "Soviets put man in space. Spokesman says US asleep."

Powers wasn't far wrong, of course. At the time, Nasa was preparing its own manned Mercury missions but had got no further than a 17-minute test-flight with a chimp called Ham. Korolev had beaten the USA easily. "He seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will," says Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff . "There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let Nasa struggle furiously to catch up – and then launch some startling new demonstration of how just how far ahead he really was." One newspaper cartoon even showed a chimpanzee telling another: "We are a little behind the Russians and a little ahead of the Americans."

Hugo Young, writing in the Times , was more straightforward. "Gagarin's triumph pitilessly mocked the image of dynamism which President Kennedy had offered the American people. It had to be avenged almost as much for his sake as for the nation's." So Kennedy wrote a memo demanding that a space programme be found that promised dramatic results and that the United States could win. The crucial words were "dramatic" and "win". Only a manned lunar landing filled those criteria.

Thus, on 25 May 1961 – a few weeks after Gagarin's flight – Kennedy made his speech committing the United States to sending a man to the moon and returning him safely before the end of the decade. The Space Race was on. "That speech, that reaction needs to be understood as a key part of the fight of Yuri Gagarin because his mission was the immediate stimulus for the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ," says space expert Professor John Logsdon of George Washington University.

Few observers gave America much chance of victory. The Soviet programme looked unbeatable with Gagarin and Korolev as its face and brains. It was not to be, however. Korolev was living on borrowed time. He had already suffered one heart attack and was now succumbing slowly to illnesses brought on by his treatment in the Gulag. "People thought of him as a burly man, built like a bear, but the truth was that his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries," say Doran and Bizony. "He could not turn his neck, but had to swivel his upper torso to look people in the eye; nor could he open his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud."

On 5 January 1966, Korolev was admitted to hospital for what was supposed to be routine surgery. But during the operation, on 14 January, he haemorrhaged on the operating table. Doctors tried to put a tube into his lungs to keep him breathing but found his jaw had been broken so badly in the Gulag, they couldn't pass it through his damaged throat. He never regained consciousness and died, aged 59, later that day. For the first time, the Soviet people learned who the chief designer was. Pravda ran a two-page obituary and Korolev was given a state funeral. Thousands gathered as his ashes were carried through Red Square to the Kremlin Wall. Gagarin gave the final eulogy.

Korolev's little eagle only survived his mentor by two years. On 27 March, Gagarin took off from Chkalovsky airbase on a MiG-15UTI jet with fellow pilot Vladimir Seryogin. It crashed a few minutes later, killing both men. A KGB investigation suggested that a near-miss with another jet had sent Gagarin's plane spinning out of control, though the cause of the accident remains unclear and the subject of unending conspiracy theories. On 4 April 1968 – after a huge state funeral in which tens of thousands gathered – Gagarin's ashes were interred close to Korolev's. The Soviet space programme had been orphaned.

Before his death, Korolev had designed a mighty launcher, the N1, which was intended to carry men to the moon. Engineers continued to work on it but without the chief designer's guidance and inspiration, they were lost. In 1969, just as America was perfecting its Apollo missions, two unmanned test N1 launches were carried out. The first exploded in flight. The second didn't even make it off the launch pad. "The rocket fell over, destroying the entire launch complex," says Harford. The Soviet lunar dream was over. Weeks later, Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the moon.

The might of the US aerospace industry had prevailed and America emerged as winners of the space race, though there is an ironic coda to this story, one that Korolev would have certainly enjoyed. After Apollo, the US went on to develop the space shuttle, the world's first reusable spacecraft, which was used – among many tasks – to construct the international space station. By the 1980s, the US was flaunting its space prowess. Then things went badly awry. Two shuttle accidents caused the deaths of 14 astronauts. As a result, the craft will be grounded later this year.

And after that, there will be only one way to get astronauts – no matter what their nationality – to the space station: on a Russian Soyuz launcher, a rocket derived from the R-7 that Korolev designed to put Gagarin into space. As Logsdon says: "The rocket we now rely on to put humans into space is essentially the same launch vehicle, taking off from the same launch pad, that was built by Korolev and which took Gagarin into space. Half a century later, we are back where we started. It raises the question of whether or not the world is serious about human spaceflight."

It also demonstrates, starkly, the enduring genius of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the man who launched Yuri Gagarin.

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60 Years Ago, the First Human to Reach Space Also Set This Incredible Record

We rarely talk about Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's other major milestone.

• During his historic journey, Gagarin set another record, becoming the first human to travel at hypersonic speeds.
• Gagarin’s flight marked a pivotal moment in the quest for hypersonic travel .

Sixty years ago this week, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to pierce Earth’s atmosphere and safely reach space. Gagarin spent 108 minutes strapped into his Vostok 1 spacecraft before returning to Earth as a hero.

But during his incredible journey on April 12, 1961, Gagarin also set another record when he became the first person to experience hypersonic flight.

✈ You love badass planes. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together .

For an object to reach supersonic speeds, it must exceed the speed of sound, or Mach 1. The speed of sound, however, can change depending on the composition and temperature of the air through which the sound or object is traveling. Because the air is thinner and colder higher up in Earth’s atmosphere, the speed requirements to break this barrier at altitude are lower than they are at sea level.

Legendary test pilot and U.S. Air Force Major Chuck Yeager became the first person to reach this milestone when, in 1947, he piloted his Bell X-1 research plane to 45,000 feet above Earth’s surface, broke the local sound barrier, and reached top speeds of 700 miles per hour (mph), or Mach 1.06.

Only a few skilled pilots have traveled at hypersonic speeds—speeds reaching about five times the speed of sound. But much of the physics of hypersonic flight is still a mystery.

As a vehicle travels faster and faster past speed of sound, it generates a series of pressure waves. These pressure waves bunch up—imagine a pressure wave traffic jam—and form a shockwave that surrounds the aircraft, Javier Urzay, a senior researcher at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, tells Pop Mech . When the speed of a vehicle increases, the pressure and temperature of gas molecules in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle increase rapidly.

For aircraft traveling at supersonic speeds, forces like drag are the primary concern. But when an aircraft reaches hypersonic speeds, heat becomes the main focus.

“We don’t know how to estimate those thermal mechanical loads because we don’t understand the fundamental physical aspects of all the flow around aircraft at those high speeds,” Urzay says.

Furthermore, it takes a lot of computational power to make these estimates.

On his way back to Earth’s surface, Gagarin and his Vostok 1 capsule reportedly reached hypersonic speeds. A month later, Alan Shepard became the first American to experience hypersonic speeds, when his capsule surpassed Mach 5 during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

The record for fastest-ever human travel, for what it’s worth, goes to the Apollo 10 crew, who in 1969 reached speeds of nearly 25,000 mph, or 30 times the speed of sound, as they free fell through Earth’s atmosphere. Technically, these weren’t controlled flights.

Six years after Gagarin’s famed flight, U.S. Air Force Major William J. Knight earned the title of “fastest man on Earth” when he piloted his North American X-15A-2 research rocket plane to speeds of Mach 6.7, or 4,520 mph. Dropped from the belly of a B-52 at an altitude of around 45,000 feet, the airplane roared to life, kicking off the roughly 8-minute powered portion of the flight.

The exterior of the X-15A-2—which was designed specifically to withstand high temperatures, decreased stability, and the intense forces exerted during high-speed travel— was covered in a nickel-chrome alloy coating that acted as a heat sink and kept the aircraft from getting too hot during its flight.

Between 1959 and 1968, 12 pilots conducted almost 200 test flights, all of which helped scientists and engineers understand the perils of hypersonic flight.

To this day, no controlled, human-piloted aircraft has ever surpassed Knight’s record.

And then there are uncrewed flights. A two-staged rocket called Project Bumper became the first to achieve hypersonic flight in 1949. The second stage of a V-2 sounding rocket reached Mach 6.7 when it launched from the New Mexico desert that same year. In 2004, NASA’s uncrewed X-43A set the record for fastest jet-powered flight when it briefly reached speeds of Mach 9.6, or about 6,363 mph, before slamming into the ocean.

In recent years, the U.S., China, Russia, and other countries have raced to develop plans for a variety of hypersonic weapons, from ballistic missiles like China’s WU-14 missile to specialized aircraft like Boeing’s hypersonic spy drone .

Urzay says we may have to wait a while for hypersonic commercial flights designed to ferry hundreds of passengers well past the Mach 5 boundary. Still, manufacturers like Boeing are working on concept planes that take off using regular turbofan engines but rely on ramjets, a type of air-breathing engine that uses a plane’s forward motion to compress air, to reach top speeds.

But don’t bother saving up your miles just yet. “We have a very small understanding of the fundamental physical processes that happen in the gaseous atmosphere around the aircraft at high Mach numbers,” says Urzay. “Those challenges still remain after 60 years.”

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Jennifer Leman is a science journalist and senior features editor at Popular Mechanics, Runner's World, and Bicycling. A graduate of the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz, her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science News and Nature. Her favorite stories illuminate Earth's many wonders and hazards.

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1st human journey into space, April 12, 1961

The flight, at a mere 108 minutes from launch to landing, gave the Soviet Union a larger lead in the Space Race. The Soviets had already launched the first successful artificial satellite with Sputnik in 1957 and the United States was trailing.

Under heavily veiled secrecy, Vostok 1 was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergei Korolev, under the supervision of Kerim Kerimov and others.

The spaceflight consisted of a single orbit of the Earth and is among the shortest orbital manned spaceflights in history. In fact, the 27-year-old cosmonaut sat in the cabin longer while final preparations were made, including having to remove the cabin’s door screw by screw to reseal it properly.

Re-entry saw a minor bump when the Vostok service module did not separate from the re-entry module, unexpectedly remaining attached by a bundle of wires. The two halves of the spacecraft began re-entry and went through strong gyrations as Vostok 1 neared Egypt. At this point the wires broke, the two modules separated, and the descent module settled into the proper re-entry attitude. As planned, Gagarin ejected with a parachute 23,000 feet above ground and landed separately from his spacecraft.

Due to the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program at the time, many details of the spaceflight were not released before the launch. In fact, some local citizens were unaware of the launch. As the story goes, a farmer and his daughter saw Gagarin parachute in from the sky, dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit and white helmet. Gagarin later recalled that, “they started to back away in fear. I told them, ‘don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!'”

Gagarin became a worldwide hero, described as having a smile that could “light up the Cold War.” Sadly, he died at the age of 34 in 1968 when a MiG 15 training jet he was piloting crashed. Held in high regard by his fellow cosmonauts and US astronauts alike, Gagarin was honored a year after his death on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a memorial satchel containing medals commemorating Gagarin and fellow fallen cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on the surface of the moon.

Related articles:

• Sputnik 1 launches, October 4, 1957
• Russia in Space
• 1st human killed in spaceflight, April 24, 1967
• Apollo 11 makes 1st manned landing on the moon, July 20, 1969
• NASA names 1st 7 astronauts, April 9, 1959

For more moments in tech history, see this blog . EDN strives to be historically accurate with these postings. Should you see an error, please notify us .

Editor’s note : This article was originally posted on April 12, 2013 and edited on April 12, 2019.

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1 comment on “ 1st human journey into space, April 12, 1961 ”

Very well written article. Here is a link to a You Tube video about Yuri Gagarin and his contributions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umY92y25DrA

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10 Key Facts About Yuri Gagarin - The First Man In Space

Updated Jan 4, 2024, 02:50 PM IST

Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut who became the first man to travel into space. (Image Credit: NASA)

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60th Anniversary of the First Human Space Flight

On April 12, the world celebrates the International Day of Human Space Flight. It commemorates the flight of Yuri Gagarin on the Vostok 1 spacecraft. In 2021, it will be 60 years since Gagarin’s journey into space. Today, we’ll talk about the history of this flight and remember another space-related event that also happened on April 12.

You can also watch our short documentary about Yuri Gagarin’s flight .

Preparations for the flight

After the successful launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, the USSR started thinking about the next milestone – putting the first human into the Earth’s orbit.

In January 1959, the Soviets began to sort out candidates for the flight. The candidates had to be intelligent, stress-resistant, and physically fit. There were also other requirements: the future cosmonaut had to be male, between 25 and 30 years old, no taller than 1.75 meters, and weigh no more than 72 kilograms. Six candidates were recommended for the flight; out of these six, Yuri Gagarin was chosen to become the first human in space.

The spacecraft built for the mission was called Vostok 1. As the Soviet Union was in a hurry to win the Space Race with the USA, some important components were not installed in the spacecraft in order to save time. For instance, Vostok 1 had no emergency escape system and soft landing system.

If you want to take a closer look at the Vostok 1 spacecraft, download the Solar Walk 2 app. It’s a 3D planetarium that contains high-quality models of celestial bodies and famous spaceships. Open the app, tap the magnifier icon in the lower-left corner of the screen, type “Vostok”, and tap the corresponding search result. You will see a 3D model of Vostok 1 orbiting around the Earth. Tap the “i” icon in the upper-right corner to view information about the spacecraft.

The first human in space

On April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 with Yuri Gagarin on board lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome. In general, the flight went quite well. One of the few moments when Gagarin felt really stressed was during the descending phase. When the spaceship entered the Earth’s atmosphere, its hull started to melt due to air friction. Gagarin saw hot metal flowing down his window and heard the spaceship crackle. In his own words: “To tell you the truth, that was no fun”.

The landing also didn’t go quite as planned. Due to a failure in the braking system, Vostok 1 missed the originally intended landing site. When Gagarin ejected from the capsule, he saw that, instead of dry land, beneath him was the river Volga. Fortunately, he was able to steer the parachute away from the water and land on the ground. The first people he met were the wife of a local forest ranger and her daughter. They were initially scared by the sight of a strange man wearing a helmet and a bright-orange uniform, but Gagarin talked to them and calmed them down. Soon, the military came to take Gagarin to a nearby city.

Before returning to the Earth, Vostok 1 completed one orbit around our planet. Most sources indicate that Gagarin’s flight lasted 108 minutes. However, it is not quite correct. In 2011, when some of the Soviet archives were declassified, it became known that the flight actually lasted 106 minutes.

After the flight, Yuri Gagarin became a national hero and a worldwide celebrity. Newspapers around the world published his biography and details of his flight. He also visited about 30 countries in the years following the flight.

40 years since the first space shuttle launch

Another remarkable event that also happened on April 12 was the launch of the first reusable human-crewed spacecraft. In 1981, exactly 20 years after Gagarin's flight, NASA launched Columbia – the first spacecraft of the Space Shuttle program. By the way, the chosen date was pure coincidence – initially the launch was scheduled on April 10, but was delayed due to some technical issues. The flight was commanded by an experienced astronaut John Young, who was the ninth person to walk on the Moon in 1972, and piloted by a rookie astronaut Robert Crippen.

The mission’s main aim was to test all the spacecraft’s systems on the Earth’s orbit. Columbia spent two days in space and orbited the Earth 36 times. On April 14, the shuttle successfully landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. During its service life, Columbia flew 28 missions and spent more than 300 days in space.

In our opinion, the best way to celebrate the two anniversaries is to get yourself involved in some space-related activity. Watch our video about the first man in space , go stargazing with the Star Walk 2 app, study the Solar System with Solar Walk 2 , or learn something new about space with one of our quizzes . Such anniversaries don’t happen every day, so make sure to celebrate them!

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‘BEYOND: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet’ hits shelves in April

“In America, it is still the evening of April 11. Millions will be watching their youthful new president, John F. Kennedy, and his glamorous wife Jackie, talk on TV about the challenges of bringing up their young children, Caroline and John, in the White House. In New York’s West Village, an unknown nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan is about to make his professional debut at Gerdie’s Folk City club… Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the east, Gagarin is strapped into his seat while the last bolt is fastened and his hatch is finally closed. Alone in his little sphere, he waits and whistles a love song.” 

Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin.

April 12, 2021, marks the 60th anniversary of the first human in space. Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin’s historic launch in the Vostok spacecraft exacerbated the U.S. - Soviet space race. His extraordinary mission and its impact on the United States’ own space program is detailed in BEYOND: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space by bestselling author and award-winning documentary filmmaker Stephen Walker. 

For Walker, the story of the space race between two giants became the next step after his bestseller Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, a story of technology used for distraction. “It takes a missile to put a human into space and it’s a beautiful paradox in some way,” Walker says.  

His new book, BEYOND , is not a biography of Gagarin, but a narrative that moves as a countdown from America, Cape Canaveral and Washington D.C., to Moscow and different parts of the Soviet Union, such as the Kazakhstan space launch site, bringing the reader to the different places. Some of the events are happening at the same time and Walker narrows the story closer and closer to the moment when Gagarin, at great risk, launches into space. It’s a very dramatic story that has a lot of twists and turns and sometimes feels like the work of fiction.  

“When I think of the technological vision of people like Sergey Korolev back in the 50s, he was a visionary. He is like Elon Musk,” said Walker. “He is building missiles and serves Khrushev, but he has vision.” In his book, Walker writes about the stories of Korolev’s mother, who would tell him fairy tales of traveling around the world on a magic carpet. “She gave him this love of going around the world, so he is like a child with dreams.”  

Walker started BEYOND as a film project in 2012, which was to use some of the lost footage of Soviet space program. “I was like a detective on a hunt, chasing for footage and people, and we shot high quality interviews with some key people who were eyewitnesses of this project in 1961 and their stories were just amazing,” Walker says. However, he couldn’t find enough of the footage.  

Gagarin and Academician Sergei Korolev, 1961.

About two years ago, while cleaning up his study, Walker found the material shot in Russia. “I thought that maybe I could do the same as I did with Shockwave ,” he says. He did more research, travelled to Moscow and the city of Saratov, where Gagarin landed. Walker witnessed a rocket launch at Baikonur, the space launch center in Kazakhstan, while also visiting Cape Canaveral, Huston, New York and other places in the U.S. 

“This is not just another Cold War story, the significance of this moment is absolutely monumental,” Walker said. “It is this first time, when humanity leaves the planet and it’s the first step into the beyond. It’s about the moment for the whole of humanity, a philosophical leap.”  

Shockwave. Countdown to Hiroshima.

In his book, Walker compares the two different approaches to space research and development. Both Americans and Soviets used animals, but the competing countries had philosophical and ideological differences. Russians sent dogs into space, while the U.S. preferred chimpanzees, highly intelligent animals, who are more like human beings.  

“I don’t think that affected the speed of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human in space,” Walker says. “[The] Soviet space program took an absolutely massive risk, because the program was conducted in secret. If anything happened to an American astronaut, this would happen on television, that’s what happened when Alan Shepard went to space in May 1961.” The news on Gagarin’s launch was only released when he was in orbit.  

“Soviets were able to take a gamble,” said Walker. “Gagarin had less than 50 percent chance of surviving that mission, it was an amazing stroke of luck.” 

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NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, ORDER YOUR COPY Here.

“a thrilling piece of storytelling” the sunday times, 12 april 1961.

“Always thrilling … brings a huge amount that is fresh and new to our understanding of the Space Race.”

Daily telegraph, explore humanity’s greatest adventure.

Twenty-seven-years old, a loyal communist and father of two, Yuri Gagarin blasts into the skies inside a tiny cannonball-shaped capsule at the top of a modified Soviet R-7 missile – replacing the nuclear warhead it was originally designed for.  

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The darkest days of the cold war. the usa and ussr confront each other across an iron curtain.   their new battleground is space., two teams are training  towards that  goal, in the us there are seven  astronauts, in the ussr there are twenty cosmonauts, two teams are training  towards that goal, in the usa there are seven  astronauts.

AND The race will come down to the wire

“Exciting and fascinating. I loved every word."

“ beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller - brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.", "an exhilarating journey into space. beyond is a dramatic tour de force.", “vivid... dramatic. this entertaining history achieves lift off.", “gripping, rich in novelistic detail… highly recommended.”, “outstanding”, "cinematic.", the spectator, "scintillating.", financial times, discover the inside story of the event that shook the world.

"This book is a triumph."

Beyond  is available to order today.

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Gateway space station.

The NASA-led Gateway Program is an international collaboration to establish humanity's first space station around the Moon as a vital component of the Artemis campaign. Gateway will help NASA and its partners test the technologies and capabilities required for a sustained human presence in deep space, and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.

International Partners

Gateway elements, science destination, gateway assembly, program history.

A NASA-led international coalition, Gateway will be a space station in lunar orbit enabling long-term human exploration at the Moon and new opportunities for scientific discovery as a foundational system to support NASA’s Artemis campaign.

Gateway is essential to the Artemis architecture, along with the Space Launch System , Orion spacecraft , Human Landing System , and spacesuits that will enable extensive exploration of the Moon’s South Pole.

Gateway is a centerpiece of the United States’ efforts through Artemis to engage international partners to advance exploration of deep space and on to Mars. While NASA is leading the Artemis missions, international partnerships will play a key role in achieving a sustainable and robust presence on and around the Moon.

Space agencies making significant contributions to Gateway:

• The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is providing the next-generation external Canadarm3 robotic arm and advanced robotic interfaces to host payloads and provide base points on Gateway.
• the International Habitat (I-Hab), one of two habitation elements where Artemis crew will live, conduct research, and prepare for lunar surface activities.
• the ESPRIT Refueling Module (ERM) that will provide refueling for PPE, cargo logistics and windows for Moon, Earth and deep space viewing.
• HALO lunar communications system (HLCS) to enable high-data-rate communications between the lunar surface and Gateway.
• critical components of the I-Hab module that will provide the heart of the space station’s life support capabilities. Japan will provide I-Hab’s Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), thermal control system functions, and cameras.
• batteries to power HALO, I-Hab, and ERM.
• HTV-XG spacecraft for launch and delivery of a logistics resupply mission for Gateway.
• The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates will provide Gateway’s Crew and Science Airlock that will permit crew and science transfers to and from the vacuum of space.

Astronauts from Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates will fly on Artemis missions to Gateway.

With its modular design offering flexibility and extensibility over its minimum 15-year lifespan in lunar orbit, Gateway offers a building block approach to deep space exploration and development.

Power and Propulsion Element (PPE)

The Power and Propulsion Element is a high-power, 60-kilowatt solar electric propulsion spacecraft that will provide power, high-rate communications between Gateway and Earth, attitude control, and orbital transfer capabilities for Gateway.

In May 2019, NASA  selected   Maxar Technologies of Westminster, Colorado, to develop and build PPE.  

The PPE project is managed out of  NASA’s Glenn Research Center  in Cleveland, Ohio.

Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO)

HALO is one of two habitation elements where astronauts will live, exercise, prepare meals, rest, prepare for lunar surface missions, and conduct research while visiting Gateway. The pressurized living quarters will provide docking ports for visiting spacecraft like NASA’s Orion spacecraft, lunar landers, and logistics resupply craft, and serve as the backbone for command and control and power distribution across Gateway. The module will perform other core functions, including hosting science investigations via internal and external payload accommodations, and communicating with lunar surface expeditions through the HALO-Lunar Communication System, or HLCS, provided by ESA.

HALO is managed out of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia was awarded a contract for the preliminary design of HALO in 2020, and the remaining content for HALO was finalized between NASA and Northrop Grumman through  signing a contract in July 2021 .

International Habitat (I-Hab)

Gateway’s second habitation element, I-Hab is a pressurized module that will provide living quarters for astronauts visiting the Gateway, and multiple docking ports for visiting vehicles and other modules.

I-Hab is led by ESA , which selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor. JAXA is making significant contributions to I-Hab, providing the environmental control support system, thermal cooling pumps, and batteries.

ESPRIT Refueling Module (ERM)

Provided by ESA, the ESPRIT Refueling Module is a habitable element that will transport cargo to Gateway, provide storage space once docked at the space station, provide fuel to Gateway’s propulsion system, and provide a view of space and the Moon through its windows. “ESPRIT” stands for European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications.

The prime contractor for ERM is Thales Alenia Space.

Crew and Science Airlock

Provided by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates, the Crew and Science Airlock will be a critical piece of infrastructure for Gateway’s planned minimum 15-year lifespan in lunar orbit, permitting crew and science payload transfers to and from the habitable environment of Gateway’s crew modules to the vacuum of space – transfers that will be essential for space station maintenance and conducting science in the deep space lunar environment.

Deep Space Logistics (DSL)

As astronauts conduct missions at Gateway and prepare for lunar surface expeditions, they will need deliveries of critical pressurized and unpressurized cargo, science experiments, and supplies like sample collection materials. In March 2020, NASA  announced  SpaceX as the first U.S. commercial provider under the Gateway Logistics Services contract to deliver cargo and other supplies to Gateway.

The Gateway Deep Space Logistics Office is based at  NASA’s Kennedy Space Center  in Florida.

Part of the Gateway External Robotics Systems (GERS) provided by CSA , Canadarm3 is a robotic system that will use cutting-edge software to perform Gateway tasks. The system will help maintain, repair and inspect Gateway, capture visiting vehicles, help astronauts during spacewalks, and enable science in Gateway’s lunar orbit.

Vehicle System Manager (VSM) software will allow Gateway to operate autonomously, representing a leap forward in spacecraft capability. VSM will provide activity planning, resource management, vehicle control, and fault management for Gateway.

Additional Artemis elements not managed under the Gateway Program :

• The Orion spacecraft will deliver crew and supplies to the Gateway space station.
• Human Landing System spacecraft will dock to Gateway to enable Artemis crew transit to and from the lunar surface.

The Gateway space station is one of humanity’s next science utilization platforms, offering unique opportunities to leverage the deep space lunar environment for scientific research and discovery.

The three science instrument payloads already selected to fly on Gateway will focus on radiation from the Sun and deep space. They are:

• the Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite (HERMES) that will fly on the outside of HALO.
• the European Radiation Sensors Array (ERSA) that will fly on the outside of PPE.
• the Internal Dosimeter Array (IDA) that will fly inside of HALO.

Gateway launch and staging

The first Gateway elements, PPE and HALO, will launch together to lunar orbit on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket no earlier than 2025.

Gateway will spend one year transiting to its unique polar orbit, known as near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) , around the Moon.

Artemis IV, V, and VI assembly missions

On-orbit assembly of the fully realized Gateway space station will commence with the Artemis IV mission that will launch no earlier than September 2028.

Artemis astronauts will enter Gateway for the first time on the Artemis IV mission.

Primary objectives of the mission are to integrate I-Hab with Gateway and complete the second crewed lunar surface expedition of the Artemis missions.

Mission highlights:

• The crewed Orion spacecraft and I-Hab Gateway element will launch as a co-manifested payload on an SLS Block 1B rocket to lunar orbit.
• Orion will deliver I-Hab to Gateway, where it will dock to HALO.
• A Human Landing System spacecraft will dock to Gateway.
• Artemis IV crew members will use the Human Landing System to descend to and later ascend from the lunar surface.
• Artemis IV crew will return to Earth on Orion.

Primary objectives of the mission are to integrate ERM with Gateway and complete the third crewed lunar surface expedition of the Artemis missions.

• The crewed Orion spacecraft and the ERM Gateway element will launch as a co-manifested payload on an SLS Block 1B rocket to lunar orbit.
• Orion will deliver ERM to Gateway, where it will dock to HALO.
• Artemis V crew members will use the Human Landing System to descend to and later ascend from the lunar surface.
• Artemis V crew will return to Earth on Orion.

Primary objectives of the mission are to integrate the Crew and Science Airlock with Gateway and complete the fourth crewed lunar surface expedition of the Artemis missions.

• The crewed Orion spacecraft and Gateway’s Crew and Science Airlock will launch as a co-manifested payload on an SLS Block 1B rocket to lunar orbit.
• Orion will deliver the Crew and Science Airlock to Gateway, where it will dock to I-Hab.
• Artemis VI crew members will use the Human Landing System to descend to and later ascend from the lunar surface.
• Artemis VI crew will return to Earth on Orion.

Dr. Jon B. Olansen

Program Manager

Holly Ridings

Deputy Program Manager

Sean Fuller

International Partner Manager

Emma Lehnhardt

Program Planning & Control Manager

Gateway is making significant progress toward launch of the initial components to lunar orbit. NASA is reviewing the schedule for launch, previously planned for October 2025, to provide additional development time and better align that launch with the Artemis IV mission in 2028.

• January 2024, NASA and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) of the United Arab Emirates announced that under a new implementing arrangement, the UAE will provide Gateway’s Crew and Science Airlock module , and a UAE astronaut to fly to the lunar space station on a future Artemis mission.
• March 2023, NASA establishes the Moon to Mars Program Office at NASA headquarters to carry out the agency’s human exploration activities at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of humanity.
• March 2023, Dr. Jon B. Olansen named Gateway Program Manager.
• March 2023, Dan Hartman retires from NASA with 29 years of service to human spaceflight, including the International Space Station Program and serving as the first Gateway Program Manager.
• January 2023, Gateway participated in the Artemis Architecture Concept Review , a robust analysis process designed to align NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration strategy and codify the supporting architecture.
• December 2022, Northrop Grumman delivers high-fidelity HALO module mockup to the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at Johnson Space Center for human factors testing and crew training.
• December 2022, second Gateway Multilateral Coordination Board meeting held.
• November 2022, NASA and JAXA announce that under the Gateway Implementing Arrangement, NASA will provide an opportunity for a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut to serve as a Gateway crew member on a future Artemis mission.
• August 2022, HALO critical design review held.
• May 2022, Holly Ridings, NASA’s first female Chief Flight Director, named Deputy Program Manager.
• December 2021, PPE Maxar Preliminary Design Review part two.
• November 2021, I-Hab Preliminary Design Review part two close-out.
• July 2021, Northrop Grumman extension awarded.
• May 2021, HALO preliminary design review close out.
• May 2021, first Gateway Multilateral Coordination Board meeting held, modeled after International Space Station Multilateral Coordination Board.
• April 2021, 6KW SEP subsystem test by PPE team, Maxar, and Busek.
• March 2021, Delivery of first Flight SolAero Standard Solar Power Modules (SPM).
• February 2021, HALO primary structure assembly initiated in Italy.
• December 2020, Japan signed an agreement (MOU) to partner with NASA on Gateway.
• December 2020, the Canadian Space Agency awarded a contract to MDA to build the Canadarm3 for deep space missions.
• November 2020, Canada signed a Gateway agreement (MOU) to contribute external robotics.
• October 2020, ESA signed an agreement (MOU) with NASA to contribute habitation and refueling modules and enhanced lunar communications to Gateway. ESA also provides two additional European Service Modules for NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
• Northrop Grumman Space received award to design the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) for Gateway
• NASA selected SpaceX as the first U.S. commercial provider under the Gateway Logistics Services contract to deliver cargo, experiments and other supplies to Gateway.
• November 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) received authorization and funding to support its contributions to Gateway including habitation and refueling.
• October 2019, Japan announced plans to join the United States on Gateway with contributions of habitation components and logistics resupply.
• May 2019, NASA selected Maxar Technologies to develop, build, and support an in-space demonstration of the element.
• February 2019, Canada announced intention to participate in Gateway and contribute advanced external robotics.
• Gateway Program Established

Snapshot: Gateway Capabilities

1st Boeing Starliner astronauts are ready to launch to the ISS for NASA (exclusive)

"I've jokingly said I could do a barrel roll around the space station."

HOUSTON — Two former U.S. Navy test pilots, now NASA astronauts, can't wait to finally get their hands on a new spacecraft.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams told Space.com and a small group of reporters at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) that they are excited for the first launch of Boeing Starliner , now set to fly to the International Space Station for a roughly 10-day mission set to go no earlier than May 1.

Wilmore, who has 8,000 flight hours and two space missions under his belt, said Friday (March 22) he'll be comparing the handling and rolling qualities of Starliner to see if it matches up with the simulators he's been training on for numerous years.

Differences "may or may not be a negative," he said in a sunny, glassed-in conference room at JSC's Building 2 and press center, "but it will be a difference that we will fix in our simulation, and go from there." 

Related: Boeing's 1st Starliner astronaut flight test for NASA could launch as soon as May 1

Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were selected by NASA for commercial crew missions in 2014 to replace the space shuttle, which Wilmore and Williams both used for their first missions. 

Dragon has flown 11 operational missions to the ISS for NASA and Axiom Space since 2020, but Starliner's progress snagged . An uncrewed test flight with Starliner failed to reach the ISS in 2019, the pandemic delayed fixes for a second successful test flight, and other technical issues with parachutes and wiring uncovered last year delayed the first astronaut excursion, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), even further.

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The CFT astronauts emphasized that safety necessitated the delays, and talked about how robust Starliner is after all the design changes. For example, Wilmore said the whole mission could be flown "with no communication at all" with Mission Control if truly necessary. The engineers also built in scenarios where the astronauts could direct the spacecraft to point to the sun to gain more solar power, should there be a need for it. And these are just some of the backups in place.

Wilmore said the second commercial crew vehicle will allow "continued access to space" from American soil, which is important. NASA relied upon Russian Soyuz spacecraft to launch astronauts for a decade while Dragon was under development; in fact, both Williams and Wilmore flew aboard Soyuz on past missions.

The U.S. and Russia continue to use each other's vehicles for astronaut launches, for both backup reasons and for policy reasons, but that may change after 2028 if Russia withdraws from the ISS as planned. (The rest of the coalition has signed on to 2030, although that may extend if new commercial space stations aren't ready.) 

Wilmore also said the lessons learned from Starliner will help NASA's Artemis program of moon exploration missions, which uses the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft. "There will be some things or findings, potentially, that we can find here that will be of benefit to their program so they don't have to figure it out themselves," Wilmore said, pointing to examples like the display technology and the operations practice. 

He's confident Starliner will perform as expected. "Don't get me trouble, but I've jokingly said I could do a barrel roll around the space station. We would never do that. No reason to do that! But the capability of this spacecraft? It's there."

Related: Boeing's 1st Starliner to visit space station looks spectacular in these astronaut photos

Williams, in an separate interview minutes later and in an office just down the hall from Wilmore, said the NASA astronauts have been working closely for years with Boeing to get Starliner set. The astronauts' feedback has been taken into account with design "trades," meaning decisions about how to prioritize aspects such as astronaut comfort, or spacecraft performance, or even sizing of displays.

Spaceflight, emphasized Williams, is not risk-free: She was at the agency when the Columbia disaster occurred in 2003, killing seven astronauts during the space shuttle's re-entry, and she also remembers the 1986 launch disaster of Challenger in which another seven astronauts died. 

But while Starliner has not flown yet with astronauts, "knowing all those lessons learned, we've tried to put this 'Get Out of Jail Free card' — as we call it — (which is) the backup mode. We tried to make it (backup) as robust as possible, and we feel really good about it," Williams said.

"All the other stuff than the nominal mission," she continued, "we've gone through it a number of times. We're hoping all the automation works as advertised, but we have ways to, you know, work around it in case we have a couple of hiccups here and there. Then hopefully, we can jump right back in the automation and continue the mission as designed. So we feel really confident about it at this point."

Williams, who has 3,000 hours of flight time in her career, said there will be moments of fun during the Starliner mission: "It's like a little sports car", she said of Starliner's maneuverability against shuttle or Soyuz. The astronauts, however, will be focused upon all the points of the mission in which trouble could happen. 

Staging of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket bearing them to space is one example she highlighted, but given the thousands of hours of practice she said she expects all will turn out well even in most off-nominal situations.

"We talked to the weather guys" in case of abort, she said, as an example. "We really want to know what the winds and waves and all that kind of stuff are like after staging, in case something happens ... because every time there was a dynamic event (like staging) the instructors would fail something (in the simulators)."

Williams, an avid skier, joked that staying off the slopes for an extended period was one of the hardest parts of the wait for space as the crew needs to de-risk its activities in the meantime. But the astronauts have had an important role in those extra years, serving as quality assurance because "our eyes are on the spacecraft."

Related: New NASA astronauts 'thrilled' to see 1st Boeing Starliner crew launch in May (exclusive)

The training also very much involves the next group of astronauts set to climb aboard Starliner for its first operational and six-month mission, currently set for 2025. Assigned so far to the Starliner-1 mission are NASA astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk. Starliner-1 will be Tingle's second mission, Fincke's fourth mission and Kutryk's first. 

Fincke, who at one point was assigned to Crew Flight Test himself, has worked on the "endeavor" of getting Starliner off the ground longer than any other astronaut, Wilmore emphasized in a press conference in a briefing room here in Building 2. 

Fincke remains backup for the Crew Flight Test astronauts in case of issues with the prime crew, too. Practically speaking, what this means is Fincke is often training alongside Wilmore and Williams.

"It's been a real luxury, because we're sharing ideas the whole time, and he's taking notes and and making changes and getting ready for the next flight," Williams said during the same press conference.

Kutryk, a test pilot and fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force before joining CSA in 2017, said the entire team behind CFT is working the same principles as he learned in the military: "Predict, test, validate." 

Aside from flying on Starliner-1, Kutryk will be Mission Control CAPCOM (an astronaut on the ground who communicates with crew members in space) during the ascent of CFT and as such is also deeply embedded in the training for the first astronaut flight. In fact, he's been doing the work quietly since 2021, although his Starliner-1 assignment was only announced last fall.

"What we want to see happen (during CFT) is the performance of this vehicle match our understanding," he said during a phone call on Friday, while on a school and media tour in Canada discussing Starliner-1 and ISS. 

"We wanted to match our modeling of Starliner at a system level or vehicle performance level. We want to validate those models. We want to reinforce confidence in the fact that we understand the vehicle, and all of its different modes."

—  NASA, Boeing hail Starliner space capsule launch success despite thruster glitch

 — Boeing's Starliner crew capsule channels R2-D2 ahead of astronaut test flight

 — NASA, Boeing delay Starliner capsule's 1st astronaut launch to early May

The crew and ground team "are super excited" about CFT, and Kutryk said he's looking forward to supporting the launch (and perhaps some other shifts, if needed) from the White Flight Control Room at JSC's Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.

Bringing humans on board Starliner for the first time will introduce new metrics to track compared to the two uncrewed test flights, he said, such as cockpit noise levels, how well the vehicle can be controlled, or the performance of the life support equipment.

"In the years that have led up to this point, we've been working as a team to test and evaluate the vehicle, and our procedures, and our reactions, and our training. Where needed, we've refined all of that," Kutryk said. "We've ended up changing software, changing things on the vehicle and changing training. It's been a long iterative process — as you'd expect, I would say — in flight test."

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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