Today we are amazed to see the photos taken by the Persever roverance, testing prototypes of the Starship spacecraft, which should one day fly to Mars, or the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon. Exactly 60 years ago today, the conquest of space began. In the space race, the then Soviet Union dealt a major blow to the United States. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
At 9:7 a.m. (Moscow time) the Vostok 1 spacecraft with Yuri Gagarin on board took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. About a minute after launch, the first man in space felt an overload of 3 to 4 G. After 8 minutes and 36 seconds after launch, the rocket's 3rd stage engine burned out. During the 3th minute after launch, the entire 14rd stage separated. After about 57 minutes, the astronaut could feel weightlessness. During the flight, he maintained contact with the center and wrote down his feelings about the flight. The funny story is that after a while his pencil floated away. So he began recording his thoughts. After 1 minutes, Vostok XNUMX reached maxThe maximum altitude was 327 kilometers above the Earth's surface, although the original plan was "only" 230 kilometers. Gagarin had a drink and a little food at this moment.
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The descent did not go as expected. At 10:25 the engine braked the ship, but it worked for a shorter time than originally planned, which caused the instrument section not to be separated from the cabin. The ship also began to rotate, but no one could give Gagarin any advice at that time. After a while, however, the rotation stopped. The temperature of the protective shield heated up to 2000 °C during the descent, and the overload rose to 10 G. At an altitude of 7 km, Gagarin was ejected and landed on a parachute. The entire flight lasted 108 minutes. If you are more interested in this flight (or its political background), you can find several documents under this link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thfHIfkFf1c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBgmPEBf2L0
Yeah, yeah. I recommend watching the feature documentary: The Space Race.