Two minutes into the flight,
the R-7’s four strap-on boosters, now spent, separated and fell away, while
the rocket’s central core engines continued pushing Vostok toward space.
Gagarin felt the mounting forces of acceleration, building up to more than
five times the normal force of gravity. Five minutes into the flight the
core stage fell away, on schedule, and a smaller upper-stage rocket took
over.
9:18 a.m.
Finally, 11 minutes and 16
seconds after liftoff, the upper stage shut down and separated, and Gagarin
was in orbit. Vostok’s path, as calculated by mission controllers in Moscow,
would have a low point of 108.5 miles (175 kilometers) and a high point
of 187.2 miles (302 kilometers), some 43.4 miles (70 kilometers) higher
than planned.
Vostok drifted silently over
the planet at a speed of 17,500 miles (28,165 kilometers) per hour. Inside,
Gagarin and everything else in the cabin was weightless, in a state of
continual free fall. Gagarin himself did not float freely, since he remained
strapped into his ejection seat, but his notepad hung in the air in front
of him when he let go of it. A pencil was attached to the pad with a string,
but after some time, it came loose and floated away somewhere in the cabin.
Having nothing to write with, Gagarin took the notepad and put it in the
pocket of his spacesuit.
But weightlessness had none
of the ill effects on Gagarin that doctors had feared. The first human
in space found that he was able to eat and drink normally, consuming foods
that had been packed in special squeeze-tubes. Through the main porthole,
he viewed Earth passing beneath him. And he reported on his condition to
mission controllers over a high-frequency radio, and by using a telegraph
key.
10:25 a.m.
In Vostok’s instrument module,
a retrorocket fired for exactly 40 seconds to slow the craft out of orbit.
When the engine shut down Gagarin felt a sharp jolt, and suddenly the Vostok
began to spin at high speed. Africa passed before him, then Earth’s bright
horizon, then the blackness of space.
Gagarin knew that the instrument
module was scheduled to separate from the descent capsule about 10 seconds
after retrofire. But as the scheduled time came and went there was no indication
that the separation had occurred. Unknown to Gagarin, the two sections
had indeed separated, but were still attached to one another by some cables.
Together, the two modules plunged into the upper atmosphere. If the cables
remained attached, there was a risk that the modules would begin to tumble
during reentry and perhaps bang into one another. But Gagarin remained
calm, reporting the situation over the radio.
10:35 a.m.
Ten minutes after the scheduled
separation time, the cables finally detached, and Gagarin continued his
descent normally. But there was nothing normal about what he saw through
the porthole as the reentry capsule plowed into the atmosphere.
"Suddenly a bright purple
light appeared," Gagarin later reported. Friction with the atmosphere was
causing gas molecules to become ionized, creating the strange glow. Even
within the craft’s heat-shield protected cabin, and in his spacesuit, Gagarin
felt heat building up. The capsule rocked back and forth in all directions.
As it slowed, Gagarin felt G-forces return, building to perhaps 10 times
normal gravity. He experienced the classic symptoms known to fighter pilots:
His vision blurred, and then began to gray. But Gagarin fought these effects,
tensing his body to force blood back to his head, and his vision cleared.
As the G-forces subsided Vostok entered the lower atmosphere, falling toward
Earth.
10:55 a.m.
At a height of 23,000 feet
(7,000 meters), the main parachute blossomed above the Vostok, and seconds
later the side hatch shot off from the cabin, as expected. Two more seconds
passed. Gagarin’s ejection seat fired and he flew into open air. Looking
down, he saw the Volga River and realized he was descending to the Saratov
region of Russia. Separating from his seat, Gagarin saw his own parachute
open, slowing him to a more gentle descent. He came to Earth in a field
next to a ravine. Just one hour and 48 minutes had passed since liftoff.
The first spaceflight was over, and the world’s first space traveler was
in good condition and fine spirits.
For Gagarin, the most important
thing was to let Korolev and the other controllers know he had landed safely.
"I climbed a small hill," he said later, "and saw a woman with a girl approaching
me…. I began to wave my hands and shout, ‘I’m a friend, I’m Soviet!’ She
told me that I could use the telephone in the field camp."
When word of the flight’s
successful conclusion reached Moscow, the Soviet Union rejoiced. They had
achieved a dream of centuries, to extend humanity’s realm beyond Earth.
And they had also achieved a stunning political victory in the
Cold War by beating the Americans into space -- just as they had with
the first artificial satellite, Sputnik.
For the United States, news
of Gagarin’s flight was a stinging embarrassment. NASA was still weeks
away from sending Alan
Shepard into space on a 15-minute suborbital "hop" -- a flight that
hardly measured up to the more ambitious Vostok orbital flight. To John
Kennedy, nothing mattered more than besting the Soviets in space. By the
time Shepard followed Gagarin into space, Kennedy had decided that the
U.S. should try to land
a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.
But the legacy of Gagarin’s
mission was even more far-reaching. It proved that human beings could withstand
the rigors of spaceflight, that they could function in weightlessness and
that the experience of leaving Earth could be exhilarating. Forty years
later, roughly 400 people have followed Gagarin into space and April 12,
1961 has come to signify not just a new era in flight, but the beginning
of human expansion into the universe.
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