Great Expeditions: 50 Journeys that changed our world

Gagarin’s rocket could have exploded on launch; he could have been stuck in orbit if the engines set to re-insert him had malfunctioned; he could have burned up in re-entry; his ejection from the capsule and parachute descent could have failed.

LEGACY

Gagain’s expedition was unique in its achievements; it also ignited the Space Race, spurring the United States into a rivalry with the USSR of ever-increasing scientific and technological ambition.

Yuri Gagarin, alone with his thoughts, shortly before the launch of Vostok 1.

12 April 1961

A farmer and her daughter are tending to a calf on the vast expanse of the Russian steppe when an otherworldly figure approaches them. The visitor is dressed in a bright orange boiler suit. His face is obscured by a white helmet and he is dragging several metres of rope and cloth in his wake.

The figure speaks: ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he tells them. ‘I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space. I must find a telephone to call Moscow!’

The stranger is the first person to leave our planet. Yuri Gagarin, the 27-year-old son of a carpenter and a milkmaid, had spent the previous 89 minutes circling the Earth in Vostok 1, reaching speeds of more than 27,400 km/h (17,000 mph) and a highest point of orbit of 328 km (204 miles). No human had ever travelled further from Earth, or faster.

Just a few minutes before his encounter with the farm workers, Gagarin had been withstanding extreme heat and severe gravitational force as the Vostok 1 capsule, barely bigger than a saloon car, battered its way through Earth’s atmosphere. Now he was calm as he waited with an excited crowd of surprised farm workers for the helicopter which would take him back to the control team. News of the mission was about to become broadcast on Soviet state radio and Gagarin would become the most famous man in the world.

A report of Gagarin’s exploits from the Soviet state newspaper Pravda.

The space race takes off

Yuri Gagarin’s world-changing mission was first prize in a race between two global super powers; the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and the United States of America. The ‘space race’ was a battle between the America’s Project Mercury and Russia’s Vostok programme for the conquest of space. For the two cold war foes the prestige of being the first nation to send a human being into space compelled them to sink vast resources into their space programmes and by the spring of 1961 both sides were on the brink of manned spaceflight.

The course of history could have been very different. The Americans had planned to launch Freedom 7, a sub-orbital flight piloted by Alan Shepard, on 24 March 1961 but opted to undertake one last, unmanned, test flight instead. By the time Shepard made it to space on 5 May 1961, his place in history had been taken.

In truth, Gagarin’s orbit of the Earth was worthy of humankind’s first foray into space. Whereas Shepard was thrust briefly into sub-orbit for just a few minutes; Gagarin’s journey took him on a lap of the whole planet, encompassing both sunset and sunrise on his 89-minute orbit.

Vostok 1 was the embodiment of mechanical force. Its engines generated 4,800 kN (900,000 lbf ) of thrust and Gagarin would be subjected the equivalent of six times the force of gravity on Earth at key points on the mission. This ferocious burst of energy would be needed to propel Vostok 1 through Earth’s atmospheric boundaries and out into the nothingness of space. Once into Earth orbit, Vostok 1 would continue on a journey eastwards above the Russian steppe and Siberian wilderness before plotting a course over the Pacific Ocean towards the southernmost tip of South America. At this point the craft would head north over the Atlantic and the rainforests and deserts of Africa before descending back to Earth in the Russian motherland.

Vostok rocket on display at the Exhibition Centre in Moscow, Russia.

First human being in space

On the morning of the Vostok 1 mission, Gagarin was calm as he waited to board the craft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Samara region. He was accompanied by Gherman Titov, the standby pilot. The two would-be cosmonauts had been working together and vying with each other for the berth in Vostok 1 for more than a year. They had been informed of Gagarin’s selection at a meeting on 8 April, just four days before the mission. The two men then took part in a staged re-enactment of the meeting for the benefit of a film crew, with Gagarin delivering a somewhat stilted acceptance speech while Titov watched on.

One factor in Gagarin’s selection was his diminutive stature. At just 1.57 m (5 ft 2 in) tall, he required less room and was somewhat lighter than Titov, a point worth consideration on a mission where every inch and ounce was scrupulously measured.

The bulk of the Vostok 1 spacecraft consisted of fuel tanks needed to power Yuri Gagarin into orbit. The tanks were jettisoned when the fuel was spent as this infographic shows.

The television cameras which had documented Gagarin’s selection were now waiting for him inside Vostok 1’s cramped interior. They recorded the pilot looking composed as he waited for the ground team to complete their launch protocols.

At 9.07 am local time it was time to go. In a cacophony of flames and fumes the spacecraft powered skywards, urged on by Gagarin’s shout of ‘Poyekhali!’ (‘Let’s go’). In just 10 minutes the craft had spent all the power from its rockets, which were jettisoned, and the tiny forward capsule emerged into space and set off on a circumnavigation of the globe.

Gagarin gave a regular commentary on his progress, his words are noticeable mainly for their matter-of-factness. In 89 minutes – less time than it takes to play a football match – his orbit was complete and what were potentially the most dangerous moments of Gagarin’s mission commenced. As the Vostok capsule re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, the world’s first spaceman was buffeted and boiled. The buffeting was caused by drag, as the fast-falling spacecraft shuddered against the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere. The boiling was caused by aerodynamic heat as friction from re-entry raised temperatures within the craft considerably. As he plummeted towards terra firma, Gagarin experienced an estimated 8G of force on his body amidst temperatures in excess of 38°C (100°F).

At around 7 km (23,000 ft) above ground, Vostok’s hatch sprang open. Two seconds later Gagarin was ejected, falling to Earth and on to his encounter with the unsuspecting farmhands.

The spot in rural Russia where Gagarin returned to Earth is marked by this monument.

His second mission

He was the first human ever to leave the planet and, equally importantly, the first to return. He would become a household name around the world and, in a ceremony overseen by President Nikita Khrushchev shortly after the mission, a Hero of the Soviet Union.

The journey into space was only the beginning of Yuri Gagarin’s travels. The Soviet Government, keen to capitalise on the prestige of their space programme, arranged a world tour for their first cosmonaut. Gagarin lunched with Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom; he spoke at a rally with Fidel Castro in Cuba; he attended functions in Finland, Iceland, Hungary and Brazil and stopped off in Canada, spending the night on a farm in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.

Further travels to France, Afghanistan, Greece, Egypt and Sri Lanka were to follow before, in 1965, Gagarin returned to his trade as a pilot. He served at the Star City cosmonaut training base and graduated with honours as a cosmonaut engineer. On 27 March 1968 he was piloting a jet on a routine training flight when it crashed near Moscow, killing Yuri Gagarin and the instructor who accompanied him.

Gagarin, who was married with two daughters, received a state funeral and his ashes were interred in the walls of the Kremlin.

His great expedition into the world beyond our world had lasted just 89 minutes but the legacy of his mission would endure forever.

‘I saw for the first time the Earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black… the feelings which filled me I can express with one word—joy.’

Yuri Gagarin

Gagarin was paraded around the world as a hero of the Soviet Union, at events such as this 1961 procession in Prague.

Finding New Land (#ulink_824c4cac-4c6f-5506-9285-0d3fc9d5905a)

Leif Eriksson’s voyage to Vinland (#ulink_824c4cac-4c6f-5506-9285-0d3fc9d5905a)

“So they followed this plan, and it is said that they loaded up the afterboat with grapes, and the ship itself with a cargo of timber. When spring came, they made the ship ready and sailed away. Leif gave this country a name to suit its resources: he called it Vinland.

As recorded in the thirteenth-century Greenlanders’ Saga

WHEN

C. AD 1000

ENDEAVOUR

Leif Eriksson sailed from Iceland to Newfoundland, and overwintered there, the first European to reach North America.

HARDSHIPS & DANGERS

Sailing in unknown waters and surviving winter (albeit surprisingly warm) in Newfoundland.

LEGACY

Limited, as no permanent Viking settlements were established in North America and it was another 500 years before Cabot reached Newfoundland.

While there will always be speculation about who was the first European to land on the North American continent (was it St Brendan in the sixth century, for example?), there is clear evidence that Leif Eriksson did reach Newfoundland at the start of the eleventh century, both from accounts in two Icelandic sagas and from the discovery of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in northwestern Newfoundland.

The naming of Greenland

The story starts with Erik the Red, one of the Vikings who had come from Norway to settle Iceland. He did not get on well with the other Vikings, and on a voyage in 982, landed on Greenland. It was summer, and he had found a land of green pastures by the coast, and so gave it the name ‘Greenland’, then unaware that beyond that southern coastal fringe it was covered in ice all year around. Erik saw great potential here, and his plans to colonize it came to fruition in 986, when he sailed with twenty-five ships and around 700 people from Iceland to Greenland.

One Viking arrived back on Iceland after a trading trip to discover that his father had already sailed to Greenland and he wished to follow as soon as possible, even though it was getting late in the season. So it was that Bjarni Herjolfsson set off from Iceland, but soon the wind dropped and the fog descended so that he could no longer navigate. Once the fog lifted after a few days, he sailed on and then sighted land. The sailors asked Bjarni whether it was Greenland, but he replied that it was not, for when they sailed close by they found that the land was ‘not mountainous but covered with small wooded knolls’. They sailed on for another two days and saw more land, but Bjarni declined to land, much to the anger of his crew. After another three days they saw a country with high mountains and glaciers. Bjarni regarded it as pretty worthless, and set sail again, this time reaching Greenland, where he was reunited with his father. He and his crew are the first recorded Europeans to see North America (most likely Labrador and Baffin Island) but Bjarni was much criticized for not landing. Thereafter he stayed with his father and did not go sailing again.