The first step: half a century of manned space flight

12 April is a day locked in history as the moment humans took a leap into the great unknown. On this day in 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet Union cosmonaut, launched humanity into a new epoch of exploration and discovery in his Vostok 1 rocket.

Gagarin, who left Earth’s atmosphere a Lieutenant in the Russian air force and re-entered a Major, completed a single orbit in just 108 minutes. At an altitude of 188 miles (302km), roughly equal to the lower limit of that of the International Space Station, Gagarin was the first person to look down on Earth. “I saw how beautiful our planet is,” he is quoted as saying. “People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”

This single flight, swifter than a trip from London to Berlin today, broke through a barrier as much psychological as technical, says Dr David Parker, Director of Space Science and Exploration for the UK Space Agency. “The impact of Gagarin’s flight meant more as a spark for human potential than directly about the science of space travel.” While animals had pioneered Space exploration, for someone to shake off gravity, circle the globe and return held enormous significance.

“Where never lark, or even eagle flew –

And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

John Magee, 1941

Rather than the wheel’s-down dignity of the Space Shuttle or the splash-down of the Apollo crew capsule, Gagarin had to eject from his craft as it descended through the atmosphere, landing by parachute. It has been claimed several labourers, confronted by Gagarin in his cosmonaut’s suit and trailing his parachute, retreated in fear. Gagarin, it is said, told them not to be afraid, and that he was a Soviet like them, he had come from outer space, and he needed to find a telephone to call Moscow.

Upon his return to the capital Gagarin’s achievement became Soviet Union’s achievement. The full pomp and ceremony of a hero of the Soviet Republics swung into action. A six hour parade through Red Square in his honour; adulation; politicians; Nikita Khrushchev grasping his hand and waving it in victory. Gagarin was presented to the world as a son of Soviet Union leading all forward as one.

Putting a man in orbit was a truly astonishing feat for the Soviet Union, a country that twenty years previous had been starved and brutalised by an advancing

Nazi army intent on wiping it out. For Gagarin, born in 1934 into poverty in rural Russia and forced to live in a ditch by the occupying forces, to have journeyed to the cosmos defies hyperbole.

The significance of this flight was summed up by cosmonaut Viktor Savinykh, speaking at an event honouring the Gagarin’s fiftieth anniversary at Russia’s Washington embassy:

“If it weren’t for Yuri Gagarin, there would be no first step on the Moon”.

The cosmonaut beat the US astronaut Alan Shepard into Space by less than a month, a defeat that must have dented American pride. Gagarin may have stood as a hero for the world, but beating the USA into second place kick-started the most remarkable technological duel - the Space Race. Carl Sagan said, in response to criticism at the USA spending $27bn on the Apollo programme: “It was done for political reasons. Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin.”

You might see the ensuing race between Soviet Russia and the USA as patriotic jostling of two great powers intent on breaking new boundaries. Or perhaps you think it was fatuous, nationalistic, arm wrestling; two monsters competing for the greatest propaganda prize in history.

Regardless of motive Gagarin precipitated a period of technological and scientific advance that put a man on the Moon, flew Rovers to Mars and sent satellites spinning off to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Alas, Gagarin did not live to see a man walk on the Moon. He did not see images produced by the Hubble Telescope. He did not see the fruits of Russia and America’s technological contest foment a collaboration that keeps men and women in space for months at a time. Seven years after he secured his place in history, his MiG-14 fighter jet crashed. He was in training for his second space flight. He died aged just 34.

Images: courtesy of NASA

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