How many spacemen was Gagarin, the first man to visit extraterrestrial space? Was he really the first? And did they actually fly?
April 12, 1961
This date forever divided the consciousness of earthlings into “before” and “after”. Until this day, people never left Earth, did not see it from space, and many did not think that it would be possible. But Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, the first astronaut in the history of mankind, in fact proved the opposite.
On the Vostok-1 ship, it flew around the Earth forty thousand two hundred kilometers, landing by parachute from a height of seven kilometers. Taking off, he was promoted to senior lieutenant, but after the flight he was promoted immediately to major. How many Gagarin was in space, having managed to make such a dizzying career on Earth? The flight did not last very long, but went down in world history, making the first astronaut famous.
All subsequent flights were also events of world significance, but they have not received such a resonance.
Vostok-1
The first spaceship of earthlings with a man on board was called the "East". He did not fail anyone, and the first astronaut returned to Earth alive and unharmed. The ship was almost two and a half meters in diameter, about four and a half meters in length (therefore, candidates for astronauts were selected no more than one hundred and seventy centimeters), weighed 4.37 tons and had manual control.
Until the short time that Gagarin spent in space, Vostok had several predecessors. Seven devices called "Sputnik" were tested in the most severe mode. Some of them crashed, due to which the possibility of finding a person in space remained in doubt.
But in the end, all the obstacles were overcome, and Gagarin’s time in outer space came.
April 12, 1961 at 9:07 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Vostok ship launched.
Flight
The first manned flight around the Earth cannot be called completely ideal. It was recently announced that during it was recorded eleven contingencies.
One of them occurred when returning to the planet. Before entering the atmosphere there were malfunctions, which the astronaut himself then called an “emergency situation” so as not to frighten the Queen. In fact, the ship spun randomly for ten minutes, since the necessary compartment did not disconnect. This happened already in the atmosphere, and Gagarin saw the metal melting behind the window glass (the temperature there reached from three to five thousand degrees). But thanks to the courage of the future Hero of the Soviet Union, everything was overcome, and he arrived on Earth.
As much time as Gagarin was in space, all cosmonauts will spend more than once in the future. But he was the first. And at that moment no one knew what would be there, how a person would behave. However, Yuri Alekseevich coped with the task, and on Earth he was awaited by honors and fame on a planetary scale.
How much was Gagarin in space? What happened to him after the flight?
How many Gagarin spent in space is known. At the age of twenty-seven years, he made the first manned flight into space, which lasted only one hundred and eight minutes.
How was his life “after”? He became a Hero of the Soviet Union and received the Order of Lenin. He visited many countries where he was eagerly awaited, made an honorary member of various societies and awarded. He began to lead an active public life, but, despite fame and universal love, again sought to return to flying.
Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin died in the air on a fighter plane with his instructor Vladimir Sergeyevich Seregin on March twenty-seventh, 1968, two years after the death of the legendary Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. In his jacket pocket, among other things, was a photograph of a designer. Gagarin was only 34 years old.
Rumors of before and after flights
While in the Soviet Union they admired the first man who conquered space, information appeared in the Western media that there were already people in space before Gagarin who, apparently, had died.
In 1957, 1958 and 1959, attempts were made to launch man into space, but they ended tragically. In 1960, with another attempt, the capsule with a man allegedly flew into the space abyss. And at the beginning of 1961, one Soviet satellite broadcast a human heartbeat, which stopped.
There were also rumors that in the fall of 1961 a group flight was made with a tragic outcome. At the end of 1962, Italian radio amateurs caught the signals, they said, of a sinking ship.
It was said about Gagarin that he did not actually fly around the Earth. For him, it was done several days earlier by another astronaut who looked so bad after the flight that it was decided not to show it to the world. Therefore, they took a cheerful guy and staged a flight.
Rebuttals
However, cosmonaut G. M. Grechko completely denied rumors of human casualties not reported to the press. Before Gagarin, mannequins were sent into space, in two of which tape recorders with recordings of words were built-in. The tape recorders were turned on during the flight, and the radio amateurs, catching what they thought were conversations, made their conclusions. There were no official messages at that time, and rumors began to circulate.