was overcome by the steady murmur of fans, ventilators, pumps, and the hiss of static in his ears. His first experience of the state of weightlessness, properly termed “microgravity,” was hampered by the fact that he was tightly strapped into his ejection seat. However, he had purposely carried a small Russian doll as a gravity indicator and watched as it floated comically in midair. So too did a notepad and pencil. In fact, this would not be the doll’s only experience of space travel: In 1991, cosmonaut Musa Manarov would carry it on his mission to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight.
As the capsule slowly rotated to avoid wasting propellant on unnecessary maneuvers and also to ensure that various sections of Vostok did not become too hot or cold, the First Cosmonaut had his first opportunity to view the world. In his official statement, made in Moscow a few days later, he would describe “a smooth transition from pale blue, blue, dark blue, violet, and absolutely black … a magnificent picture.” He started jotting down observations in his notepad, but after the pencil floated away he turned instead to the on-board tape recorder to log his thoughts, describing weightlessness as “not at all unpleasant” and confirming that the food and drink were good.
Ten minutes into the mission, Vostok was heading eastward in the direction of Siberia and Gagarin gradually drifted out of radio range with the Baikonur launch site, to be picked up in turn by other listening posts at Novosibirsk, Kolpashevo, Khabarovsk, and the easternmost station on Soviet soil, Yelizovo, near Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. To attract Gagarin’s attention, each station transmitted musical themes to him: Muscovite tunes, Waves of the Amur, Baglanova songs, and others. “During that early period,” Alexei Leonov wrote in his memoir, Two Sides of the Moon, “the Mission Control Centre at Yevpatoria in the Crimea … was still under construction, so communication and control from the ground … were performed from the radio stations above which the spacecraft flew.” Leonov had been sent to the remote Yelizovo site a few days earlier as its cosmonaut representative and, to underline the secrecy, had no idea if Gagarin or Titov was aboard Vostok. Then, as the spacecraft passed over Kamchatka at around 9:21 a.m., he saw the first crude television images from the cabin. “I could not make out his facial features,” he wrote, “but I could tell from the way he moved that it was Yuri.”
Leonov had been instructed not to initiate communications with Vostok unless given permission to do so, and he duly remained silent. However, within moments, Gagarin radioed a request for details of his “flight path,” keeping the orbital nature of the mission—for now—a secret from Western ears. “The radio operator by my side did not realise his finger was depressing the button that opened the radio link … when he turned to speak to me,” Leonov wrote. The open mic broadcast the words of both Leonov and the radio operator straight up to Vostok. As soon as he heard Leonov tell the operator that “everything is going fine,” Gagarin responded with “Give my regards to Blondin,” fair-haired Leonov’s nickname.
The journey continued, cutting diagonally across the Pacific Ocean and toward the sleeping Americas. “The transition into Earth’s shadow,” Gagarin explained to a Moscow press conference a few days later, “took place very rapidly. Darkness comes instantly and nothing can be seen. The exit from the Earth’s shadow is also rapid and sharp.” The unexpected suddenness of the shift from orbital daytime to nighttime led to some mutterings that the flight was a fraud; a testament, clearly, to how limited humanity’s understanding of space travel was at the time. Midway through the darkness, at 9:26 a.m., Vostok rose above the horizon of the Electronic Intelligence station on the Alaskan island of Shemya, giving the United States its first awareness that a Soviet man was indeed in orbit. Admittedly, American long-range radars had detected the R-7’s launch, but it was Shemya which co