revolve and I told ground control about it,” he wrote. “The turning I had worried about soon stopped … ” Little else would be known or even suspected for almost three decades. However, in his testimony before the top-secret State Commission on 13 April, he described feeling the intensity of the capsule’s oscillations and an audible sound of “cracking,” possibly from the structure of Vostok itself or from the expansion of the thermal cladding material. He saw the bright crimson glow of ionised gases rushing past the capsule and would later estimate that the G forces exceeded 10 and “data on the control gauges started to look blurry … starting to turn grey in my eyes.”
Eventually, as he heard denser air whistling past the capsule and saw blue—not black—sky outside, he braced himself for ejection. By this point, Vostok had crossed back into Soviet territory, on the Black Sea coast, near Krasnodar. Gagarin’s ejection procedure was supposed to be fully automatic, triggered when the on-board sensors registered an outside atmospheric pressure consistent with an altitude of about four miles. He may have felt that the oscillations were too severe to risk it, and it would appear that he initiated the sequence manually. With a tremendous roar and rush of air, the hatch above his head blew away and the ejection seat’s rocket propelled him from the capsule at terrifying speed. Protected from the frigid high-altitude temperatures by his suit, Gagarin descended to Earth; his main parachute opened successfully, followed by its backup, and the First Cosmonaut hit the ground under two canopies.
A new era had begun.
The second part of this article will appear tomorrow.