In the early hours of 11 April 1961—more than five decades ago—an enormous booster trundled humanity’s first manned spacecraft to its launch site in a barren region of steppe in Soviet Central Asia. Within its bulbous nose shroud was a ship called Vostok, and it was planned that the following morning the R-7 rocket would blast it into low-Earth orbit, allowing its single cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, to complete one full circuit around the Home Planet. Within two hours of launch, shorter than one of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, it was hoped that Gagarin would be safely home, providing an enormous propaganda coup for the Soviet Union and a hard poke in the eye for the United States. Fifty-three years ago today (12 April 1961), a new era began.
For years, the two superpowers had fought the Cold War on the high ground of space, from the development of long-range ballistic missiles to the race to loft an artificial satellite into orbit. America’s caution in flying its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, in early 1961 ultimately allowed the Soviets to score a remarkable success. Yet on the night of 11 April, for three men, at least, the chances of success seemed far away. The prime and backup cosmonauts for the flight—Gagarin, a humble farmboy-turned-aviator, and Gherman Titov—slept in a cottage, near the launch pad, their every toss and turn monitored by strain gauges fitted to their mattresses to allow doctors to decide if they experienced restful sleep. (Months later, Gagarin would privately joke that the only reason he flew the mission was because Titov had not rolled over in his sleep!)
At 5:30 a.m. Moscow Time, on a day now universally known as Cosmonautics Day, 12 April 1961, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev and his head of medical preparations, Vladimir Yazdovsky, woke the two cosmonauts. After washing, shaving, and a breakfast of meat puree and toast with blackcurrant jam, doctors glued sensors onto their torsos and sent them off to don their pumpkin-orange space suits. Titov got into his suit first, in order to reduce Gagarin’s time overheating in the uncomfortable garment. As he continued his own suiting-up, Gagarin realized for the first time that he was—or soon would be—the most famous man on Earth. In his heavily censored account of the mission, The Road to the Stars, he recalled technicians offering him slips of paper and work passes on which to sign. Titov beheld this and wished Gagarin luck, although he was disappointed and considered his role as hopeless. “He was commanding the flight and I was his backup,” Titov said later, “but we both knew, just in case wasn’t going to happen. What could happen at this late stage? Was he going to catch the flu between the bus and the launch gantry? Break his leg? It was all nonsense! We shouldn’t have gone out to the launch pad together. Only one of us should have gone.” Vladimir Yazdovsky, who was aboard the bus and gave him the order to remove his suit as soon as Gagarin was strapped inside Vostok, recalled Titov’s tension.
Much tradition surrounds Gagarin’s trip to the pad, including, famously, his need to relieve himself through his suit’s urine tube against the tires of the bus. Unable to share the going-away custom of kissing three times on alternate cheeks, he and Titov merely clanked their helmets together in a sign of solidarity. After reaching the top of the gantry, Gagarin maneuvered himself into his ejection seat. Senior engineer Oleg Ivanovsky and chief test pilot Mark Gallai tightened his harnesses and plugged his suit hoses into Vostok’s oxygen supply. After giving him a good-luck tap on his helmet, Ivanovsky motioned for Gagarin to lift his faceplate to inform him of three significant numbers.
Since the beginning of their adventure in space, the Soviets had operated their machines through on-board systems controlled exclusively from the ground and, for a time, considered that manned missions should be undertaken in the same way. What would happen, wondered the medical experts, if a cosmonaut went mad in orbit, overcome by a profound sense of separation from his home