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 confirmed without doubt that live dialogue was ongoing with an Earth-circling cosmonaut.
By 9:32 a.m., a stable orbit had been achieved—reaching a maximum apogee of 200 miles (320 km) and dipping to a perigee of 105 miles (170 km), inclined 64.95 degrees to the equator—and, shortly thereafter, Gagarin began his passage across Hawaii, then out over the South Pacific. Following several requests, he was assured by the Khabarovsk station via high-frequency radio at 9:53 a.m. that his orbit was satisfactory. Minutes later, precisely on the hour, as he crossed the Strait of Magellan, Radio Moscow announced the electrifying news: “The world’s first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, was launched into orbit from the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961. The pilot-navigator of the satellite-spaceship Vostok is a citizen of the USSR, Flight Major Yuri Gagarin. The launching of the multi-stage space rocket was successful and, after attaining the first escape velocity and the separation of the last stage of the carrier rocket, the spaceship went into free flight on a round-the-Earth orbit. According to the preliminary data … ”
The effect throughout the world, and particularly in the United States, was dramatic. Although it was known that the mission was underway virtually since its launch, and with certainty since Shemya confirmed Gagarin’s dialogue, and even though the imminence of the flight was not unexpected, the event sent shockwaves through the new administration of John F. Kennedy. Before retiring to bed the previous night, the president had displayed a sense of foreboding and his science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, had gone so far as to prepare a statement for the press. Elsewhere, in Florida, NASA’s press officer John “Shorty” Powers was awakened in the middle of the night by a journalist who had just heard of Gagarin’s launch. Powers had not. With clear irritation in his voice, and uttering words he would regret, he yelled down the phone: “What is this? We’re still asleep down here!” The journalist could not resist exploi