nfirmed 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 exploiting the figurative irony of Powers’ words. The United States and its own effort to put a man in space had indeed been caught off-guard. Next morning came the front-page headline: Soviets Put Man In Space. Spokesman Says U.S. Asleep.
It was not only the world that expressed shock and disbelief at Gagarin’s achievement; even those closest to him—his family—had little or no idea of what had happened. Only his wife, Valentina, knew that he would be flying into space, although he had told her that the mission was planned for 14 April, so as not to worry her. He informed his parents that he was going on a business trip and, according to his sister, would be traveling “very far.” Upon learning of the flight, his mother’s reaction was to buy a train ticket to visit her daughter-in-law in Moscow and help care for their children. His father, meanwhile, was working on the collective farm and, after hearing that someone called Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was in space, he responded that it could not be his son, who was “only a senior lieutenant.” The enormity of what his son had done became apparent when he headed to the local soviet for more information and was quickly pushed onto the phone with a Communist Party official in Gzhatsk. Within hours, Alexei Gagarin and his sons were answering an endless stream of calls from journalists within and beyond the Soviet Union.
High above Earth, at 10:25 a.m., just off the coast of western Africa, near Angola, Vostok’s retrorocket fired automatically to begin its re-entry into the atmosphere. Gagarin would never need to touch his controls, nor open the envelope, nor worry about the three magic numbers. Five thousand miles still remained to be covered before landing back in the Soviet Union. However, all did not go according to plan. Ten seconds after retrofire, as intended, the four metal straps holding the instrument section and the capsule together severed, but an electrical cable failed to separate. The cable contained a thick bundle of wiring which provided power and data to t