Yuri gagarin how long in space

Such pilots were considered optimal because they had exposure to the forces of acceleration and the ejection process, as well as experience with high-stress situations. Gagarin, a year-old senior lieutenant at the time, was among the pilots selected. On April 12, , at a. Moscow time, the Vostok 1 spacecraft blasted off from the Soviets' launch site. Because no one was certain how weightlessness would affect a pilot, the spherical capsule had little in the way of onboard controls; the work was done either automatically or from the ground.

If an emergency arose , Gagarin was supposed to receive an override code that would allow him to take manual control, but Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the Soviet space program, disregarded protocol and gave the code to the pilot prior to the flight.

Over the course of minutes, Vostok 1 traveled around the Earth once, reaching a maximum height of miles kilometers. The spacecraft carried 10 days' worth of provisions in case the engines failed and Gagarin was required to wait for the orbit to naturally decay. But the supplies were unnecessary. Gagarin re-entered Earth's atmosphere, managing to maintain consciousness as he experienced forces up to eight times the pull of gravity during his descent.

Vostok 1 had no engines to slow its re-entry and no way to land safely. About 4 miles 7 km up, Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth. Soviet leaders indicated that Gagarin had touched down with the Vostok 1, and they did not reveal that he had ejected until Regardless, Gagarin still set the record as the first person to leave Earth's orbit and travel into space.

Upon his return to Earth, Gagarin was an international hero. A cheering crowd of hundreds of thousands of people greeted him in Red Square, a public plaza in Moscow. A national treasure, Gagarin traveled around the world to celebrate the historic Soviet achievement. When he returned home, Gagarin became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union the highest legislative body in the Soviet Union and was appointed commander of the Cosmonauts' Detachment. Yuri attended the local school for six years and continued his education at vocational and technical schools.

Soon afterward, he became a military fighter pilot. By , he had been selected for cosmonaut training as part of the first group of USSR cosmonauts.

Yuri Gagarin flew only one space mission. On April 12, he became the first human to orbit Earth. Gagarin's spacecraft, Vostok 1 , circled Earth at a speed of 27, kilometers per hour. The flight lasted minutes. At the highest point, Gagarin was about kilometers above Earth. What could be made of claims by Mikhail Rudenko, a former Soviet senior engineer and experimenter with Experimental Design Office , formed in by members of the editorial staff of the oldest Soviet paper Pravda, that cosmonauts had been sent into space in , and ?

But considering Pravda has also run with headlines such as " Aliens forced Americans out from the Moon '' and "Alien and human skulls found on Mars", it's a tough call. Harder still to determine is Ilyushin's location in March and April The Soviets didn't help themselves in this regard either since they couldn't give a straight answer about the reason why he was seen to be injured — pinned down to that car crash — or when it actually took place.

Neither could they offer up a suitable explanation for why he might have been in China. They also went as far as to say he was never actually a cosmonaut and, indeed, it would appear that he wasn't in the original cosmonaut team. No memoirs or declassified information put him there. Yet it's also difficult to corroborate the Judica-Cordiglia recordings with any data from official sources.

Listening stations did not pick up on what they claimed to have committed to tape, and radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, who established the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, dismissed claims of earlier Russian manned space attempts in Even that, however, isn't as clear cut as it sounds.

Lovell paid visits to Russia around this time, and there have even been allegations that he was brainwashed. He fell ill that year following such a trip, and the U. Ministry of Defence said it might have been due to an attempt to remove his memory of a Soviet offer to build a telescope facility in the U. And that sounds more plausible. Related: Russia's next space station-bound Soyuz spacecraft named for first cosmonaut. Besides, supposing Russia had suffered such terrible space attempts which resulted in deaths and crashes, would it really have announced Gagarin's flight in the way it did?

As James E. Oberg points out in a article he wrote in Space World magazine , the Russian news agency TASS — frequently used as a front organisation by the Soviet intelligence agency — released its first bulletin while Gagarin was still in-flight.

If it was worried about the potential for bad news, wouldn't it have been better to wait until the mission was over and Gagarin's feet were firmly back on the ground, rather than risk Gagarin's spacecraft hitting the same problems as the one claimed to have taken place just days before?

Maybe we will never know. The two men who would have been directly involved are no longer alive — Gagarin was killed when the MiG training jet he was piloting crashed on March 27, , when he was Given the evidence that has been made available, the smart money remains on Gagarin having been the first person on a manned spaceflight Russian space history can be murky and difficult to pick apart, but in truth there is no real reason to lie in instances such as this.

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How the Soviets shocked the world by launching Yuri Gagarin as the first man into space. Click to expand. Replay Video. Found the story interesting?