Urzay says we may have to wait a while for hypersonic commercial flights designed to ferry hundreds of passengers well past the Mach 5 boundary. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Douglas Miller Getty Images. On April 12, , the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to safely reach space and orbit Earth.
During his historic journey, Gagarin set another record, becoming the first human to travel at hypersonic speeds. So do we. Related Story. During selection, Gagarin found himself up against Gherman Tiova, a son of a school teacher known for quoting poetry. It was decided that the average citizen of the Soviet Union would be more likely to relate to, and celebrate someone like Gagarin, who was the son of a potato farmer. For security reasons, the Volstok 1 was completely controlled from the ground.
In a last case scenario, if ground communications were lost, Gagarin could however open a sealed envelope containing the codes that would grant him the control of the spaceship when typed on an on-board computer. This content is not available in your region. 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. Because the Soviets did not want to risk losing such an important public figure, they were hesitant about allowing Gagarin to return to space.
He continued to make test flights for the Air Force, however. On March 27, , Gagarin was killed along with another pilot while test-piloting a MiG, a jet fighter aircraft. He was survived by his wife, Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva, and two daughters. NASA's Apollo 11 , the first mission to put people on the moon, landed in July , and the crew left behind a commemorative medallion bearing Gagarin's name.
They also left medallions for other astronauts who lost their lives in space or while preparing for spaceflight. Over time, the U. There were real fears that a human wouldn't be able to breathe properly, even obviously, in an oxygenated atmosphere. The human being wouldn't be able to swallow, for example, that weightlessness would do really, really strange things to the heart, they wouldn't beat properly.
You know, nobody knew because nobody experienced weightlessness of any kind for more than a few seconds in one of those aeroplanes that simulated weightlessness with his parabolas, they kept flying. But that was only for about 20 seconds. This is going to be much, much longer than that. So they just didn't know. They were tremendous concerns about how he'd get down again, everybody knew that a capsule returning through the atmosphere would build up massive amounts of friction, the temperatures would reach degrees centigrade, even more, you know, would it burn away?
Would whatever protection he had in the form of a heat shield, or in the design of the capsule itself? Would it work already burn up as he came down? You know, would that be a problem? And then, beyond all of those problems, there was, as I said, the psychological problem. And the psychological problem basically boiled down to very simple sentence, or rather a very simple question, but with a very simple answer.
And that was, would he go insane? Was he going mad in space, because the real fear, and it was a real fear at that time.
And there were, there was psychological textbooks that were written about something called space horror , was that the first human being divorced from the planet below divorce from life or life as we know it divorce for all of that sailing alone, and this is ultimate loneliness or isolation, in the vacuum of space in his little sphere, might go mad.
So they had to think about that, too. And what they thought about as I described in my book was a very Soviet response, they decided that flight will be completely automated. But they then decided at the last moment, that if actually, something did go wrong, and he needed to take manual control, then how are they going to let him have manual control.
And they came up with this extraordinary solution, which is just utterly mad, where they basically had a three digit code, which you press on, like, the kind of thing you have in a hotel safe on the side of his capsule, and you press these three numbers, which I think will one to five; it's in the book, and that would unlock the manual controls.
But then they worried that he might go so crazy that he might just do that anyway, take control, and God knows what he'll do, you know, destroy himself, defect to America, in his spacecraft. These were proper discussions that took place, literally a few days before he flew. And in the end, what they decided to do was to put the code in an envelope, and seal the envelope, and glue it somewhere in the lining of the inside of his spacecraft. The idea being somehow-- this is crazy logic, it's not even logic-- that if he was able to find it, open it, read the code and press the correct numbers, then he won't be insane.
And that was seriously discussed in a state commission of the top politicians, KGB people and space engineers, one week before Yuri Gagarin flew in space. That's, that's what they dealt with, because they were they didn't know space, horror, insanity. So you're, again, it comes back to my saying at the very beginning, everything here is a first everything is an unknown, nobody's done it before. And what increases that feeling of isolation that would have made the possibility of insanity a real one.
Why they were so frightened was because they didn't have reliable radio communications with the ground. They didn't have what the [American] Mercury astronauts would have, which was a chain of stations basically, in circling the globe, where they would always have somebody to talk to, and we're very used to the moon landings and there's all those, you know, communications with beeps on the end, and even with Apollo 13, the one that went wrong, they're always communicating with Mission Control in Houston.
But for Gagarin's flight, I would say a substantial part of his flight. I'm not sure if you'd actually say the majority, but a substantial part of his flight hidden nobody's talked to. He had nobody to talk to, except a microphone with a tape recorder that was installed inside his cabin. And as I say, in the book, it turns out that whoever installed the tape in the tape recorder didn't put enough tape in. So he ran out halfway around the world.
And he sat there and made probably one of the few independent decisions that he made in the cabinet, in that Vostok spacecraft, which was to rewind the tape to the beginning, and then record over everything he just said. This is the first mind in space and that's what happened. His book is on sale today. You can get it through HarperCollins, its publisher, or wherever you buy your books. For more information visit www. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Full Transcript. So instead, he wrote a book. So what exactly were the challenges … Stephen Walker: The challenges are physiological and psychological, the physiological challenges, some of which had been kind of looked at and dealt with some of the animal flights they do, which I write about in the book with dogs in a Soviet Union and with monkeys, and then finally, obviously a chimpanzee called Ham in the United States.
You can't really make this stuff up.
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