Volume 2: First into Space
Early manned missions 1961-1964
By 1961, both America and the Soviet Union were poised to send a man into space – but who would get there first?
The answer came in April, when a young cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth and in doing so captured the imagination of the entire world. To the newly elected U.S. President John F. Kennedy, it was a challenge that could not go unanswered for long. Just six weeks later, with NASA still struggling to send an astronaut into orbit, Kennedy boldly committed his nation to landing man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.
The USSR ignored the challenge, instead notching up more space “firsts” with its tried-and-tested Vostok rocket/spacecraft combination: first day-long flight, first paired spacecraft in orbit and first woman in space. To NASA’s dismay, the much-publicized flight of John Glenn into orbit in 1962 and the three Mercury-Atlas flights that followed were soon eclipsed the rise in international tension that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis of late 1963. But behind the scenes, American industry was already gearing up for the greatest engineering challenge it had faced since the Manhattan atomic bomb project of World War II.
PLUS audio/video in the digital edition:
The answer came in April, when a young cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth and in doing so captured the imagination of the entire world. To the newly elected U.S. President John F. Kennedy, it was a challenge that could not go unanswered for long. Just six weeks later, with NASA still struggling to send an astronaut into orbit, Kennedy boldly committed his nation to landing man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.
The USSR ignored the challenge, instead notching up more space “firsts” with its tried-and-tested Vostok rocket/spacecraft combination: first day-long flight, first paired spacecraft in orbit and first woman in space. To NASA’s dismay, the much-publicized flight of John Glenn into orbit in 1962 and the three Mercury-Atlas flights that followed were soon eclipsed the rise in international tension that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis of late 1963. But behind the scenes, American industry was already gearing up for the greatest engineering challenge it had faced since the Manhattan atomic bomb project of World War II.
PLUS audio/video in the digital edition:
• Developing the Mercury spacecraft
• Meet the Mercury Seven
• The Vostok spacraft
• The right stuff: astronaut training
• Tested to the limit: cosmonaut training
• The launch of Vostok 1
• Gagarin’s return
• Newsreel: the U.S. reacts to Vostok 2
• The flight of Freedom 7
• The launch of Friendship 7
• John Glenn in orbit
• Telstar makes TV history
• Newsreel: Vostoks 3 and 4
• Valentina Tereshkova: first woman in space
