On this Day in 1961 The boy who dreamed of space goes into orbit

On the morning of the 13th April 1961 the front page of the Yorkshire Post carried news of an adventure in the far away Soviet Union which was the forerunner of every manned mission beyond the atmosphere of the earth that has ever taken place.

The previous day 27 year old Yuri Gagarin had been propelled aloft in a spacecraft named Vostok 3KA, a tiny spherical metal capsule that was no bigger than the back seat of a modern car.

It was a perilous undertaking. Previous unmanned rocket launches carried out by both the Soviet Union and the United States had had mixed fortunes, some resulting in spectacular disaster. One can only admire the bravery of this Russian man with his beaming anglic smile as he waited on the launch pad for blast off.

If Gagarin was at all nervous it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

“Let’s Go!” or “Poyekhali” he said as the rocket cleared the launch tower.

Once underway, the flight took 108 minutes. During this time Yuri Gagarin barrelled around the earth at around 17,000 miles per hour, faster than any human had flown and reached an altitude of 91 nautical miles.

This was an extraordinary undertaking, a man sitting ontop of what was essentially a liquid gas bomb that travelled at an unimaginable speed. It was a daring and innovative competition between two nations to see who would get into space first.

“The flight is continuing well. I can see the Earth. The visibility is good.... I almost see everything. There’s a certain amount of space under cumulus cloud cover. I continue the flight, everything is good.” he reported after the final stage had ignited.

He was the first human to experience the wonder of weightlessness as he severed the gravitational tentacles of earth, something that everybody had worried about because it had not been experienced by a human before.

After just over an hour in orbit the reentry kicked in and Vostok 1 began it’s descent.

Unlike subsequent manned space missions crew and spacecraft did not land together. Instead, at 8,000 feet Yuri Gagarin ejected from the capsule and parachuted to earth. The capsule itself made its own way down and apparently bounced before it settled into the earth in front of two gaping schoolgirls.

Nearby a Russian farmer and her daughter were alarmed to see a figure in a bright orange space suit and white helmet descend from the heavens and land in front of them.

Of course, it was Yuri Gagarin. His epic mission monumentally successful and complete.

The Yorkshire Post reported the triumph of this historic trip and Gagarin’s thunderous reception back on earth.

There was the crush of people trying to embrace him and the immediate phone conversation with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

There was the report of the tears of relief and joy from Gagarin’s wife Valentina and the account of Valentina’s neighbour rushing into her house to tell Valentina to put the radio on because they were broadcasting about Yuri.

She was pregnant and her husband had decided not to tell her about the mission until it was over.

The Yorkshire Post also told of the Russian schoolboy who had dreamed of going into space as a child.

As a child Gagarin had been engrossed in the writings of Jules Verne and he had spent many hours building model aeroplanes. He fantasised about travelling to other planets.

Yuri Gagarin was the first of over 500 people that have travelled into space but tragically in 1968 the risks of his profession as a test pilot caught up with him and he was killed on a routine training flight.

He never lived to see his American rivals land on the moon but every manned space programme since that first flight into space takes something of Yuri Gagarin with it.

So next time that we see the International Space Station fly over our rooftops we should think of the little smiling Russian Cosmonaut.

To him we owe a big thankyou. Or “Spasibo” as they say in Russia.