SPACE/ From Gagarin to Vittori: 50 years in orbit

April 12th is the fiftieth anniversary of the space flight of Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man to leave Earth’s atmosphere on April 12, 1961.

In the Soviet Union, the first serious proposal of the human exploration of space was put forward in the middle of the 50s by the legendary “head project manager” Sergey Korolev, who directed the so called OKB-1 (Experimental Project Office n. 1), the state-run organization which had developed the R-7 Semyorka, the first Soviet intercontinental missile, and which was later used in the launch of the Russian space program. Initially, Korolev had formed a small group of engineers to study the possibility of conducting brief suborbital flights, launching an inhabited space shuttle with a missile up to the highest layer of the atmosphere. At the beginning of 1958, a second group amplified these studies to include the possibilities of an orbital flight.

At the end of that year, Korolev decided to abandon the idea of suborbital launches and to concentrate the efforts of his department on an orbital vehicle capable of carrying a human crew, converting an earlier project for a satellite spy. The Soviet government officially approved this project, which was named Vostok (East) in May of 1959, at about the same time that the United States began work on Project Mercury, their own project to put a man into orbit.

The Vostok craft was built of two units: a reentry apparatus and a compartment for instruments. The first, which was spherical, could hold a single pilot, protect him both during the launch and during the reentry into Earth's atmosphere, and could support his life functions for up to ten days. The second part, which was in the shape of a cone, carried out the connecting functions between the launching missile and the spacecraft, held the instrumental and auxiliary systems, as well as the reentry motor.

After the project and construction phases, the trial phase of the Vostok took about a year, during which seven trial launches, which were not always successful took place. In this period, the Soviets used dogs to test the survival possibilities of living things in flight conditions and during reentry into the atmosphere, as they had already done in the launch of the Sputnik-2 with the famous dog, Laika. The Vostok project experienced many delays because of various inconveniences and mishaps, but the last two trial launches, conducted in March 1961, with both a dog and a manikin to simulate a human on board, were successful, leading to the April 12, 1961 launch of Gagarin.