On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft’s controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone

The space race that produced Vostok 1 had begun in earnest approximately three and a half years earlier, on 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into low Earth orbit and demonstrated to a startled American government that the technological gap the Cold War had assumed was [...] The post On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft’s controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone appeared first on Space Daily .