To-day In History: First Person in Space
“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!”— Yuri Gagarin
On this day in 1961, Yuri Gagarin looked out a spacecraft window and saw something no human had ever seen before: the Earth.
It’s hard to imagine, but nobody really knew what the Earth looked like before Gagarin’s flight. There were accurate maps, of course, but the only photographs of Earth from space were grainy black and white pictures taken by unmanned rockets and satellites. Nobody had seen our planet with their own eyes.
That all changed on April 12th, 1961. That morning, Gagarin entered the capsule of his Vostok spacecraft, and the launch countdown began…
A Risky Mission
It would be an understatement to say this was risky mission. No manned spaceflight had ever been attempted before, and half of all previous rocket launches had ended in failure.
Tensions were understandably high. As the countdown entered its final phase, the spacecraft’s chief designer nearly suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be given a pill to calm down.
“Let’s Ride!”
Liftoff occurred at 06:07 UTC. As the rocket cleared the launch platform, Gagarin shouted “Let’s ride!” into his microphone. Ten minutes later the rocket reached orbit, and Gagarin became the first human ever to cross over into outer space.
Over the next hour, Gagarin’s spacecraft traced a path over Russia, the Pacific Ocean, South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and the Middle East.
“What beauty,” he recalled later, “I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth…. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.”
Return to Earth
Gagarin’s capsule came back to Earth in a field 280 km away from the planned landing site. A farmer and her daughter approached Gagarin nearby. Bewildered by his spacesuit they asked, “Can it be that you have come from outer space?”
“As a matter of fact,” replied Gagarin, “I have!”
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