Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth with his controls locked and the code already whispered to him
No one knew whether a person could think clearly while weightless, so Vostok 1's manual controls were locked. The unlock code sat in a sealed envelope for emergencies, and his superiors told him the three digits before launch anyway. On 12 April 1961 Gagarin circled the planet once, in 108 minutes.
The flight capped a secret Soviet race against America's Project Mercury. Uncrewed test capsules flew from May 1960 with mixed results, until the final two in March 1961 worked perfectly. Gagarin was a long-standing favourite, but the head of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, wavered between him and Gherman Titov right up to early April. He wanted the tougher man saved for the longer second flight. Gagarin got the news on 9 April, and the moment was staged again for television the next day. Alexei Leonov, another candidate, only learned the choice once the rocket was already flying.
Preparations reflected a mix of worry and improvisation. There was no backup braking rocket, so the capsule carried 13 days of supplies in case Gagarin had to wait for the orbit to decay, including liver purée and chocolate sauce squeezed from metal tubes. An engineer hand-painted the letters of the USSR on his helmet so that, a year after the American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down, a man falling from the sky would not be taken for an intruder. The night before, both cosmonauts turned down sleeping pills. Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, did not sleep at all.
His nerves had reason. Half of all Soviet space launches to that point had failed. On the pad Korolev needed a pill for chest pains, while Gagarin, joking and asking for music, had a pulse of 64. A hatch warning forced technicians to unbolt and reseal it, though that alarm may have been false. At 06:07 UTC the rocket lifted off, and Gagarin's reply, poyekhali, meaning let's go, became famous.
Minutes later he reported seeing Earth clearly beneath the clouds. His orbit ranged from 181 to 327 kilometres high. On the way down he ejected at about seven kilometres and parachuted to the ground apart from his capsule.
Source: Vostok 1
