The First Astronauts

The first living creature in space, the dog Laika, was put into Earth orbit in November 1957 by the Soviet Union. The Soviets then startled the world on April 12, 1961, by putting the first per­son into orbit. He was Yuri Gagarin, a pilot with the Soviet air force, and his spacecraft was Vostok 1. Although Gagarin made only one orbit, lasting 108 minutes, the mission’s impact was enormous. Gagarin was greeted as a hero after his historic flight, and the world became excited by the possibility of astronauts flying, not just around Earth, but to the Moon and even to other planets.

Gagarin started training in 1959, the same year in which seven Americans were chosen to become NASA’s first astronauts. The seven U. S. astronauts
were Donald Slayton, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, L. Gordon Cooper, M. Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, John Glenn, and Alan Shepard. They trained to fly the Mercury capsule, a cone-shaped spacecraft weighing about 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilo grams)-about one-third the weight of a ball-shaped Vostok capsule.

Shepard and Grissom were the first to test the Mercury craft, making fifteen – minute suborbital flights in May and July 1961. The U. S. astronaut chosen to fly into orbit was John Glenn, a former Korean War fighter pilot. His capsule was mounted on top of a U. S. Air Force Atlas rocket, which was more powerful than the Redstone rocket used for the first two Mercury flights. Glenn blasted off on February 20, 1962, and became
the first American to orbit Earth in his craft Friendship 7. Glenn’s three-orbit flight was followed by other manned flights by U. S. astronauts. They used Mercury spacecraft and then the larger Gemini two-man craft. These flights led to the Apollo program (1967-1972), which sent the first people to the Moon.

THE FIRST WOMAN IN SPACE

No women were among the first U. S. and Soviet astronauts. In the 1950s, there were few experienced female jet pilots, and some scientists believed women would be physically unable to withstand the stress of launch and reentry. In June 1963, however, the Soviet Union launched the spacecraft Vostok 6 that carried Valentina Tereshkova. The first woman in space was not a pilot but a former textile technologist in a cotton mill and an avid parachutist. Inspired by Yuri Gagarin’s flight, she had written to the Soviet govern­ment with a request to become a cosmonaut. Just over a year later, she was orbiting Earth. Tereshkova suf­fered no bad effects from her orbital mission. She later married and gave birth to a daughter. The normal birth showed that human reproduction was not affected by spaceflight.