Vostok 1

Vostok 1 (, East or Orient 1) was the first flight to take a human into space. It used a Vostok 3KA spacecraft, and was launched on April 12, 1961. It took into space Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union. The Vostok 1 mission was the first time a person went into outer space and the first time anyone had entered into orbit. The flight made one orbit and lasted for 1 hour, 48 minutes. The Vostok 1 was launched by the Soviet space program and made by the Soviet rocket scientists Sergei Korolev and Kerim Kerimov.

The Vostok spacecraft weighed , was  long and  in diameter. The cosmonaut flew inside a spherical module. He sat on a seat which was also an ejection seat which allowed the cosmonaut to escape from the spacecraft in case of an emergency. The flight was simple, the cosmonaut was simply a passenger. There were controls for use in an emergency. The spacecraft had a food locker, radio, a cabinet with experiments inside, and two windows, one above the ejection seat and one to the right.. Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft after re-entry and landed by parachute.

There were six manned Vostok flights, the last one, Vostok 6, carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space on June 16, 1963.

References

Category:Soviet spacecraft
Category:1960s in spaceflight