The Cruise of the Vostok

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on April 21, 1961.)

Triumphant music blared across the land. Russia's radios saluted the morning with the slow, stirring beat of the patriotic song How Spacious Is My Country. Then came the simple announcement that shattered forever man's ancient isolation on earth: "The world's first spaceship Vostok [East], with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit."

From Leningrad to Petropavlovsk, the U.S.S.R. came to a halt. Streetcars and buses stopped so that passengers could listen to loudspeakers in public squares. Factory workers shut off their machines; shopgirls quit their counters. Schoolkids turned eagerly from the day's lessons. Somewhere above them a Soviet citizen was arcing past the stars, whirling about the earth at 18,000 miles an hour soaring into history as the first man in space.

Radio reports identified the "cosmonaut" as Major Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, 27. According to the official announcement, the Vostok had blasted off from an unidentified launching pad at exactly 9:07 a.m., Moscow time. Brief bulletins, from time to time, traced its orbital track. Word came that at 9:22 a.m. Gagarin had reported by radio from a point over South America: "The flight is proceeding normally. I feel well." At 10:15 he checked in over Africa: "The flight is normal. I am withstanding well the state of weightlessness." At 11:10 a report was broadcast that at 10:25 Gagarin had completed one circuit of the earth and that the spaceship's braking rocket had been fired. This was the perilous point when the Vostok, its nose white-hot from friction with the earth's atmosphere, began its plunge to a landing. All Russia waited nervously -- and the government-controlled radio milked every moment for suspense. Not until 12:25 was the proud announcement put on the air: "At 10:55 Cosmonaut Gagarin safely returned to the sacred soil of our motherland."

Hats were heaved aloft. Russians cheered, hugged each other, telephoned their friends. The celebration spread from factories to collective farms, from crowded city streets to clusters of huts on the lonely steppes. Newspapers blossomed with bright red headlines. Everywhere people paraded with banners hailing the Soviet leap into space. Not even for Sputnik 1 had the U.S.S.R. worked up such effervescent enthusiasm.

The extravagance was understandable. Yuri Gagarin had flown higher (188 miles) and faster (18,000 m.p.h.) than any other man ever before; yet even such startling statistics shrank into insignificance before the infinite implications of his trip. Suddenly man's centuries-old dream of space travel had been transformed into reality.

Vostok was not an unmanned satellite - impersonal, cold, emotionally empty. It had carried an ordinary man soaring across the face of the heavens, and mankind's imagination had soared with him. Scientists could talk with new assurance about a whole new series of technological achievements that might refashion the world of the future: manned satellites watching and perhaps controlling the weather, guiding ships and airplanes, acting as communication relay stations, providing a drastic change of environment for people with diseases that cannot be cured on earth. Military men conjured up orbiting space fleets, bristling with giant nuclear missiles capable of devastating the land below.

All this had been talked about before, but Yuri Gagarin's high ride made it all seem sure and possible. As the first man in space, his own contribution had been no more than his own survival, but the world to which he returned would never be the same again.

As Washington awoke to its propaganda defeat, the proper people said the proper things. President Kennedy congratulated the Russians. So did James Webb, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But behind the cheerful and gracious phrases were frustration, shame, sometimes fury. U.S. spacemen had been beaten again.

At Cape Canaveral, U.S. astronauts were still waiting their chance to ride a Mercury capsule down the Atlantic missile range. But now even this little experiment seemed empty and futile. Mercury men were hard put to conceal their discouragement. They had all been working with desperate intensity; some were groggy with fatigue; and they felt that their country was not behind them. "We could have got a man up there," cried one of them angrily. "We could have done it a month ago if somebody at the top two years ago had just simply decided to push it." Said another: "All of us were longing for someone to say 'O.K. boys, let's go.' We were prevented from winning by high-level decisions. If Columbus' Santa Maria had been handled that way, she would never have left the harbor."

Most scientists around the world think that Major Gagarin and the good ship Vostok have opened a door that will never entirely close. Space exploration may slow down for a while or stop, but the human species is young, and it is the bumptious master of a fruitful planet. More men will always yearn to travel in Major Gagarin's wake to see the blue band around the curve of the earth. Eventually perhaps 10, 100, or 1,000 years from now, a great spaceship will carry men far out in the solar system. They will learn whether the moon and the planets have value as real estate. They may tinker with the offensive atmosphere of Venus, perhaps making it suitable for human breathing. They may develop human subtypes that will enjoy Venus as it is. They may learn to live in space itself, cruising the solar system in artificial, mobile planets. Human civilization is only 7,000 years old, and countless years lie ahead. But wherever future adventurers travel, whatever they find in the black, cold reaches of space, they will always remember the pair that preceded them -- the Vostok and Major Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin.