Vostok 1

Sergei Korolev had put twenty four rockets up and watched exactly half of them fail. On the morning of 12 April 1961 he was going to put a man on one.

He had chest pains the night before, took a sedative and did not sleep. At the pad he talked to the cosmonaut over the radio, who asked for some music.

Half an hour before launch, Yuri Gagarin's pulse was 64.

At 06:07 UTC the engines lit and Korolev's voice went up with them. Preliminary stage. Intermediate. Main. Lift off. We wish you a good flight, everything is all right.

Gagarin answered with one word. Поехали. Poyekhali! Let's go!

He was flying as Kedr, cedar. Soviet callsigns worked as code words and were not made public before a launch, so anyone listening in learned nothing.

This is the part that came back: a sealed sphere of aluminium magnesium alloy, 2.3 metres across, with a man inside it.

No wings, no steering, nothing to trim its attitude on the way down. Its mass was hung off centre so one side was heavier, and the air did the rest. A sphere has no nose, so they gave it one by loading it.

The ablative coating went over all of it anyway. Nobody was willing to guarantee the physics.

One seat, one man, and the SK-1, the first spacesuit anyone had worn, built to work with the ejection seat as much as the cabin.

On the floor at his feet sat the Vzor: a central sight with eight ports ringed around it. Square the craft up against the horizon and all eight lit at once.

It only worked in daylight. At night there was nothing to line up against, so the burn had to come from the ground.

Nobody knew what weightlessness did to a person's eyesight, judgement or hands. The controls were locked before the hatch closed, and the pilot went up as cargo.

The code was 1-2-5, sealed in an envelope in the cabin, for an emergency.

Nikolai Kamanin told him the code before the flight anyway.

An engineer called Gherman Lebedev painted the four letters onto Gagarin's helmet by hand while he was driven to the pad.

Eleven months earlier, Francis Gary Powers had come down over Sverdlovsk in a U-2 and been paraded as a spy. A man landing by parachute in an orange suit with nothing on him to say who he was would have been a problem, and somebody thought of it late.

One lap, and in 108 minutes one person saw the whole planet from outside it for the first time.

Fewer than a thousand have followed him.

At 07:25 UTC the retrorocket fired over the west coast of Africa. Ten seconds later the command went out to release the equipment module, but it stayed connected.

A bundle of wires still held the two halves together, and somewhere above Egypt Vostok 1 began to gyrate hard.

Gagarin radioed that everything was OK.

He had worked out that it did not matter. The weight in the ball's base would turn it the right way round in the end, and saying so would only make noise.

The wires burned through. The sphere settled and took around 8 g coming in, which he later put at over 10.

The spacecraft was broken for ten minutes, but nobody apart from Gagarin knew.

By his own account, coming down, he sang.

The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows. That comes from his memories rather than from the mission record.

A man at eight times his own weight, in a sphere that had spent the previous ten minutes tumbling, singing about the country listening for him.