That translates to “let’s go” in English. Burning highly refined kerosene as fuel, the Vostok rocket fired away from its launch pad at 0607 GMT (9:07 a.m. Gagarin climbed into his Vostok 1 capsule on top of a Vostok rocket at Baikonur. Only a relatively small group of Soviet government officials, engineers, and the launch crew knew of the mission’s schedule. The launch from the cosmodrome on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan occurred in secret. Gagarin’s flight began with a liftoff from a Soviet spaceport named the Baikonur Cosmodrome, now part of the independent republic of Kazakhstan. NASA scrubbed the first try to launch the space shuttle Columbia on April 10, 1981, due to a timing error in the ship’s flight computers.Īpril 12 is celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in Russia, marking each anniversary of Gagarin’s historic launch into space. It’s a coincidence that the two famous anniversaries fall on April 12. Twenty years later, in 1981, the era of reusable spacecraft dawned with the first launch of NASA’s space shuttle. Sixty years ago Monday, a 27-year-old Russian test pilot named Yuri Gagarin strapped into a Vostok capsule in Central Asia and rode into orbit atop a launcher derived from a Soviet nuclear missile, becoming the first human to travel into the void of space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin before launch April 12, 1961.
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