The Space Race: A History From Beginning to End by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2018-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The First Men in Space

“I see Earth. It is so beautiful!”

—Yuri Gagarin, first words in space

One of the results of the successful American satellite launch was extended discussion about which agency should take control of the U.S. space program. The inter-service rivalry between the Navy Vanguard and the Army Jupiter-C was unhelpful and wasteful. In the end, it was decided that control of the space program should be handled by a special civilian body set up outside the Department of Defense, and on October 1, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed with Thomas Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, as its first administrator.

In Russia, Sergei Korolev and his team of engineers began to work towards the next logical step in the space race—manned space flight. The Soviet space program was still dependent on funds from the military, so Korolev was charged with designing a launch vehicle that could be used to launch both large reconnaissance satellites and some form of manned space vehicle. In the late 1950s, he began work on the Vostok (East) spacecraft. The first version, the Vostok-L, was similar to the R-7 rocket though it used more powerful engines. It was tested during 1959, and the first test launch took place on May 15, 1960. For the first test, the rocket carried the Korabl-Sputnik (Starship Satellite). This was an unmanned vehicle, though it was used to test many of the functions of the planned manned craft.

The Korabl-Sputnik (later re-named the Vostok Spacecraft) comprised a cylindrical body containing engines and instruments and a descent module in which there was room for a single cosmonaut. Space inside the 2.3-meter diameter module was very tight indeed, and one of the essential prerequisites for any early Soviet cosmonaut was that they could not be more than five feet, four inches tall. The descent module was designed to separate from the main body and then deploy parachutes when it entered the atmosphere. The cosmonaut was required to eject from the capsule at an altitude of around 20,000 feet and descend separately. Lessons learned from early tests resulted in the production of the Vostok 3KA Spacecraft, an improved version of the Korabl-Sputnik with limited thruster ability and room for a single cosmonaut.

In America, Project Mercury was initiated in October 1958 under the control of the newly formed NASA and with the objective of placing a manned spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. The design of the Mercury spacecraft differed from the Russian Vostok—the Mercury capsule was bigger with more internal space (a pilot of up to five feet and eleven inches in height could be accommodated), and it was conical in shape with a heat-shield at the broad end. When the capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere, parachutes were deployed, and all Mercury missions were planned to allow the capsule to splash-down in an ocean with the astronaut still inside. The Jupiter-C rocket used for the early satellite launches was not suitable for the

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