Word: gagarin
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...time Gagarin's flight was announced, the Soviet public was primed. Tension was increased enormously by the apparently reckless daring of passing the word while the Vostok was still in orbit...
None of this was surprising to space scientists. Everything the first cosmonaut reported had been suggested earlier by the instruments of unmanned satellites or by earthbound theory. The narrow blue band that Gagarin saw was the familiar color of the clear sky-the blue component of sunlight that the atmosphere scatters upward into space as well as toward earth. Still, all such details held a fresh fascination: they were part of a firsthand observation, an eyewitness confirmation. They belonged to a tale told by an adventurer into the unknown, and if they added little to man's knowledge, they...
Smooth Landing. At the end of the first jubilant day, Gagarin was still at an unspecified base, undergoing a careful physical examination and presumably being questioned by experts. But whatever the Soviet space experts learned, they added little to Gaga's own story. They published only the bare statistics of the flight: it lasted 108 minutes, of which 89 minutes were actually spent in orbit; the rest was climbing to orbit and descent to the earth. Academician Evgeny Fedorov, one of the big brains of the Soviet space program, spoke briefly about the descent. It was accomplished with retrorockets...
Fedorov's account suggested that the cosmonaut landed inside his space capsule, but according to other sources in Russia, Major Gagarin parachuted out of the capsule before it hit the ground. Space Scientist Nikolai Gurovsky said: "The cosmonaut came down smoothly in a glade near a field. Landing on his feet, without even tumbling, he walked up to the people...
...descent to earth, the most difficult and dangerous part of the flight, was still ahead. A last-minute failure might have left Gagarin in orbit to die a slow and lonely death, or fried him in the atmosphere. Earlier Soviet tune-up flights had suffered similar fates...