Word: vostok
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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...
...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...
...expressed doubt that the flight had been made at all, with every report more contradictions came to light. And when newsmen checked back over the preflight publicity, more curious items turned up. For days, Moscow had been flooded with rumors about an imminent attempt at space flight. Before the Vostok flight, the Moscow correspondent for the London Daily Worker cabled his paper that the cosmonaut son of a famous Soviet airplane designer had orbited the earth three times and landed with serious injuries. The London Daily Sketch identified him as Gennady Mikhailov. Soviet authorities promptly denied both reports...
...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, which slowed the Vostok and brought it down into a "braking zone" of gradually thickening air. There the ship was heated by friction and suffered tremendous strain, but the braking effect was distributed over thousands of miles of flight. "At the height of several tens of kilometers [one kilometer-.62 miles] above the earth...
...Soviets really risked their space prestige so rashly? Most foreign observers felt sure that they had not. It seemed probable that Major Gagarin had arced into orbit and returned safely before anything was reported. There were also other minor mysteries about the Vostok's flight. According to the Russian official account, he checked in over South America only 15 minutes after the Vostok was launched. Yet South America is more than half an orbit away from the probable launching. At a space conference in Florence, Italy, Academician Anatoly Blagonravov, 66, a former Czarist artillery expert who often acts...