Word: vostok
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...waiting rocket in an eggshell-blue bus. Bulky in his orange spacesuit, Titov clambered up the gantry ladder and settled himself in the giant five-ton capsule perched on the rocket's nose. An attendant handed him a notebook labeled ''Log Book of the Spaceship Vostok II.'' With exaggerated care, Titov examined the pencil dangling from the log, and remembered: "Yuri Gagarin did not attach his pencil firmly and lost it." Then the hatch clanged shut, arid soon Vostok II lifted through the clear air to carry Titov on the longest journey ever made...
...very first orbit, Titov took over the manual controls of the Vostok II, checked out the systems designed to let him steady his capsule as it curved along its predetermined arc in space. On the third orbit, Titov ate a three-course lunch, squeezed out of tubes like toothpaste. On the seventh orbit, after 9¼ hours in the air, Titov passed over Moscow, radioed: "I beg to wish dear Muscovites good night. I am turning in now. You do as you please, but I am turning in." With that, Titov lay back for the programed 7½ hours...
...globe, his retrorockets fired to slow the space capsule and send it plunging back into the atmosphere. He had a choice, he said later, of riding his capsule all the way to earth, or of parachuting out once he dropped low enough. He chose to eject from the Vostok and use his chute, with which he drifted into a plowed field some 460 miles from Moscow, remarkably close to the spot where Yuri Gagarin landed...
...Automation is automation," brooded Gagarin as the critical moment approached, "but I had determined the ship's position and was ready to take control with my own hands. But at 10:25 the braking device was turned on by remote control, and it worked perfectly. The Vostok began to lose speed, and shifted from its orbit into a transitional ellipse. Then it began to enter dense layers of the atmosphere. Its outer surface heated rapidly, and through the curtains that covered the portholes I saw the lurid crimson glow of the flames that raged around the ship...
...ship started to spin, and I informed the ground of this. But the spinning, which worried me, soon stopped, and the rest of the descent went normally. All the equipment had worked splendidly, and the ship was headed precisely for the selected landing area. At 10:55 the Vostok, having circled the globe, landed safely in a fallow plowed field of the collective farm, Lenin's Way, southwest of the city of Engels not far from the village of Smelovka...