Word: yuri
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...faster than the design speed of the U.S.'s piloted rocket plane X-15. Though his capsule had curved along its course with infinite precision, its ballistic trajectory could not be compared with the far more complicated orbital flight that Russia claimed last month for its own astronaut, Yuri Gagarin (TIME cover, April 21). Still, it was a magnificent milestone on man's path into space; it was a signal achievement of U.S. science. And it brightened the cold-war world with a luster all its own. It was a gaudy American gamble, a nation going for broke...
...television cameras and all the world's press, the U.S. could take special satisfaction in the fact that its spacemen did not keep secrets from science. They had worked in the open, unafraid of failure, unshielded by the compulsive secrecy that still surrounds much of the voyage of Yuri Gagarin's Vostok. Now, like Kilroy, Shepard had been there-and while he traveled, the world had watched...
...that he was looking forward to seeing him in Washington. Said Shepard: "Thank you very much, Mr. President. It was certainly a very thrilling ride. I'd like to thank everybody who made it possible." Soon after the stilted conversation (which sounded for all the world like Major Yuri Gagarin's talk with Khrushchev after his orbital flight), an airplane took Shepard to Grand Bahama Island, where he was held incommunicado for an elaborate physical and mental examination and a more complete debriefing...
...landing controls, the Vostok was crammed with enough food and water for a ten-day whirl. For low-altitude emergencies, there were two escape hatches and an ejector seat equipped with a parachute, emergency rations, an oxygen supply and a radio transmitter. As he spun past the stars, Yuri could study his surroundings through three heat-resistant portholes. Even if he spotted no landmarks 188 miles below, he could get his bearings by watching an "optical orientator"-a cockpit globe synchronized to turn with the 18,000-mile-an-hour flight of the orbiting spaceship...
...Yuri actually make the flight? U.S. certainty that he had come by his honors honestly was based on a strategic network of listening posts capable of tuning in on the actual countdown, long-range radar tracking stations that plotted the orbit of the satellite and could even estimate its size and weight, electronic eavesdropping that may have overheard Yuri's radio reports to earth, and, finally, traditional cloak-and-dagger espionage inside the Soviet Union...