FIRST
VOSTOK AND VOSKHOD
Between 1961 and 1965 the Soviet Union flew eleven people into orbit.
BEGIN — CHAPTER 01 →The simplest shape that comes home the right way up
Vostok was a spherical descent module and a conical instrument module.
The cosmonaut ejected at about 7 km; the low orbit was the backup for the braking engine.
“Poyekhali!” — and 108 minutes later, a field near Saratov
Gagarin lifted off at 06:07 UTC into a 181 × 327 km orbit.
Then the instrument module failed to separate.
Times from ESA's minute-by-minute account.
The peak load depends on one angle, not on the spacecraft
Allen and Eggers solved ballistic entry in closed form.
The vehicle changes where the peak happens, not how big it is.
Default β assumes the Vostok sphere.
Ten days of air, and an orbit that would have taken twenty
Vostok relied on orbital decay instead of a second braking engine.
The model lowers the orbit step by step with drag.
Perigee fixed at 181 km; β assumed 300 kg/m².
Sleeping, feeling sick, and seeing another spacecraft
Titov flew 17 orbits and was the first to sleep in space.
Vostok 3 and 4 came within about 6.5 km without any engine for changing orbit.
48 orbits, and nineteen years until the next woman
Tereshkova flew 48 orbits in nearly three days.
No other woman flew until 1982.
Voskhod 1: no spacesuits, no ejection seats, no margin
The Vostok sphere was refitted for three, with no room for spacesuits.
16 orbits with no escape system at all.
Twelve minutes outside, and a suit too stiff to come back in
Leonov went outside through an inflatable airlock.
The Berkut suit ballooned; Leonov bled it to the lower setting.
Idealised fabric tube.
A manual retrofire and two nights in the snow
The automatic system failed; the crew oriented the ship by hand.
They landed in deep forest and spent two nights there.
From one orbit to a day, a week, a crew and a spacewalk
Every flight answered one question.