Intensive space exploration began only in the last century. For centuries people have studied the stars and celestial sphere, but only in the 20th century scientific and technical progress made it possible not only to enter Earth’s orbit, but also to be in outer space, to set foot on the Moon. Who was the first to fly into space? Below we will answer this and other questions related to such flights.

The first living creature in outer space

Many are sure that the famous mongrels Belka and Strelka were the first to go into space. However, this is not the case. Before their flight, various experiments were carried out for at least 10 years, during which various animals were released into low-Earth orbit. The very first were squirrel monkeys, which were launched by the Americans in 1949.

Four-legged friends - pioneers of space flights

It was only in 1951 that experiments began on our four-legged friends. The first dogs to fly into space were the mongrels Dezik and Tsygan. They were launched on high-altitude rockets to an altitude of 450 km. They returned successfully. The legendary Laika made its first real orbital flight on the Sputnik 2 rocket in 1957. The dog died from stress and overheating... a short time after takeoff. In any case, Laika was doomed to death, since the design of the ship did not allow for a return to Earth.

And only in 1960, the well-known Belka and Strelka ascended into space on the Sputnik 5 rocket. They survived the flight successfully and returned home safe and sound. It became clear that the first manned flight into space was just around the corner. Soviet and American scientists worked hard in this direction.

Who was the first to fly into space?

Any schoolchild can answer this question. Everyone knows who was the first to fly into space. The name of this hero is Yuri Gagarin. The Vostok space rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 12, 1961. During takeoff, Gagarin exclaimed: “Let's go!” He was calm; the archive contains information that the sensors recorded a pulse of 64 beats per minute. Already in orbit, Yuri was surprised: “The Earth is blue! How beautiful!”

He orbited the planet in 108 minutes and returned successfully, landing in a field near settlement Engels Saratov region. Gagarin recalled that the first to see him in an orange spacesuit were a peasant woman and her daughter and they were scared...

The news spread all over the world that the first manned flight into space had taken place. This great event is the starting point for the development outer space person.

Biography

Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in the Smolensk region. His father and mother were simple collective farmers from the village of Klushino.

In June 1951, Yura graduated with honors from Lyubertsy vocational school. In the same year he graduated from the Lyubertsy School of Working Youth.

In 1955 with highest scores graduated from the Saratov Industrial College and graduated from the Saratov Aero Club. In the same year he was drafted into the ranks of the Soviet Army. He served as a fighter pilot in an aviation regiment.

In 1957 he graduated from the First Chkalov Aviation School named after. Voroshilov (Orenburg) with the qualification of a first-class military pilot. Yu. A. Gagarin was a student of the famous test pilot Akbulatov.

On March 3, 1960, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Air Force, he was enrolled in the cosmonaut corps. A year later he made his famous flight. After him, Yu. A. Gagarin became a living legend, received recognition throughout the world, and was awarded the title of Hero Soviet Union and awarded many medals. Yuri was declared an honorary citizen of various cities.

The personal life of the one who first flew into space also turned out well. In 1957, Gagarin got married and then had two daughters.

However, on March 27, 1968, at the age of 34, the first person to fly into space tragically died while testing the MiG-15 fighter. At that time the whole country was grieving!

The weaker sex is not far behind

The first woman to conquer space was also a citizen of the USSR. This is Valentina Tereshkova. She was born on March 6, 1937 in a simple family. She graduated from school, worked at a factory, and then as a weaver at a mill. At the same time, I studied in absentia at a technical school. light industry. Her hobby is parachuting, in which she was one of the best in the women's team. In 1960, Valentina became secretary of the Komsomol committee.

When Academician Korolev came up with the idea of ​​sending a woman into low-Earth orbit, a competition for applicants was announced. The woman had to be no older than 30 years old, no taller than 170 cm and weigh no more than 70 kg, have good health, be politically literate, morally stable and have experience in skydiving. Valentina immediately applied. She and 4 other applicants were selected among several hundred applicants.

Tereshkova's difficult flight

Tedious training began, which lasted several months. In November 1962, Tereshkova and the other candidates successfully passed the exams. However, the choice fell on Valentina, although according to the doctors’ findings, she was fifth on the list. But the decisive ones were political factors- the woman was from a simple family, the secretary of the Komsomol cell. A big plus was the fact that she knew how to speak well at meetings (her experience as a Komsomol member affected her). After all, if the flight was successful, Tereshkova was expected to travel internationally and meet with Western journalists. According to contemporaries, Khrushchov personally insisted on Valentina’s candidacy.

The historic launch took place on June 16, 1963 on a Vostok-6 rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The flight into space lasted three days, and during this time emergency situations arose. The most serious and threatening was Tereshkova’s temporary disorientation, as a result of which she directed the spacecraft in the other direction, moving away from enormous speed from the planned flight path to open space. The observers got their bearings in time and switched the rocket to automatic control mode, returning it to the correct route. V.V. Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut on the planet, said many years later that she physically felt very bad. Indeed, immediately after landing she was in bad shape and was urgently hospitalized. However, after a couple of days, she accepted congratulations with a smile.

For her heroic flight into space, Valentina Tereshkova was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and other honors.

Other victories of the USSR

The Americans were shocked by the news of Gagarin's flight, and then by the news of Tereshkova's orbital flight. The United States launched the first man - Alan Shepard - into space a month after the USSR, but this was not a real space flight, only a suborbital one. Only on February 20, 1962, the American Mercury 6 rocket made its first real orbital flight with astronaut John Glenn on board.

In the space race between the USA and the USSR, the country of the Soviets took almost all the prizes:

• The world's first satellite was launched by the USSR on October 4, 1957.
• Gagarin is the first cosmonaut on the planet.
• Tereshkova is a pioneer woman in astronautics.
• Alexey Leonov, a citizen of the USSR, carried out the first spacewalk on March 18, 1965 from the Voskhod-2 spacecraft.
• Soviet citizen Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman who dared to go into outer space on July 25, 1984.
• Anatoly Solovyov spent 16 spacewalks in airless space in total record 82 hours 20 minutes.

The United States took revenge when it was the first to land its astronauts Neil Armstrong and Alvin Aldrin on the Moon. Although many argue that it was a big scam, and so far no man has set foot on the moon.

• 1964 - the first civilians were sent into space - doctor Boris Egorov and doctor technical sciences Konstantin Feoktistov.
• 1978 - Czechoslovakia joined the ranks of countries conquering space, sending cosmonaut V. Remek into the vacuum of space.
• 1985 - the first politicians in space - Senator Edwin Garn and Prince Saudi Arabia As-Saud.
• 1990 - Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama went into outer space.

Tourist space

Idea space tourism was put forward back in 1967. The first official report on this topic was heard in 1986 at International Congress in astronautics. In the same year, the first tourist was supposed to fly into space - American Christy McAuliffe, a teacher who won this prize in the competition. However, she died during the launch of the Challenger shuttle, which became the reason for the state ban on non-professional flights into space.

The idea of ​​such tourism did not die, but continued to develop at an unprecedented speed. Already in 2001, Russia was able to send the first tourist into space - American Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million for the flight. This mission caused great dissatisfaction with NASA. However, in 2002, again, Russia sent a second tourist into space - Mark Shuttleworth, who also paid $20 million for the flight.

Tito and Shuttleworth are the first people to fly into space as tourists. To date, 8 travelers have already visited outer space. The cost of the flight increased to $40 million. Announced additional service for 15 million - a spacewalk.

USA leads active work to create cutting-edge safe shuttles for space tourism and promise to reduce the cost of flights to 50 thousand dollars by 2020, which will make it possible to send to the International space station up to 500 tourists per year.

The news of the first man's flight into space shook the whole world. Today everyone on the planet knows that the first manned flight into space took place on April 12, 1961, and this astronaut’s name was . This day is known as International Cosmonautics Day.

However, the world's first flight into space was made not by people, but by an animal. It was they who had to experience all the difficulties of space travel so that scientists could make human flight as safe as possible.

From the early fifties to the sixties of the last century, scientists conducted a number of experiments on animals in which they studied the effects of overload, weightlessness and vibration on a living organism. The first testers were not launched into orbit. They flew on rockets along a parabolic trajectory. The most suitable candidates for such tests were dogs. Of all the applicants, the choice fell on mongrels, since they were tougher than purebred candidates.

The first dogs in space

The first test dogs did not reach outer space. On July 22, 1951, stray dogs named Dezik and Gypsy made the first suborbital flight to an altitude of eighty-seven kilometers seven hundred meters. The R-1B rocket was launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome. This mission was successful and after it five more launches took place with different dogs.

Another series of launches took place in 1954-1956. The purpose of these missions was to test spacesuits in conditions of depressurization of the ship. The dog was sent to a height of one hundred and ten kilometers. Most of The animals tolerated the load well, but in subsequent tests, five out of twelve dogs died.

In 1957, animals were launched into orbit for the first time. This was the year of a breakthrough in astronautics. The very first dogs in space had to experience conditions of prolonged weightlessness, temperature changes and overloads during launch. The first cosmonaut was destined to be a dog named Laika. She liked her exemplary behavior and pleasant appearance. The dog made four orbits around the earth and unfortunately died due to a malfunction in the thermoregulation system. However, Laika still had to die, since the launch was designed to only go one way.

Belka and Strelka

Next step was the launch of animals on the descent module. The dogs Belka and Strelka, together with several dozen mice and two rats, became the first to make a successful flight in space and return to Earth. August 19, 1960 is actually the date of the first flight into space with a successful outcome for the test animals. This was a big step towards space exploration, because the information collected during the flight became invaluable material for further research.

Other animals

However, besides dogs, other animals have also been sent into space. In particular, monkeys took part in suborbital and orbital flights, as they are the closest in physiology to humans. In the United States, the first monkey was launched into space around 1948. In France, a monkey was sent into space in 1967. In the USSR, monkeys were used for launches into orbit in 1983 and 1996. In the first launches, mortality among monkeys was quite high.

Felicette the cat

In addition, for space travel used cats. The first suborbital astronaut in France was a cat named Felix. But the first orbital flight was made by a cat named Felicette. This happened on October 18, 1963. It is interesting to note that Felix the cat was initially appointed as the main candidate for this flight, but shortly before the start he ran away and had to look for a replacement. Felicette the cat was launched into space from the Sahara Desert. The rocket rose to a height of two hundred kilometers, after which the capsule with the cat separated and went back behind the Earth by parachute.

For each anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, “exposing” articles appear again and again in newspapers and the Internet, claiming that Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut. Usually they come down to a list of rumors about pilots who allegedly flew into space before Gagarin, but died there, which is why their names are classified. Where did the myth of victims come from? Soviet cosmonautics?

Venusian phantom

For the first time, the Soviet Union was accused of keeping silent about the deaths of cosmonauts even before Gagarin’s flight. In the diary of the then head of the cosmonaut corps, Nikolai Kamanin, there is an entry dated February 12, 1961:

After the launch of a rocket to Venus on February 4, many in the West believe that we failed to launch a man into space; the Italians even allegedly “heard” groans and intermittent Russian speech. These are all completely baseless fabrications. In fact, we are working hard to guarantee the astronaut's landing. From my point of view, we are even overly cautious in this. Full guarantee successful first there will never be a flight into space, and some of the risk is justified by the greatness of the task...

The launch on February 4, 1961 was indeed unsuccessful, but there was no person on board. This was the first attempt to send a research apparatus to Venus. The Molniya launch vehicle launched it into space, but due to a malfunction, the device remained in low-Earth orbit. The Soviet government, according to established tradition, did not officially acknowledge the failure, and in a TASS message to the whole world it was announced that the heavy satellite had been successfully launched and that the scientific and technical tasks had been completed.

In general, it was the unjustified in many cases veil of secrecy surrounding the domestic space program that gave rise to a lot of rumors and speculation - and not only among Western journalists, but also among Soviet citizens.

Birth of a myth

However, let's return to Western journalists. The first message dedicated to the “victims of red space” was published by the Italians: in December 1959, the Continental agency disseminated a statement by a certain high-ranking Czech communist that the USSR had been launching manned ballistic missiles since 1957. One of the pilots, named Alexey Ledovsky, allegedly died on November 1, 1957 during such a suborbital launch. Developing the topic, journalists mentioned three more “dead cosmonauts”: Sergei Shiborin (allegedly died on February 1, 1958), Andrei Mitkov (allegedly died on January 1, 1959) and Maria Gromova (allegedly died on June 1, 1959). At the same time, the female pilot allegedly crashed not in a rocket, but while testing a prototype of an orbital aircraft with a rocket engine.

During the same period, rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth said that he had heard about a manned suborbital launch that allegedly took place at the Kapustin Yar test site in early 1958 and ended in the death of the pilot. However, Oberth emphasized that he knows about “ space catastrophe» from hearsay and cannot vouch for the veracity of the information.

And the Continental agency produced sensation after sensation. Italian correspondents talked about “ lunar ship", which exploded on the launch pad of the mythical Siberian cosmodrome "Sputnikgrad", then about the upcoming secret flight of two Soviet pilots... Since none of the sensations were confirmed, they stopped trusting the Continental reports. But the “rumor factory” soon gained followers.

In October 1959, the Ogonyok magazine published an article about aircraft testers. Among them were mentioned Alexey Belokonev, Ivan Kachur, Alexey Grachev. The newspaper "Evening Moscow" in a note on a similar topic spoke about Gennady Mikhailov and Gennady Zavodovsky. For some reason, a journalist from the Associated Press, which republished the materials, decided that the photographs in these articles depicted future Soviet cosmonauts. Since their names subsequently did not appear in TASS space reports, the “logical” conclusion was drawn: these five died during early unsuccessful launches.

The real Belokonov, Grachev and Kachur in photographs from Ogonyok (Photo: Dmitry Baltermants)

Moreover, the wild imagination of the journalists ran wild so much that for each of the pilots they came up with a separate detailed version death. Thus, after the launch of the first satellite 1KP, the Vostok prototype, on May 15, 1960, Western media claimed that the pilot Zavodovsky was on board. He allegedly died due to a malfunction in the orientation system, which put the ship into a higher orbit.

The mythical cosmonaut Kachur found his death on September 27, 1960 during the unsuccessful launch of another satellite, the orbital flight of which was supposed to take place during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to New York. According to rumors Soviet leader had with him a model of a manned spaceship, which he was supposed to triumphantly show to Western journalists if the flight had been successful.

It must be admitted that the Soviet diplomatic services they themselves created an unhealthy atmosphere of anticipation for some high-profile event, hinting to American journalists that “something amazing” would happen on September 27. Intelligence reported that tracking ships spacecraft took positions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Soviet sailor, who escaped during the same period, confirmed that a space launch was being prepared. But, after knocking his fist at the UN General Assembly, on October 13, 1960, Nikita Khrushchev left America. There have been no official statements from TASS. Of course, journalists immediately trumpeted to the whole world about new catastrophe that befell the Soviet space program.

Many years later it became known that a launch was actually planned for those days. But it was not a person who was supposed to fly into space, but 1M - the first apparatus for studying Mars. However, attempts to send two identical devices into at least low-Earth orbit, undertaken on October 10 and 14, ended ingloriously: in both cases, the launch was disrupted due to the failure of the Molniya launch vehicle.

The next victim space race", pilot Grachev, died, according to Western media, on September 15, 1961. About him terrible death told by the same rumor factory “Continental”. In February 1962, the agency said that in September 1961, two Soviet cosmonauts were launched on the Vostok-3 spacecraft: supposedly this launch was timed to coincide with the XXII Congress of the CPSU and during the flight the ship was supposed to fly around the Moon, but instead “ lost in the depths of the Universe."

Cosmonaut Ilyushin?

Vladimir Sergeevich Ilyushin, son famous aircraft designer, is another victim of sensation hunters. In 1960, he had an accident and was declared another “Dogagarin cosmonaut.” Proponents of the conspiracy theory believe that Ilyushin was forbidden to talk about his flight into space until the end of his life, because he allegedly... landed on Chinese territory. It is impossible to think of a more ridiculous reason to abandon space primacy. Moreover, Ilyushin not only did not die - he lived until 2010 and rose to the rank of major general.

Voices in space

The grave of tester Zavodovsky. As can be seen from the dates, the “deceased cosmonaut” died in the 21st century in retirement

The failed launch of the Venusian station on February 4, 1961 gave rise to a new wave of rumors. Then the radio amateur brothers Achille and Giovanni Iudica-Cordiglia first made their presence known and built their own radio station near Turin. They claimed that they were able to intercept telemetry radio signals of the beating of a human heart and the intermittent breathing of a dying person Soviet cosmonaut. This “incident” is associated with the name of the mythical cosmonaut Mikhailov, who allegedly died in orbit.

But that's not all! In 1965, brother radio amateurs told an Italian newspaper about three strange broadcasts from space. The first interception allegedly took place on November 28, 1960: radio amateurs heard the sounds of Morse code and a request for help on English language. On May 16, 1961, they managed to catch the confused speech of a Russian female cosmonaut on air. The third radio intercept, on May 15, 1962, recorded conversations between three Russian pilots (two men and a woman) dying in space. In the recording, through the crackling noise, the following phrases could be discerned: “Conditions are getting worse... why aren’t you responding?.. the speed is falling... the world will never know about us...”

Impressive, isn't it? In order to finally assure the reader of the authenticity of the “facts” presented, the Italian newspaper names the names of the victims. The first “victim” on this list was pilot Alexey Grachev. The female cosmonaut's name was Lyudmila. Among the trio who died in 1962, for some reason only one is named - Alexei Belokonev, about whom Ogonyok wrote.

In the same year, the “sensational” information from the Italian newspaper was republished by the American magazine Reader’s Digest. Four years later, the book Autopsy of an Astronaut, written by pathologist Sam Stonebreaker, was published. In it, the author claimed that he flew into space on Gemini 12 to obtain tissue samples from dead Soviet pilots resting in the ship in orbit since May 1962.

That's who really flew into space before Gagarin - the dummy Ivan Ivanovich. To prevent him from being mistaken for the corpse of an astronaut, a “Model” sign was inserted into the helmet.

As for the article in Ogonyok, which gave rise not even to a myth, but to an entire mythology, the famous journalist Yaroslav Golovanov, who investigated the stories of the “Dogagarin cosmonauts,” interviewed Alexei Timofeevich Belokonov himself (that’s right, and not Belokonev, as is customary among myth-makers ). This is what the tester, who was buried by Western rumor factories a long time ago, said.

In the 50s, long before Gagarin’s flight, my comrades and I, then very young guys - Lyosha Grachev, Gennady Zavodovsky, Gennady Mikhailov, Vanya Kachur, were engaged in ground testing of aviation equipment and anti-g flight suits. By the way, at the same time, spacesuits for dogs that flew on high-altitude rockets were created and tested in a nearby laboratory. The work was difficult, but very interesting.

One day a correspondent from the magazine “Ogonyok” came to us, walked around the laboratories, talked with us, and then published a report “On the threshold of great heights” with photographs (see “Ogonyok” No. 42, 1959 - Ya. G.). The main character of this report was Lyosha Grachev, but they also told about me how I experienced the effects of explosive decompression. Ivan Kachur was also mentioned. They also talked about the altitude record of Vladimir Ilyushin, who then rose to 28,852 meters. The journalist slightly distorted my last name and called me not Belokonov, but Belokonev.

Well, that's where it all started. Magazine New The York Journal-American printed a fake that my comrades and I flew into space before Gagarin and died. Chief Editor“Izvestia” Alexey Ivanovich Adzhubey invited Mikhailov and me to the editorial office. We arrived, talked with journalists, and took pictures of us. This photograph was published in Izvestia (May 27, 1963 - Ya. G.) next to open letter Adzhubey to Mr. Hurst Jr., the owner of the magazine that sent us into space and buried us.

We ourselves published a response to the Americans to their article in the newspaper “Krasnaya Zvezda” (May 29, 1963 - Ya. G.), in which we honestly wrote: “We did not have the chance to rise into extra-atmospheric space. We are testing various equipment for high-altitude flights.” No one died during these tests. Gennady Zavodovsky lived in Moscow, worked as a driver, did not get into Izvestia at that time - he was on a flight, Lyosha Grachev worked in Ryazan at the factory of calculating and analytical machines, Ivan Kachur lived in the town of Pechenezhin in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, worked as a teacher in an orphanage . Later, I participated in tests related to life support systems for astronauts, and even after Gagarin’s flight I was awarded the medal “For Labor Valor” for this work...

Forgotten heroes

So, the list of mythical cosmonauts still included people who worked for the space program, but they authentic life markedly different from journalistic fantasies.

In addition to the four testing friends, a very real figure was, for example, Pyotr Dolgov. Western media They declared him an astronaut who died during the disaster of the orbital satellite on October 10, 1960 (in fact, on that day they tried to launch the 1M No. 1 apparatus). Colonel Pyotr Dolgov died much later: on November 1, 1962, during a parachute jump from a stratospheric balloon raised to a height of 25.5 kilometers. When Dolgov left the stratospheric balloon, the face shield of the pressure helmet cracked - death occurred instantly.

Record-breaking skydiver Pyotr Dolgov really died, but space has nothing to do with it

Pilot Anokhin flew on a rocket plane, not on a spaceship

I present all these details here not to amaze the reader or make him doubt the history of astronautics as we know it. A review of rumors and mythical episodes is needed to show how harmful it was to the reputation of the Russian space program policy of silence and disinformation. The reluctance and inability to admit mistakes played a cruel joke on us: even when TASS made a completely truthful statement, they refused to believe it, looking for contradictions or trying to read “between the lines.”

Sometimes the test pilots themselves contribute to the spread of rumors. Shortly before his death in 1986, the distinguished Soviet pilot Sergei Anokhin said in an interview: “I flew on a rocket.” Journalists immediately asked the question: when and on what rocket could he fly? They remembered that from the mid-1960s Anokhin headed the department in Sergei Korolev’s bureau that trained “civilian” cosmonauts for flights. And he himself was part of the detachment. Is it because he already had experience “flying on a rocket” in the early 1950s?.. But in fact, long before working at the bureau, Anokhin participated in testing a rocket plane and a cruise missile and, most likely, had this in mind.

James Oberg, one of the debunkers of this "conspiracy theory"

All the rumors about the Soviet cosmonautics that flashed in the Western press since the mid-1960s, an American expert on the issues undertook to systematize space technology James Oberg. Based on the collected material, he wrote the article “Phantoms of Space,” first published in 1975. Now this work has been supplemented with new materials and has gone through many reprints. Having a reputation as a staunch anti-Soviet, Oberg is nevertheless very scrupulous in selecting information concerning the secrets of the Soviet space program, and is very careful in drawing conclusions. Without denying that there are many “blank spots” in the history of Soviet cosmonautics, he concludes that stories about cosmonauts dying during launch or in orbit are implausible. All these are the fruits of fantasy, heated by the regime of secrecy.

Reality vs Myth

Soviet cosmonauts really died - both before and after Gagarin’s flight. Let us remember them and bow our heads to Valentin Bondarenko (died on Earth, without ever flying into space, on March 23, 1961 due to a fire during testing), Vladimir Komarov (died on April 24, 1967 due to a disaster during the landing of the Soyuz spacecraft). 1"), Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev (died on June 30, 1971 due to depressurization of the Soyuz-11 descent module). However, in the history of Soviet cosmonautics there was and is not secret corpses.

For cynics who do not believe documents, memoirs and diaries, but rely on “logic” and “common sense,” I will give a cynical but absolutely logical argument. In the conditions of the space race, it did not matter whether the first cosmonaut returned to Earth or not - the main thing was to declare his priority. Therefore, if there had been pilot Zavodovsky on the 1KP satellite, as irresponsible authors are trying to assure us, it would be Zavodovsky who would have been declared the first cosmonaut of the planet. Of course, the whole world would mourn him, but soviet man I would still be the first to go into space, and that’s the main thing.

The readiness of the USSR government for any outcome of the flight is confirmed by declassified documents. I will give here a fragment of a note sent to the CPSU Central Committee on March 30, 1961 on behalf of those involved in the space program:

We consider it appropriate to publish the first TASS message immediately after the satellite enters orbit for the following reasons:

a) if necessary, this will facilitate the rapid organization of rescue;
b) this will exclude any announcement foreign state astronaut as a reconnaissance officer for military purposes...

Here is another document on the same topic. On April 3, the CPSU Central Committee adopted a resolution “On the launch of a spacecraft-satellite”:

1. Approve the proposal<…>about the launch of the Vostok-3 spacecraft with an astronaut on board.
2. Approve the draft TASS report on the launch of a spacecraft with an astronaut on board an Earth satellite and grant the Launch Commission the right, if necessary, to make clarifications on the launch results, and the USSR Council of Ministers Commission on Military-Industrial Issues to publish it.

They did it as they decided. The TASS report dedicated to the first manned flight into space sounded even before Gagarin returned to Earth. He could have died during the descent - and April 12 would still have become Cosmonautics Day.

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"Unsolved Mysteries": Was Yuri Gagarin the first man in space

First before Gagarin

November 10, 1959. A newspaper with sensational material is published in the USA. It contains a secret recording of conversations between the chief Soviet designer Sergei Korolev with an astronaut: "Earth. The pressure is normal." After a minute of silence: “I can’t hear you, the batteries have failed. Oxygen. Comrades, for God’s sake, what to do? What? I can’t. Do you understand? Do you understand?” Then the astronaut’s speech turned into an indistinct muttering and disappeared completely. According to journalist Allen Henders, the deceased's name was Alexander Belokonev.

“As for Gagarin, there is no smoke without fire. There are some factors that allow rumors to emerge. We all know the canonical date of Gagarin’s flight – April 12, but before his flight there were five satellite ships on which the flight of the Vostok spacecraft was tested,” - said Vadim Lukashevich.

Andrey Simonov has been researching flight tests in our country for many years. He admits experiments in this industry have been going on since 1953.

Yuri Gagarin, 1961

“Nobody wanted to show, imagine: the world’s first man in space, and suddenly death. It would be an even greater shame than if we fell behind. Therefore, we checked every detail so that there was a one hundred percent guarantee of success. On the eve of Gagarin’s flight, the Daily Worker publishes an article of his Moscow correspondent. He reports: “On April 8, Vladimir Ilyushin, a test pilot, the son of a legendary aircraft designer, made an orbital flight on board the Rossiya spacecraft.” It is he who will be listed in the Guinness Book of Records for 1964 as the first cosmonaut on the planet,” comments Andrey Simonov.

“The Hungarian writer Eastwood Nemory wrote a whole book about how the first cosmonaut was Viktor Ilyushin, who survived, but was in unsightly shape after this unsuccessful landing,” said Yuri Karash.

The Italian agency "Continental", shortly after Gagarin's return, published an interview with its scientists, the Undico-Cordillo brothers, who said that since 1957 they had recorded three tragedies in space. In their space listening center, they picked up radio signals of the dying, groans and intermittent heartbeats. Those recordings still exist today.

"Initially, about 3,000 people were selected. We looked first of all at their medical records, that is, there was an almost absolute requirement physical health. Of these, as a result of a strict selection, 6 people were retained and flew under the Vostok program. In fact, of course, more were selected,” adds Yuri Karash.

The last unofficial flight in the foreign press is listed as February 4, 1961. The Baikonur launch actually took place that day, but who flew? Why didn't you come back? The details remained classified for many years.

Why did cosmonaut Bondarenko die?

The West is convinced that Gagarin only played the role of the first cosmonaut to hide his failures.

“Before Gagarin’s flight, the Americans were also working on their Mercury spacecraft, they had two suborbital launches, they managed to launch them. The rhesus monkey Sam flew in the first, and the first astronaut, the chimpanzee Ham, flew in the second. He flew two months before Gagarin, he rose to a height of 285 km vertically. Perhaps that is why Korolev began to say that there was no point in launching Gagarin suborbitally, it was necessary to immediately make a full orbit. Otherwise he would have been second behind the monkey. Therefore, the race was neck and neck," said Vadim Lukashevich.

Today, astronauts acknowledge the death of one of their colleagues. This really happened before Gagarin, and they don’t like to talk about it. Valentin Bondarenko was one of the favorites of the first squad - the youngest and most cheerful. Pilot-cosmonaut Viktor Gorbatko was friends with him, but even he admits that he died through his own fault.

"We heated food and tea on ordinary spiral tiles. We wiped his head for sensors with alcohol, and an alcohol swab accidentally fell on the tile - he was getting ready to have dinner. A fire occurred, he had 80% burns, he was taken away in an ambulance, but he I lived only two or three hours,” recalls Viktor Gorbatko.

Yuri Gagarin before the start

Gagarin could not say goodbye to Bondarenko, he is called to the start. There is a battle for space. Before sending Yuri Gagarin into flight, he and his backup, German Titov, are brought to the cosmodrome twice. They work out to the smallest detail everything that can be done on Earth, and for real: in spacesuits, with a report, with negotiations.

“They rehearsed the landing, reported them, they were taken in an elevator to the very top, to the ship. Everything was done except boarding the ship. That is, a large retinue: soldiers conscript service, standing in the cordon, saw that the cosmonauts reported, went to the rocket, the rocket flew away,” said Vadim Lukashevich.

This is how rumors are born. They are also fueled by kitchen conversations of dissidents who do not trust the authorities.

“Once I was in Italy, those who proved that Gagarin and Tereshkova were not the first gathered there,” recalls Viktor Gorbatko.

Late 70s Almost twenty years after Gagarin's flight. Cosmonauts can already divulge some details of the first launches. Then Viktor Gorbatko says for the first time that Valentin Bondarenko died not in space, but in a soundproofing chamber during a test. But those radio signals that the Italian brothers heard really existed, and they came from space.

“Radio transmitters were taken on board. They simply recorded the voice and watched how the signal would pass to Earth. There were simple call signs: “Reception!”, “Can you hear me?”, etc. Western pilots, having heard this, might well have thought “that a person is saying this, although in fact it was a tape recorder speaking,” said Andrei Simonov.

Human trials

So was astronaut number zero, and who are the people whose names were named by the largest foreign publications? Why did they believe in them so much? Was Gagarin the first, second or twelfth cosmonaut in the world? The first journalistic investigation appeared in the summer of 1965.

“In American publications - Belokonev, Ledovsky, Shiborin, Gusev, Zavadovsky also flew before Gagarin - a lot of names were given. And it turned out that in 1959 in the Ogonyok magazine there was a detailed publication where testers of spacesuits for pilots, not for cosmonauts, were interviewed ". And they said that they tested high-altitude spacesuits. And so the Americans took the names of people from this group and passed them off as astronauts. But the questions remained. What really happened to Vladimir Ilyushin?" - said Andrei Simonov.

"He was very unique person. In 1959, he set a world record for airplane flight altitude, and a lot has been written about him. And then in 1960 he suddenly disappeared from view. Everything was simple: on June 8, 1960, he got into a car accident on the way from Moscow to Zhukovsky, and was treated for a long time. This year he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and he came on crutches to the presentation. And, apparently, someone saw, and gossip began to spread that he had an unsuccessful flight into space. Although he himself always denied it,” recalls Simonov.

Yuri Gagarin in the Grand Kremlin Palace, 1961

Evgeny Kiryushin is also one of those who was named among the dead cosmonauts. His friends heard about this on a foreign radio station.

"Someone randomly asked me: 'Oh! Are you alive? “I heard you died” - “No, I say, you’re alive!” said Evgeny Kiryushin.

Kiryushin was one of those who did everything to prevent the cosmonauts from dying. For more than 20 years he was officially listed as either a simple laboratory assistant or a mechanic at the institute space medicine. Only in the early 1990s did it become possible to speak out loud about his work, and he received the title of Hero of Russia.

“Let’s say, explosive decompression, when they checked the suit for an explosion - a fraction of a second passes until complete depressurization, from earth pressure to vacuum - three tenths of a second. God knows what can happen: maybe lightning will tear off, maybe the helmet, and maybe the head ", explained Kiryushin.

There are countless tragedies among the testers; not many can withstand twelve-fold overloads and emergency ejection. A common injury is a spinal fracture. Until the very end, no one knows how a person will behave in space. It is believed that in a state of weightlessness he will simply go crazy. Gagarin's entire ship control panel is blocked. The code is in a special envelope; a deranged pilot will not be able to decipher it. Before last minute the success of the flight is in doubt.

"After the Second World War International Commission prohibited experiments and tests on humans. But how can you develop such a new industry as astronautics without conducting experiments with people? This is impossible, therefore, despite all sorts of international acts, we had a group of testers who did this,” said Evgeny Kiryushin.

Vadim Lukashevich has written more than one book about astronautics. He believes that the Americans, by spreading rumors about Soviet launch failures, did not want to belittle the achievements of the Soviet country. On the contrary, they were frightened by such information. During cold war they kept a close eye on the Russians. For meetings in the US Congress on the budget, the Pentagon even published a special brochure “Soviet Military Power”.

"The West then accepted very little information about the Soviet Union. To the point that they would not say where we started from. We started from Chuo Tama, but they said that from Baikonur, and this is hundreds of kilometers away. And the Americans recognized the launch site from ballistic calculations, looking at where the rocket took off from. Gagarin is the first person in space, but according to the rules of the international association, in order to register a record, he had to take off in a ship and land in a ship. And he ejected at an altitude of 80 km and landed on a parachute separately, but when we submitted documents to register the record, we hid it. That is, they thought up a lot of things,” said Vadim Lukashevich.

Death of Ivan Ivanovich

Larisa Uspenskaya knows secrets like no one else space flights. For many years she has been in charge of the archive of the first cosmonaut corps. Unique, recently closed documents are stored here.

"In 2011, when the celebrations took place, anniversary events, a massive declassification of documents was carried out. Documents from the Presidential Archive, state power at that time, our departments were declassified. Recently, a non-departmental commission declassified a significant block of archives relating to the first space flights,” said Larisa Uspenskaya.

The very first recordings of the archive of Gagarin's flight were made in real time by Korolev and the cosmonaut personally immediately after landing. Gagarin writes how he lost his pencil in weightlessness, how he was thirsty, how the ship deviated from course.

Designer Sergei Korolev and first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, 1961

“The Americans took direction finding of Gagarin’s negotiations with the Earth during the flight and woke up the president that the race was lost,” said Vadim Lukashevich.

Meanwhile, three weeks earlier, a resident of the village of Korsha, in Western Kazakhstan, discovered a man in a spacesuit on a high spruce tree - he landed unsuccessfully with a parachute. The news about the deceased cosmonaut quickly spread around the area. But no one had time to get close to him: the military arrived and the victim disappeared without a trace.

“We can only call the dummy Ivan Ivanovich as cosmonaut number zero. It was absolutely impossible to imagine how the human body would react. The overloads that the astronauts were subjected to during training and testing on Earth could not compare with what would happen there,” said Larisa Uspenskaya .

Officially, two dummies flew into space, jokingly nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich by the designers. In order not to scare people, they will write on the suit of the second one: “Model”. But it was impossible to stop the rumors.

“It was only fifty years later that the UN established that April 12, 1961 is the day of the first human flight into space,” said Viktor Gorbatko.

Today, for $1 million, anyone can go into space. But has it become safe? What are astronauts still hiding?

“I was worried, of course, but there was no fear. Unfortunately, the previous crew, when we flew to Almaz (the Salyut-5 military station), panicked, they began to take things more and more acutely, which caused a deterioration in their health, and this led to an emergency landing, and for some time it was even believed that the station was poisoned.

Only behind the scenes, testers say that the risk in flights has not disappeared. It's still roulette, which is why they sign non-disclosure documents. Their reports are kept as secret files for years.

“As a result of each flight, not counting TASS reports, a whole complex of documents arises. For example, Gagarin’s flight log has not yet been published. What do we know about the flights after Gagarin?” - Vadim Lukashevich argues.

It would seem that the veil of secrecy of the first flights has been lifted, and except for dogs and mannequins, no one had been in orbit before Gagarin, but until all the documents are declassified, these questions will be investigated again and again.

Major Gagarin completed the task. After him, Viktor Gorbatko managed to travel into space three times, each time the mission was made more difficult.

“Plains, forests, all this can be seen from space. On my second flight, taking the appropriate equipment, we could see a person,” recalls Viktor Gorbatko.

Space exploration began long before the flight. Many scientists and designers tried to create a rocket in order to give humanity the opportunity to explore outer space. The main rivals in this struggle were the USSR and the USA. Both countries aspired to become space pioneers. But in 1961 the world learned who was the first to fly into space. It was a citizen of the USSR, Yuri Gagarin.

Experimental flights into space began a little earlier. But dogs were used as astronauts. At first, the rockets were launched to a low altitude. Scientists have studied the effect of weightlessness on the body of animals. After this, developments in this area continued. At the same time, preparations were being made for the first manned space flight.

Then a rocket was designed for longer flights, but it did not have a mechanism for returning to the ground. Therefore, a dog named Laika, who flew into space on it, did not return to earth and died. Then two dogs, Gypsy and Desik, flew into space on a high-altitude rocket. They completed their flight safely and landed successfully on the ground.

Therefore, when talking about who was the first to fly into space, one cannot fail to mention these astronauts.

But, of course, the real breakthrough in this area was the first manned space flight. It was a historic day not only in but for all of humanity. The whole world found out who was the first to fly into space.

Thanks to the launch vehicle, a spaceship entered orbit, the only passenger of which was a person. The duration of the first flight was only 108 minutes. But these were moments of pride for Soviet people And domestic astronautics. Today, when astronauts work in space for several months at a time, this period seems so short. But for a first flight it was a huge achievement.

The one who first flew into space showed all of humanity that it was possible to explore this unknown space. People got the opportunity to work and live in space. This is how the word cosmonaut came into use, and a new profession appeared.

People in this profession must have many skills and knowledge. The most important and initial requirement that is presented to them is excellent health. During the flight, the astronaut experiences very large overloads. They are especially felt during landing and entering orbit. The state of weightlessness is also a test for human body. That is why the health requirements are so high.

In addition, the astronaut must have courage and courage. Ability to accept correct solution V difficult situations is also required quality. Outer space is an unusual environment for humans. There are radiations and vacuums that are harmful to humans. But the ship's hull is strong and impenetrable. It has everything you need for full life and work.
An astronaut must know the structure of a spacecraft thoroughly. The combination of all these qualities precisely characterized the first cosmonaut of the Earth.

Yuri Gagarin was the one who first flew into space. But that was only the initial stage. Further research outer space continued. The complexity of flights and the tasks that faced the astronauts increased. The technology became more complex. The next flights lasted more than a day. Then there was a man's exit from the spaceship. It was accomplished. Orbital stations were created and launched, which allowed crews of astronauts to replace each other in orbit.

The development of astronautics is proceeding ever faster. But the flight is the main event in this field, which has opened up new challenges, opportunities and prospects for humanity.