First Person to Orbit Earth

That’s what the first space travelers did: they sat in a cramped capsule and went along for the ride. When the former Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in Vostok I on April 12, 1961, the flight lasted just one orbit—about 90 minutes.
 The United States responded a few months later by launching Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr., in a Mercury capsule on a Redstone rocket that couldn’t even reach the speed required to make orbit. Shepard got to the edge of space and then was fished out of the Atlantic Ocean after just 15 minutes in flight. In those days, it was an enormous challenge even to build a small spaceship that could carry a person into space and back right away.

However, the greatest thing about human technology is that we improve as we learn and gain more and more experience. In the Mercury program there were 19 unmanned launches to test the various systems! Step by step, the designers and engineers in both the former Soviet Union and the United States solved every little problem and built more reliable spaceships. John Herschel Glenn, Jr., was the first U.S. astronaut in orbit, almost a year after Gagarin, in a Mercury capsule he named Friendship 7. Glenn stayed up for three orbits of Earth. Although Glenn had many minor problems, such as keeping cool in his spacesuit and responding to a signal that said his heat shield might come loose, none of them prevented a safe landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The distance he traveled in only five hours was almost 76,000 miles (122,000 km).

People across the United States were thrilled by Glenn’s suc- cess, and NASA followed it with three more orbital Mercury flights. Meanwhile, the former Soviet Union also made strides in its program. There were five more Vostok and two Voskhod flights. Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova became the first woman in space on board Vostok 6, and Alexei Archipovich Leonov made the first spacewalk during the Voskhod 2 mission.