Apr 11, 2010

Posted by in history

Gagarin’s secret parachute jump

Gagarin: parachuted home from Vostok 1

Fifty-nine years ago tomorrow, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the earth. He stunned America—and the world—by riding an R7 rocket aboard Vostok 1 into space.

Gagarin was, by all accounts, a charming and talented man. He was a very good pilot. Not perhaps as good as Gherman Titov, who would be the second cosmonaut to go into space. (Reportedly, Soviet Premier Krushchev wanted Gagarin up first—because Gagarin came from “good peasant stock.”)

In any case, on April 12, 1961, Gagarin orbited the earth and returned safely home. But how he returned was a Soviet secret. Gagarin did not return with his spacecraft—which the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) required for it to be considered an official spaceflight.

Gagarin, instead, took a long parachute jump to the ground. He reached the ground about ten minutes before his spacecraft.

Well, today nobody remembers or cares what the FAI would have said, had they known the truth. We’re all impressed that a brave man allowed himself to be strapped onto a rocket, and sent around the world.

Gagarin died in a plane crash on March 27, 1968—my eleventh birthday.

  • Volker

    There was an interesting breach of secrecy about Gagarin’s parachute jump. I grew up in East Germany and although back then we couldn’t do as much as sneeze without Russian permission, somehow, we knew about the parachute. Gagarin’s own account of his landing was censored in the Soviet Union, but not in East Germany. Gagarin’s auto-biography was published in East Berlin just months after his flight and in it he wrote how he landed a little bit apart from the spacecraft and when he finally made it to the craft, there were already a number of people hunting for souvenirs. I even remember drawing a picture in school once, showing Gagarin on his parachute. Considering that we had thousands of Russians living in East Germany, it is amazing how Soviet authorities were able to keep the truth from their own countrymen for almost thirty years.

  • Gsqared

    I suspect you have the sequence of events reversed. I would believe Gagarin landed well AFTER the Vostok, not before. The Vostok’s higher descent rate, and it’s condition after impact with the ground would also provide a good reason for taking the risk of a parachute descent.

  • Anonymous

    What you say makes sense, and I can’t find the source I used to write up this entry. The most detailed description of the Vostok 1 landing I can find now is here: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html

  • Anonymous

    What you say makes sense, and I can’t find the source I used to write up this entry. The most detailed description of the Vostok 1 landing I can find now is here: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html

  • Anonymous

    What you say makes sense, and I can’t find the source I used to write up this entry. The most detailed description of the Vostok 1 landing I can find now is here: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html

  • Anonymous

    What you say makes sense, and I can’t find the source I used to write up this entry. The most detailed description of the Vostok 1 landing I can find now is here: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok1_landing.html