[amsat-bb] Re: April 12 - Yuri & ARISSat-1

[Clint Bradford]

>> ... If you want to get technical, Gagarin did actually do an EVA of sorts. 

Thanks, Rick, for trying to bail me out ... But it was a mistake/typo on my part ... (grin)

Yes, after his 108-minute flight, Gagarin ejecting from the spacecraft at 7,000 metres 
(23,000 ft), and landing by parachute. 

Under International Federation of Aeronautics (FAI) 
qualifying rules for aeronautical records, pilots must both take off and land with 
their craft, so the Soviets kept the landing procedures secret until 1978, when 
they finally admitted that Gagarin did not land with his spacecraft.

When the flight was publicly announced, after it was successfully completed, it was 
celebrated around the world as a great triumph, not just for the Soviet Union, but 
for the world itself, though it once again shocked and embarrassed the United States.

Three weeks later, on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, 
when he was launched on the Mercury-Redstone 3 suborbital mission, in a spacecraft 
named Freedom 7. Though he did not achieve orbit, unlike Gagarin he was the first 
person to exercise manual control over his spacecraft's attitude and retro-rocket firing.

The first Soviet cosmonaut to exercise manual control was Gherman Titov in Vostok 2 
on 6 August 1961.

Almost a year after the Soviets put a human into orbit, astronaut John Glenn became 
the first American to orbit the Earth, on 20 February 1962. His Mercury-Atlas 6 mission 
completed three orbits in the Friendship 7 spacecraft, and splashed-down safely in the 
Atlantic Ocean, after a tense reentry, due to what falsely appeared from the telemetry 
data to be a loose heat-shield.

/end/