Stephen Walker, my guest today and the author of a new book on Gagarin’s historic feat and the world it happened in, puts at 106. The spherical capsule was blasted into orbit, circling the Earth at a speed of about 300 miles per minute, 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.Īccounts vary on exactly how long Gagarin spent circling our blue planet before he re-entered the atmosphere, hurtling towards Earth, gravity rapidly pulling him in.
Yuri Gagarin, 27-year-old Russian ex-fighter pilot and cosmonaut, was launched into space inside a tiny capsule on top of a ballistic missile, originally designed to carry a warhead. On that day, without much fanfare, Russia sent the first human to space and it happened in secrecy, with very few hints in advance. Pakinam Amer: It was at 09.07 am Moscow time on Apthat a new chapter of history was written. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.
Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively. Walker discusses his new book Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space, out today, and how Gagarin’s journey-an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy-happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight-the first of its kind- Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond. It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead.
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