America Makes Headway Into Space

Vostok 1 was programmed to operate automatically, or by commands from mission control, because nobody knew how Gagarin would be affected by weightlessness. Gagarin could only take control in an emergency, and to do so, he would have to punch a special three-digit code into a special device in the instrument panel. Gagarin’s flight lasted 108 minutes, with Gagarin suffering no ill effects.

Gagarin’s flight was an embarrassment to America’s president, John F. Kennedy, who was simultaneously dealing with the repercussions of a failed attempt to oust Fidel Castro from his position as leader of Cuba (Caribbean island country between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, 150 Earth km south of South-Western tip of the USA). America would have to send a Human Being into space. On May 5, Alan Shepard went on a 15 minute suborbital hop above the Earth on the Freedom 7.

Less than three weeks later, Kennedy, addressing a joint session of Congress (the legislature of the United States government ), declared, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Such a mission would mean reaching a moving target 239,000 Earth miles away, with rockets more powerful than any yet devised, in spacecraft so complex that they had millions of parts, all within less than ten years. Even some NASA managers were sceptical about it. For the time being, NASA concentrated on the simpler goal of putting a man in orbit.

In the summer of 1961, Gus Grissom repeated Shepard’s suborbital mission. However, at the same time, the Russians sent German Titov into orbit for a full day. Finally, in February 1962, John Glenn rode an Atlas missile into space and circled the Earth three times.

Glenn’s flight gave NASA its first crisis. Sometime before Glenn’s re-entry, ground controllers saw an indication that Friendship 7’s heat shield had detached. This meant that the passage through the atmosphere would be fatal to Glenn. The ground controllers decided that Glenn could use Friendship 7’s package of retrorockets to hold the shield in place. The package was attached to the craft’s heat shield by straps, and was designed to be jettisoned before re-entry. Mission control told Glenn to leave the package attached; they thought it would help to hold the heat shield in place. The indication of a loose heat shield turned out to be erroneous, and Glenn’s re-entry was uneventful.

Three more Mercury astronauts followed in Glenn’s footsteps, culminating with a 33-hour mission by Gordon Cooper in May 1963. However, the Americans still could not keep up with the Russians. In June 1963, Valiery Bykovsky spent nearly five days on the Vostok 5. Two days into his flight, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, joined Bykovsky in orbit on the Vostok 6. By the time the two returned to Earth, Russian cosmonauts had logged a total of almost 16 Earth days in space, compared to just over two days for American astronauts.