Space pioneers: Gagarin, Titov, Leonov. The Presidential Library marking the World Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics

April 12, 1961 the dream of mankind came true as the world's first spaceship-satellite Vostok was launched into orbit around Earth with a man on board - the Soviet pilot-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Thanks to the materials of the electronic collection of the Presidential Library Outer Space it is now possible to return to that significant day and feel the incredible delight that millions of people experienced.

Newsreel footage captured Yuri Gagarin before the start of the flight: the future first cosmonaut of Earth rides in a bus to the launch site, says goodbye to designer Korolev, then settles in the cockpit and the ship takes off. In other footage, we see Sergei Korolev at the control panel, anxiously waiting for radio contact with Yuri Gagarin. Seconds stretch languidly until the moment when he hears Gagarin's words: "I feel fine".

"Victory! A man in space!", "Hello, space - says the Russian" - the main headlines of the issue of the Smena newspaper, published on April 13, 1961. And the Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent even managed to get a short interview with the first cosmonaut immediately after landing. When asked about his state of health, Gagarin replied: “As you can see, it’s good. Safe and sound. The flight was successful. The equipment worked great. I am infinitely happy that it was I who managed to open the way for people into space”.

The first cosmonaut in the world later shared his impressions on the pages of his books: “From a height of 300 kilometers, the illuminated surface of Earth is visible very well. Watching the surface of Earth, I saw clouds and their light shadows that lay on fields, forests and seas. When I flew over our country, I clearly saw squares of collective farm fields. The digitized editions of "The Road to Space", "I See Earth", "Psychology and Space" and others are available at Senate Square, 3 and in remote electronic reading rooms of the Presidential Library.

According to the generally accepted version, Yuri Gagarin circled the globe in 1 hour and 48 minutes. However, according to declassified documents, the historical flight was two minutes shorter. And this is due to a number of dangerous situations that occurred before and during Gagarin's "star journey". More information is available in the video lecture by writer and journalist Anton Pervushin “106 minutes of Yuri Gagarin: declassified details of the first space flight” (2016).

Only 4 months have passed and the world was shocked by a new sensation - a man spent more than 25 hours in orbit, or rather, a day, an hour and 18 minutes. This hero was cosmonaut № 2 - German Titov. Launched on August 6, 1961 the Vostok-2 spacecraft under his control made 17 orbits around the Earth, covering 700 thousand kilometers.

The flight of the Vostok-2 spacecraft is captured on rare footage of the newsreel "Cosmonautics in the USSR" on the Presidential Library’s portal. Many interesting materials dedicated to German Titov are presented in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library. Among them are newspaper articles, rare editions, audio recordings, photographs.

By the way, it was Titov who was considered the leader of the first detachment of cosmonauts formed at the end of 1959, but when it was decided who would fly into space first, the choice was made in favor of Gagarin. The issue of the Kommersant newspaper for September 22, 2000 contains an excerpt from the memoirs of General Nikolai Kamanin, who was in charge of the selection and training of cosmonauts in those years.

But German Titov also became one of the first in the history of astronautics - as a person who made the first long orbital flight. And if Gagarin's flight proved that a person can fly into space then the second flight became a test of human capabilities in weightlessness.

Three and a half years later, on March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the world's first spacewalk! Another dream of mankind has become a reality. For the first time, the people of Earth saw on TV screens how a man left Voskhod-2 into an airless space: he pushed off from the edge of the airlock and moved smoothly until he was stopped by the tension of the halyard - a special cable connecting the astronaut with the ship. Then they moved together over the Earth. For 12 minutes and 9 seconds, while Leonov was in outer space, the ship covered the distance from the Black Sea to Sakhalin. Later, Alexei Leonov would write: “The ship, flooded with bright rays of the sun, with loose antennae-needles, looked like a fantastic creature. The ship was equally brightly illuminated by the sun and the light reflected from the atmosphere of Earth, which unfolded in a solemn blue ball below. All this was reflected in the paintings of the astronaut - after all, Alexei Leonov was also an artist.

…He has become a legend. And also not on the scale of one country or several, but, without exaggeration, the whole Earth. This is evidenced by at least such a fact, which is mentioned in the article of Komsomolskaya Pravda dated July 8, 1975. Its copy is stored in electronic form in the Presidential Library: “Once Leonov was translating a “space” article from a German magazine and came across an unknown verb “leoniren". I looked in dictionaries and couldn't find it. Then one of my friends guessed: “This is “leonit’”, that is, flying in outer space ...“When verbs are built from your last name, this is already more than fame”.

“Step by step, Soviet cosmonautics accumulated experience, with each experiment crossing the line beyond which the unknown ... Space has become part of the living space of mankind”, the newsreel of the 60s of the last century reported, which launched a new “space” era.

The Presidential Library’s portal provides the electronic collection Outer Space which features fragments of newsreels, periodicals, books, postcards and other interesting materials that spotlight various milestones in the development of astronautics.