Первые пилотируемые корабли Восток и Восход

The first man in space. The first group flight in orbit. First female astronaut. First spacewalk. All these breakthroughs of the USSR took place thanks to the manned spacecraft Vostok and Voskhod. Today, we are no longer fully aware of what a scientific feat these first orbital flights were and what enormous risks they involved: 10-fold G overloads and temperatures up to 3500°, insufficiently studied consequences of weightlessness and cosmic radiation. The trajectory of the ballistic descent, angles of attack and temperature conditions were calculated even on hand-held electromechanical adding machines, and out of the seven test launches that preceded the triumph of Yuri Gagarin, only three were successful. Not without reason, many years later, Boris Chertok admitted that “today I would never have signed a safety guarantee” for the launch of the first cosmonaut and that only “having gained vast experience, I realized how much we risked then ...” In the new book by the leading historian of astronautics, you will find an exhaustive information about the first manned spacecraft of the USSR and the training of the first cosmonauts.