Ignition Protocol / Programme
Vostok
Whether a person could survive orbit, and whether Moscow could say so first. The capsule shared its design with the Zenit reconnaissance satellite, so one development effort bought both a cosmonaut and a camera.
Vostok put six people into orbit between 1961 and 1963 in a spherical capsule developed out of the Zenit spy satellite project, on a launcher adapted from the R-7 ballistic missile. It was a single seat with almost nothing for the occupant to fly, and its running order was set by which record would read best rather than by what the engineers wanted to test next.
How it went
Sergei Korolev built one vehicle to serve two customers, a photographic satellite for the military and a capsule for a person, sharing the pressure hull and the recovery hardware.
Yuri Gagarin flew a single orbit on 12 April 1961 lasting 106 minutes, not the 108 reported for the next fifty years, and left the capsule on the way down to land under his own parachute.
The rocket overperformed and put Gagarin into a higher orbit than planned, a fact kept from him during the flight and from everyone else for decades.
Vostok 5 and Vostok 6 flew together in June 1963, putting Valentina Tereshkova in orbit as the first woman in space and leaving Vostok 5 holding the record for the longest solo orbital flight.
With the record book emptied the design had nowhere left to go, and the remaining airframes were reworked into Voskhod rather than flown as built.
What it flew
What it cost, what it got
Six crewed flights, six survivors, and the first human being in orbit. The price was a vehicle whose pilot ejected and came down separately from his own spacecraft, and a programme structure that treated the flight schedule as a publishing schedule.
Sources
- Vostok-1: the first human in spaceRussianSpaceWeb
- Vostok programmeWikipedia