Vostok 1

Vostok 1 was an automatic spacecraft. The cosmonaut inside it carried a manual override sealed behind an envelope his superiors expected him to open only in an emergency.

On 12 April 1961, at 9:07 Moscow time, Yuri Gagarin lifted from Pad 1/5 at Baikonur with the call sign Kedr — cedar. The capsule weighed 4,725 kg and entered an orbit with a perigee of 181 km and an apogee of 327 km. The flight lasted 108 minutes and completed one orbit.

During reentry, the service module failed to separate cleanly. It remained attached by wiring for several minutes, sending the capsule into gyrations before the cables burned through. The envelope stayed sealed.

Gagarin ejected at approximately 7 km altitude and parachuted separately from the spacecraft — a detail the Soviet Union withheld, since international rules at the time required a pilot to land with the vehicle for an official flight record. He came down near Engels in the Saratov region.