Saturday, November 12, 2011

Vostok 1






Here are some images of Revell's 1/24 scale Vostok 1 plus some added detail by yours truly.

From Wikipedia"

Vostok 1 (Russian: Восток-1, East 1 or Orient 1) was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961. The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space. The flight marked the first time that a human entered outer space, as well as the first orbital flight of a manned vehicle. Vostok 1 was launched by the Soviet space program, and was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergey Korolyov under military supervision of Kerim Kerimov and others.[7]

The spaceflight consisted of a single orbit of the Earth. According to official records, the spaceflight took 108 minutes from launch to landing. As planned, Gagarin landed separately from his spacecraft, having ejected with a parachute 7 km (23,000 ft) above ground. Historian Asif Siddiqi has written that Gagarin was in the spacecraft for 108 minutes after launch, and that he didn't touch ground for another 10 minutes. (The exact duration is useful to prove that Gagarin completed a full 360-degree orbit in inertial space. The longitude of launch to landing spanned a little more than 340 degrees, but the Earth also was rotating underneath him at about 15 degrees per hour while Gagarin was aloft.)

Due to the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program at the time, many details of the spaceflight only came to light years later, and several details in the original press releases turned out to be false.


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