Fifty years ago today: youngest person in space throws up

Fifty years ago today, Gherman Titov became the second man to go into orbit. The first was Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961. Titov was also Soviet, and flew aboard the Vostok-2 mission.

While Gagarin launched into enduring fame and became one of my personal heroes, Titov has been largely forgotten. That’s a shame, because his flight included a number of records and advanced our knowledge of conditions in zero gravity.

Unlike Gagarin’s single-orbit flight, which was largely to see whether the Soviet Union could get a man into space, Vostok-2 on 6 August 1961 was intended to test how well someone could deal with zero gravity for 24 hours. Major Titov was chosen for the task. He was only 25 years old and is still the youngest person ever to have gone into space.

It didn’t all go well. Early in the flight Titov became space sick and while trying to eat lunch on his sixth orbit around the Earth he threw up. The effects of this in a small capsule in zero gravity must have been unpleasant to say the least. Titov was made of tough stuff, though, and took the manual control of the capsule for a time and also snapped a picture of the Earth from space, the first human being to do so. Ten-and-a-half hours into the flight he felt good enough to fall asleep.

That’s probably the most amazing part of the story. I can’t imagine actually falling asleep when Earth is shining outside my window. Perhaps the adreneline rush finally wore off and Titov conked out due to sheer exhaustion. He slept for eight hours. When he woke up he still didn’t feel a hundred percent but was able to keep his breakfast down. After 17 orbits he reentered the atmosphere and safely landed.

One interesting footnote to the flight is that the Soviets made all the radio frequencies between Vostok-2 and ground control public, so that the whole world could listen in as the capsule passed overhead and could track it using directional antennae. This kept anyone from claiming the flight was faked. Conspiracy theorists have been saying ignorant things about the space program for a long time now.

For more information and some cool images, check out the great website Space History Notes and their article on Vostok-2.

Image of Maj. Titov and Vostok 2 patch courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Forgotten space pioneer: 50th anniversary Alan Shepard’s historic flight

Fifty years ago today Alan B. Shepard Jr., became the first American in space when he flew in the Freedom 7 mission. He got 116.5 miles up and his flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds. He made history, but has been generally forgotten.

Why? Because he was the second man in space. Yuri Gagarin made it into space 23 days earlier and won the second round of the US-Soviet space race. The Soviets won the first round too, when they got the first satellite into orbit in 1957.

Neither man achieved full orbit, but they did prove you could survive the trip and they paved the way for future space missions. Both deserve to be remembered.

NASA has an excellent interactive webpage about the mission and the capsule he flew in is on display at the Armel-Leftwich Visitor Center at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Shepard was an alum (Class of 1945) so needless to say they’re pretty proud of him over there.

Shepard later landed on the Moon in the Apollo 14 mission and drew laughs and criticism when he played golf in low gravity. You can see the Apollo 14 command module at the John F. Kennedy Space Center.

[Photo courtesy NASA]