It was the Soviet Union's own giant leap for mankind, one thatwould spur a humiliated United States to race for the moon. It happened 50 years ago Tuesday, when an air force pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. The 27-year-old cosmonaut's mission lasted just 108 minutes and was fraught with drama: a break in data transmission, glitches involving antennas, a retrorocket and the separation of modules. And there was an overarching question that science had yet to answer: What would weightlessness do to a human being? "There were all kinds of wild fears that a man could lose his mind in zero gravity, lose his ability to make rational decisions," recalls Oleg Ivanovsky, who oversaw the construction and launch of the Vostok spacecraft that carried Gagarin. The flight was to be fully automatic, but what if weightlessness caused Gagarin to go mad and override the programmed controls? The engineers' solution was to add athree-digit security code that the cosmonaut would have to enter to gain command of the spacecraft. It proved unnecessary. The flightwent off safely, and the handsome Russian with the big smile became a poster boy for the communist world, still a national idol 43 years after his death in a jet training accident, and remembered with enormous affection by the last surviving pioneers of the Soviet space program at Star City outside Moscow, where he trained. From the stern and uncompromising chief designer, Sergei Korolyov, to young nursesand rank-and-file launch pad workers, "people loved, really loved him," Ivanovsky said in a telephone interview. Read more at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/16/MNQ61IRCTD.DTL
