The flight and plight of Yuri Gagarin

The path to low orbit never did run smooth... the lives and struggles of both the first man in Space and the man who got him there

Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, 160km west of Moscow. His father, Alexei Ivanovich, and his mother, Anna Timofeyevna, worked on a collective farm – he as a storesman, she with the dairy herd.
Yuri's brother Valentin was ten years older, and his sister Zoya, seven years his senior. A younger brother, Boris, was born in 1936. Despite hardships, the family was reasonably content, given the harsh conditions of the prevailing Stalinist regime and the occasional frightening disappearances among their neighbours.
The description of the Gagarins as 'peasants' is a propagandist myth. Anna Timofeyevna's father was an oil-drilling manager in St Petersburg until the 1917 revolution disrupted that existence. Anna was educated, a voracious reader, while Alexei was a skilled craftsman. At his side, Yuri learned practical skills, including woodwork and the maintenance of farm machine

Lives lost in rocket research

Valentin Glushko was not Sergei Korolev's only rival. Mikhael Yangel developed an alternative missile, the R-16, from his bureau in Ukraine, while the fourth major figure in Soviet rocketry, Vladimir Chelomei, was responsible for the Proton, still in use today. Yangel's R-16 also went into service, but not before causing Russia's greatest rocket disaster.
On 24 October 1960, as the R-16 was being prepared for its first flight, a premature signal caused the upper stage to fire, burning a hole in the top of the lower stage. A gigantic explosion instantly killed everyone on the gantry, while staff on the ground were swamped with viscous burning fuel.
More than 100 people were killed, including Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the man in charge, perched on his chair near the gantry as a surge of blazing chemicals swept towards him.
The cosmonauts at Star City also experienced tragedy, just three weeks before Gagarin's flight. Valentin Bondarenko was the baby of the cosmonaut squad, a fresh-faced lad of 24. At the end of a 15-day session in a chamber filled with pure oxygen, testing the ability of a cosmonaut to survive in cramped isolation, Bondarenko cleaned an irritated patch of skin with a piece of cotton wool, daubed in alcohol, and tossed it aside. It landed on the an electric cooking stove and caught alight.
In the confined oxygen-rich environment, the fire spread with terrifying rapidity. The circumstances of his death were not made public until 1986, while the scale of the R-16 disaster has only become clear recently