Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin , born on 9 March 1934 and died on 27 March 1968, was the first man to have flown in space. Youri Gagarin gained international fame and was awarded numerous distinctions, including that of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Lenin Order Medal, the highest Soviet distinctions. The Vostok 1 mission is his only space flight, but he was also Vladimir Komarov's backup double for the Soyuz 1 mission. He died at the age of 34 when his Mig 15 crashed.

The Vostok is the first inhabited space program in the Soviet Union that was flown between 1961 and 1963. The program requires the development of the Vostok spacecraft. After several unmanned test flights, Youri Gagarin became the first man to remain in space on April 12,1961 as part of the Vostok 1 mission. Five other crewed missions took place

Vostok 1 12 April 19611 h 48 m12 April 1961Yuri GagarinFirst man in space.

Vostok 2 6 August 19611 d 1 h 18 m7 August 1961Gherman TitovFirst manned mission lasting a full day.

Vostok 3 11 August 19623 d 22 h 22 m15 August 1962Andriyan NikolayevFirst simultaneous flight of two manned spacecraft.

Vostok 4 12 August 19622 d 22 h 56 m15 August 1962Pavel PopovichFirst simultaneous flight of two manned spacecraft.

Vostok 5 14 June 19634 d 23 h 7 m19 June 1963 Valery BykovskyLongest solo orbital flight.

Vostok 616 June 19632 d 22 h 50 m19 June 1963Valentina TereshkovaFirst woman in space.

Sputnik 1 is the first artificial satellite of the Earth. This Soviet spacecraft was launched on 4 October 1957 from the Baikonur cosmodrome by an R-7 Semiorka launcher which crowned the work of the OKB-1 engineers and technicians responsible for developing this large intercontinental ballistic missile. Their leader Sergei Korolev, a visionary fascinated by the space prospects opened by rockets, had succeeded in persuading his military sponsors to use the ballistic missile as a satellite launcher.

The launch of Sputnik I marks the first year of the space age: the following year, 28 attempts to launch satellites were made, including 5 successful ones. The event has a global impact and is a huge shock to the American public, as it clearly demonstrates the Soviet's apparent lead in this field. The Soviet leaders, initially surprised by the echo of the event, will make the Soviet space program the keystone of the regime's propaganda. In this period of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, this event triggered the space race; the two countries tried to prove the superiority of their form of government through their space achievements over the following decades. American leaders will work to catch up by creating a space agency dedicated to the civil space program (NASA) and providing it with enormous financial resources.

Laïka (from Russian: "small barker") is a female dog of the Soviet space program and the first living being put in orbit around the Earth. It was launched by the USSR aboard the spacecraft Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957, one month after the launch of the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1. After the success of Sputnik 1, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded the launch of a second vehicle on 7 November to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Russian revolution. In the emergency, without preliminary study, Sputnik 2 is built in four weeks.

Laïka died about 7 hours after launching, from stress and overheating, probably due to a failure of the temperature control system. The true cause of his death was not revealed until several decades after the mission. The versions that survived until Dr. Dimitri Malachenkov's revelations in 2002 claimed that she had died consuming poisoned food - which had been prepared to prevent her from suffering from the heat when Sputnik 2 returned to the atmosphere - or from asphyxiation at the exhaustion of her oxygen reserves. In addition, until then, it was thought that Laïka had remained alive for four days in the cockpit of the spacecraft. The space capsule was consumed on April 14,1958 when it entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Despite the death of Laïka, experience proved that a living being could survive an orbiting orbit around the Earth and suffer the effects of weightlessness (Laïka only died after this stage). The Sputnik 2 mission paved the way for man's space flight by providing scientists with the first data on the reactions of living organisms in space.

Valentina Tereshkova remains to this day the only woman to have made a solo journey in space and the youngest cosmonaut.

After the success of Yuri Gagarin's flight, Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, had the idea of sending a woman into space. A textile worker at the age of 18, she was chosen among more than 400 candidates to become, under the leadership of Youri Gagarine, the first woman in space.

The ship's automatic orientation program failed during the flight, Vostok-6 was going up instead of down, and it tended to move away from the Earth during each revolution instead of approaching it. Although Terechkova suffered from nausea and physical discomfort for most of the flight, she filled out a logbook and took photographs of the horizon. The control system data had to be modified to return to a good orbit. At an exhibition in London in 2015 on Soviet space conquest, she explained that the failure was due to a programming error on the part of the ship.

During the final phase of the Vostok 6 landing, Valentina Terechkova ejected as planned from her capsule in a parachute at an altitude of 7000 metres, but found herself over a lake. However, it managed to fly over the lake and land on land.

He was the first man to perform a spacewalk in space as part of the Voskhod 2 mission on March 18,1965.
In 1975, for his second mission, commanding the Soyuz 19 mission, he took part in the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, marking a warming up of relations between the two countries during the Cold War.

On March 18,1965, about an hour and a half after the ship was placed in orbit 173x498 km, Leonov entered the Voskhod 2 Volga inflatable airlock to begin his spacewalk. The inner hatch is closed by Beliaev. This triggers the airlock depressurization and then the opening of the outer hatch. Leonov neatly emerges from the airlock connected to the space capsule by a 4.5-metre cable.

After about ten minutes floating in space, Leonov starts maneuvers to reintegrate the spacecraft. It is planned that he will be able to retract his front feet so that he can be reinstalled in his seat, without having to tumble in the airlock because the diameter of the airlock theoretically does not allow it. But then he realizes that, in a vacuum, the suit has expanded so much that his feet and hands are no longer positioned in the gloves and boots, as if he had shrunk. He has to drop the pressure in his suit at 0.27 atmospheres with a valve to regain some maneuverability and, contrary to what was planned, he barely enters the airlock head first. Once in the airlock, he makes a difficult turn to position his feet in front of the airlock. Leonov is exhausted, his pulse rate has risen to 143 beats per minute and his body temperature is 38 degrees Celsius. While swimming, he opened his helmet immediately after triggering the external hatch and pressurized the airlock in violation of his instructions. He re-enters the cabin, then Voskhod 2's crew begins the rest of the mission program. Leonov's walk through space lasted 12 minutes and 9 seconds.

The mission subsequently encountered other problems. The hatch failed to close properly, causing cabin air to leak slowly. During the 17th orbit, which was planned for the atmospheric re-entry of the ship, the firing of the retrofusées did not start because the ship's automatic steering system had not worked. The two cosmonauts had to use an imprecise manual system that landed them 386 kilometres from the planned site in an inhospitable area of Siberia in the middle of a dense forest. The two men spent two nights on the spot before they could be repatriated.

All these unforeseen adventures of the spacewalk and the mission were killed by the Soviet authorities after the announcement of the mission's success. They will not be revealed until much later when the regime is liberalised.

The Voskhod programme is the inhabited space programme of the Soviet Union, which took over from the Vostok programme in 1964. The decision to develop the Voskhod program is made in the context of the Space Race to match NASA's Gemini program while awaiting the development of the Soyuz ship. The Voskhod is a simple evolution of the Vostok spacecraft allowing three occupants to be carried away.

The programme will consist of only two missions with a human crew: Voskhod 1 takes a crew of three cosmonauts with it in October 1964 for the first time in space history; during the Voskhod 2 mission launched in March 1965 Alexei Leonov carries out the first ever "spacewalk". A third mission to set a new record for the length of stay in space is being abandoned due to problems with the development of an adaptive life support system that results in NASA taking the initiative. The capabilities of the Voskhod spacecraft being too limited to carry out more sophisticated space missions, Soviet manned space flights would not resume until 1967 under the Soyuz Programme.