Vostok Failure Essay

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On April 12th of 1961, Russia became the first nation to send a man named Alexeyevich Gagarin to space, aboard the Vostok I space shuttle. It was one of the several controversial attempts that had been deemed to fail to get a man into space (Wisnewski 60). The other well-known attempt being by cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin in 1957. During his journey, the craft developed mechanical faults and crash-landed in China. The Soviet State indeed conquered the feat to send the first man into space, thus thwarting America’s previous efforts towards achieving this glory (Lewis). With pride and the intent to break a ‘legitimate’ world record, the Americans took to endeavoring to place the first man on the surface of the moon, without suffering any technical glitches, and back to earth. In fact, this achievement was part of the late …show more content…

First, there was some form of miscommunication between the craft engineering team and the governing body Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) that led to the inaccurate drafting of the rules of engagement. The drawback regarding the inability of the Vostok I to engage mechanical brakes during re-entry caused a flaw in the FAI rulebook. Further, the perceived 108-minute flight over the earth’s orbit was not a perfect placement. The path is claimed to have been a suborbital one, and not fully orbital. The implication here was that Gagarin never got to circumnavigate the earth along the orbital trajectory, rather, the spacecraft fell back into the earth’s atmosphere at a particular point. About 20,000 feet before ground impact, Gagarin was seat-ejected safely to achieve a safe landing. Such an occurrence, according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale guidelines, would have dismissed as unsuccessful, and owing to the braking system dysfunction, the rules were modified, and Yuri Gagarin was awarded a pioneer medal for his

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