.dleuty

gallery

Forty-seven years ago, Восток-1 (Vostok 1) was the first manned orbital spaceflight. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on 1961-04-12 06:07 UTC, taking Yuri A. Gagarin into space. Gagarin orbited the Earth once in 108 minutes. He returned unharmed, ejecting from the Vostok capsule 7 km (23,000 ft) above the ground and parachuting separately to the ground. Resembling a 4.7 ton bowling ball, the capsule's parachute landing was too rough to put cosmonauts ae risk.

Ground controllers did not know if a stable orbit had been achieved until 25 minutes after launch.

The left side of the reverse of this 1981 1-ruble coin depicts the primitive launch vehicle named Ласточка (pronounced Lastochka, meaning Swallow). Attitude control was run by an automated system, since Medical staff and spacecraft engineers were unsure how a human being might react to weightlessness. Flight controls were locked out to prevent Gagarin from taking manual control. Override Codes to unlock the controls were placed onboard for Gagarin's use in case of emergency.) Vostok I could not change its orbit, only spacecraft attitude, and for much of the flight the spacecraft's attitude was allowed to drift. The automatic system brought Vostok 1 into alignment for retrofire about 1 hour into the flight.

The right side of the reverse contained the image of the orbital space station, Салют-6 (Salyut 6), with an attached Союз (Soyuz, meaning Union) spacecraft. Salute 6 was the fifth in the series of state-of-the-art space stations of the soviet space program initiated April 4, 1973. It joined in space by Skylab, first space station the United States launched into orbit, 1973-05-14.

The center image is Юрий А Гагарин or Yuri A. Gagarin, command pilot of Vostok I. Gagarin later became deputy training director of Star City. He began to retraining as a fighter pilot. On 27 March 1968, he and his instructor died in a MiG-15 on a routine training flight near Kirzhach.

The banner across the top of the coins translates loosely into "20th Anniversary of Man Piloting in Space".

The inset contains the obverse of the coin bearing the familiar Soviet Union Coat of Arms.