On April 12, 1961, at 9:07 Moscow time, several tens of kilometers north of the village of Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, at the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome, an intercontinental ballistic missile R-7 was launched, in the bow of which was located a manned spacecraft "Vostok" with Air Force Major Yuri Gagarin on board. The launch was successful. The spacecraft was launched into orbit with an inclination of 65 grams, perigee height of 181 km and apogee height of 327 km and made one round around the Earth in 89 minutes. On 108th mines after start it has returned to the Earth, having landed near village Smelovka of the Saratov area. Thus, four years after the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, the Soviet Union carried out the first human space flight in the world.
The spacecraft consisted of two compartments. The descent, which was also the cockpit of an astronaut, was a 2.3-metre diameter sphere covered with ablative thermal protection material for re-entry into the atmosphere. The spacecraft was controlled automatically and by an astronaut. During the flight it was continuously maintained with the Earth. The atmosphere of the spacecraft is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen at a pressure of 1 atm. (760 mm Hg.). "Vostok1" had a mass of 4730 kg, and with the last stage of the launch vehicle - 6170 kg. The Vostok spacecraft was launched into space 5 times, after which it was declared safe for human flight.
Four weeks after Gagarin's flight on May 5, 1961, Captain Alan Shepherd of the 3rd rank became the first American astronaut.
Although he did not reach near-Earth orbit, he rose above the Earth to an altitude of about 186 km. Shepherd, launched from Cape Canaveral at Mercury 3 using a modified Redstone ballistic missile, flew 15 minutes and 22 seconds before landing in the Atlantic Ocean. He proved that a person in a weightless-neutral environment can manually control a spacecraft. The Mercury spacecraft was significantly different from the Vostok spacecraft.
It consisted of only one module - a manned capsule in the form of a truncated cone with a length of 2.9 m and a base diameter of 1.89 m. Its sealed nickel alloy shell had a titanium lining to protect it from heat during re-entry into the atmosphere.
The atmosphere inside Mercury consisted of pure oxygen at a pressure of 0.36 atmospheres. On February 20, 1962, the U.S. reached near-Earth orbit. Mercury 6, piloted by Navy Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, was launched from Cape Canaveral. Glenn remained in orbit for only 4 hours and 55 minutes, with three rounds to go before he successfully landed. The purpose of Glenn's flight was to determine if a person could work at Mercury CC. The last time Mercury was launched into space was on May 15, 1963.
On March 18, 1965, Mercury was put into orbit with two cosmonauts on board - Colonel Pavel Belyaev, commander of the spacecraft, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexei Leonov, second pilot. Immediately after entering the orbit the crew cleared itself of nitrogen, inhaling pure oxygen. Then the lock compartment was deployed: Leonov entered the lock compartment, closed the hatch cover of the CC and for the first time in the world made a spacewalk. The astronaut with an autonomous life support system was out of the CC cabin for 20 minutes, sometimes moving away from the spacecraft at a distance of up to 5 m. At the time of its departure, it was connected to the SC only by telephone and telemetry cables. Thus, the possibility of the astronaut's stay and work outside the spacecraft was practically confirmed.
On June 3, Jameni 4 was launched with Captains James McDeavitt and Edward White. During this 97:56 flight, White left CC and spent 21 minutes out of the cockpit testing the possibility of manoeuvring in space with a handheld compressed gas jet pistol. Unfortunately, space exploration was not without casualties. On January 27, 1967 the crew preparing to make the first manned flight under the program "Apollo" died in a fire inside the CC burning for 15 seconds in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffey were the first American astronauts to die in CC. On April 23, a new Soyuz-1 SC was launched from Baikonur, piloted by Colonel Vladimir Komarov. The launch was successful.
On the 18th turn, 26 hours 45 minutes after the launch, Komarov began orientation for re-entry into the atmosphere. All operations were normal, but after re-entry and braking the parachute system failed. The astronaut was killed instantly at the moment of the Soyuz's impact on the Earth with the speed of 644 км\ч. Later on, Cosmos took more than one human life, but these victims were the first.