Yuri Gagarin's flight

[benzman]

It has always struck me as odd that Gagarin's flight should have been an orbital flight. To make a first attempt at putting a man in space by orbiting him seems to me to be unnecessarily ambitious and risky. Is there any evidence that the Russians flew or attempted sub-orbital flights before Gagarin, as the Americans did with Alan Sheppard and Gus Grissom?

[ZooNamedGames]

Well they did more ANIMAL flights prior to Yuri than America did. America only launched Ham- they had Laika and a whole other crew of dogs who were launched so they knew what they were doing before launching Yuri.

Ofc that's NOT including Animals that did NOT make it to space on the American side- As Miss Chimp was LAUNCHED atop a Little Joe but I don't think that made it to space... may need to double check that.

[lincourtl]

There were plans for it. I'm not sure if ultimately politics intervened, but there were competing interests in the Soviet Union's early space program.

Here's a brief article: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_manned_first.html

And some diagrams here: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/subcabin.htm

[xenomorph555]

As others have said, they originally wanted to create something like Mercury that would fly on a R-5 missile to suborbit, but with the introduction of the 3 stage R-7 they decided to go straight for orbit. They did many test flights of either hardware or the whole ship, without passengers or with dogs. By the time the test program ended the spacecraft was basically ready to fly, the rocket though was very unpredictable.

Test 1-Unmanned-Partial failure

Test 2-Two dogs-Failure

Test 3-Two dogs-Success

Test 4-Two dogs-Partial failure

Test 5-Two dogs-Failure

Test 6-One dog-Success

Test 7-One dog-Success

Edited December 23, 2014 by xenomorph555