* 1961 – The Russian ( Soviet ) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 ( Vostok 1 ).

Averaging at least 1. 6 km thick, the ice is so massive that it has depressed the continental bedrock in some areas more than 2. 5 km below sea level ; subglacial lakes of liquid water also occur ( e. g., Lake Vostok ).

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth aboard Vostok 1 manned spacecraft on 12 April 1961.

Columbia was successfully launched on April 12, 1981, the 20th anniversary of the first human spaceflight ( Vostok 1 ), and returned on April 14, 1981, after orbiting the Earth 36 times, landing on the dry lakebed runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The Soviet space program achieved many of the first milestones, including the first living being in orbit in 1957, the first human spaceflight ( Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 ) in 1961, the first spacewalk ( by Aleksei Leonov ) in 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station ( Salyut 1 ) in 1971.

Vostok 1 was launched by the Soviet space program, and was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergei Korolev under the supervision of Kerim Kerimov and others.

27-year-old Yuri Gagarin was the only crew member of Vostok 1.

" Kamanin was referring to the second mission, Vostok 2, which would last a full day, compared to the relatively short single-orbit mission of Vostok 1.

Gagarin entered the Vostok 1 spacecraft, and at 7: 10 am local time ( 04: 10 UT ), the radio communication system was turned on.

Once Gagarin was in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, his picture appeared on television screens in the launch control room from an onboard camera.

* 06: 10 UT The payload shroud covering Vostok 1 is released.

* 06: 13 UT The rocket is still firing, pushing Vostok 1 toward orbit.

Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1

I'm continuing the flight ..." Vostok 1 is moving further downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

* 06: 17 UT The Vostok rocket final stage shuts down, ten seconds later the spacecraft separates and Vostok 1 reaches orbit.

Lake Vostok (, Ozero Vostok, lit.

Vostok (,, Orient or East ) may refer to:

Vostok 2 (, Orient 2 or East 2 ) was a Soviet space mission which carried cosmonaut Gherman Titov into orbit for a full day on August 6, 1961 to study the effects of a more prolonged period of weightlessness on the human body.

Vostok 3 (, Orient 3 or East 3 ) was a spaceflight of the Soviet space program intended to determine the ability of the human body to function in conditions of weightlessness and test the endurance of the Vostok 3KA spacecraft over longer flights.

Vostok 4 (, Orient 4 or East 4 ) was a mission in the Soviet space program.

Vostok 5 (, Orient 5 or East 5 ) was a joint mission of the Soviet space program together with Vostok 6 ; as with the previous pair of Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 the two Vostok spacecraft came close to one another in orbit and established a radio link.

Vostok 6 (, Orient 6 or East 6 ) was the first human spaceflight mission to carry a woman, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, into space.

The use of the word for " rising " to refer to the east ( where the sun rises ) has analogs from many languages: compare the terms " Levant " (< French levant " rising "), " Vostok " (< Russian voskhod " sunrise "), " Anatolia " (< Greek anatole ), " mizrahi " in Hebrew (" zriha " meaning sunrise ), " sharq " (< Arabic " rise ", " rising "), " shygys " (< Kazakh shygu " come out "), (, a pictograph of the sun rising behind a tree ) and " The Land of the Rising Sun " to refer to Japan.

The Vostok (, translated as East ) was a type of spacecraft built by the Soviet Union.

The Vostok programme (,, Orient or East ) was a Soviet human spaceflight project that succeeded in putting a person into Earth's orbit for the first time.

This site (, 3233 m above sea level, 560 km from Vostok Station ) was chosen to obtain the longest undisturbed chronicle of environmental change, in order to characterise climate variability over several glacial cycles, and to study potential climate forcings and their relationship to events in other regions.

Lake Vostok is located at the southern Pole of Cold, beneath Russia's Vostok Station under the surface of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is at above mean sea level.

The lake is named after Vostok Station, which in turn is named after the Vostok ( Восток ), a sloop-of-war, which mean " East " in Russian.

Location of Lake Vostok in East Antarctica

The Vostok 6 landing site coordinates are, which is 200 km West of Barnaul, Region of Altai in the Russian Federation and 7 km south of Baevo, and 650 km North East of Karagandy, Kazakhstan.

Two Chechen former warlords Said-Magomed Kakiev and Sulim Yamadayev are commanders of Special Battalions Vostok and Zapad (" East " and " West ") that are controlled by the GRU.

Vostok Research Station is located at, about 1, 300 km from the Geographic South Pole, at the center of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and within the Australian Antarctic Territory.

The preparation work on the two ships, the 985-ton sloop-of-war Vostok (" East ") and the 530-ton support vessel Mirny (" Peaceful ") was carried out by Mikhail Lazarev, who had captained his own circumnavigation of the globe before.

The island was first sighted in 1820 by the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who named the island for his ship Vostok ( the name means " East " in Russian ).

However, the Soviet Union was fiercely competitive in holding the early lead it had gained in manned spaceflight, so the Soviet Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the hasty conversion of its single-pilot Vostok capsule into a two-or three-person craft named Voskhod, in order to compete with Gemini and Apollo.

The first human spaceflight in history was accomplished on a derivative of R-7, Vostok, on 12 April 1961, by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961.

The Soviet programme for doing this was the Vostok programme.

At 07: 55 UT, when Vostok 1 was still 7 km from the ground, the hatch of the spacecraft was released, and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected.

At altitude, the main parachute was deployed from the Vostok spacecraft.

Two schoolgirls witnessed the Vostok landing and described the scene: " It was a huge ball, about two or three metres high.

When Soviet officials filled out the FAI papers to register the flight of Vostok 1, they stated that the launch site was Baykonur at.

The coldest recorded average annual temperature was at Vostok Station, Antarctica.

He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.

Gagarin was further selected for an elite training group known as the Sochi Six, from which the first cosmonauts of the Vostok programme would be chosen.

Out of the twenty selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov due to their performance during training sessions as well as their physical characteristics — space was limited in the small Vostok cockpit, and both men were rather short.

The first manned spacecraft was Vostok 1, which carried Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, and completed a full Earth orbit.