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The kiss goodbye could not be missing.
Through the open helmet visor, a high-ranking Soviet officer apparently gave the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin a communist brotherly kiss on the lips on the morning of April 12, 1961.
And twice as much.
This can be seen in a short film sequence that was apparently filmed by a member of the crew at the Soviet missile test site Tjuratam (now known as the Baikonur spaceport) in Kazakhstan, when Gagarin had just got off the bus to the launch pad.
The day before there had been a ceremony - also recorded on film.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, head of the rocket program, congratulated Gagarin on being the first person to leave earth on the next day.
He wished him a good flight and a successful landing.
"May our spaceships reach unimagined heights", Korolev concluded his speech to the applause of around 30 members of his team.
Gagarin on the bus that took him to the launch pad on April 12, 1961
Source: picture alliance / dpa / Sputnik
Gagarin replied with some apparently memorized words: “Comrades, I want to assure our government, the Communist Party and the Soviet people that I will honorably carry out this mission by building the first road into space.
And if I run into difficulties on this road, I will overcome them, just as good communists do. "
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The next morning the time had come.
At 5.30 a.m. local time the 27-year-old jet pilot got up, asked for help in his orange pressure suit, put on the white helmet with the large Cyrillic letters "CCCP" and went to the bus with his equally well-equipped substitute German Titow, which took him to the launch pad brought.
There he got the brotherly kiss - it is quite possible that it was Korolev who said goodbye to him: You only see the officer from behind in the film clip.
The R-7 launcher launches
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
At 7:10 a.m. Gagarin began the ascent to the top of the 40-meter-high rocket and climbed into the spherical capsule that was named Vostok.
The start should take place in two hours.
But suddenly warning lights in the control center glowed red.
That means: The hatch was not properly closed and could not be closed either.
For more than an hour, the technicians of the ground team occupied themselves with fixing the error;
they even removed the hinge again and replaced the bolts.
Meanwhile the countdown continued.
Gagarin remained seated and was calm itself.
Gagarin's capsule after landing
Source: picture alliance / dpa / Sputnik
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This was one of the reasons why he was selected for the first manned space flight.
But that's only one of the reasons.
Gagarin was a trained fighter pilot, small enough at only 1.57 meters and younger than 30 years - all qualities that had been prerequisites.
Above all, however, it corresponded perfectly to the ideal with which the Soviet party leader Nikita Khrushchev intended to go public in the event of success: "It should be a Russian and a working-class child", writes the space expert Ulli Kulke in his book "Weltraumstürmer".
Both were true of Gagarin.
On the other hand, his skills as a pilot were unimportant.
In fact, from his pilot's examination in 1955 to his admission to the space program in March 1960, he had only completed a total of 247 hours of flight, of which only 23 were under difficult weather conditions.
He was also not an engineer and certainly not a tried and tested test pilot, in contrast to his six US colleagues in the Mercury program, who all had many thousands of flight hours of experience (although they were also at least eight years older).
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That wasn't necessary because Gagarin wasn't supposed to steer himself anyway.
The entire flight would run according to the specified program and, if necessary, corrected by remote control.
The first cosmonaut was human cargo, nothing more.
The front page of the SED central organ "New Germany" from April 13, 1961
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
It was also fitting that a camera was aimed at his face during the entire flight, which was calculated to take just under two hours, in order to document his reactions if he should not be able to report on it himself.
However, Korolev actually wanted Gagarin to remain in continuous radio contact with the ground station.
At 9:07 a.m. local time in Kazakhstan, the 20 liquid fuel combustion chambers of the launch vehicle, a modified ICBM of the R-7 type (NATO code SS-6) with a third stage, were fired.
She lifted Gagarin vertically into the sky on board Wostock.
After six minutes he reported: “Everything is okay, I can see the earth.” At 9.21 am, the spaceship shot over the Kamchatka Peninsula and across the Pacific. A quarter of an hour later, Gagarin flew over Hawaii and radioed: “I feel great, very good , very good very good."
Do you want to hear history too? "Assassin" is the first season of the WELT History Podcast.
Shortly afterwards, his capsule entered the earth's shadow - the sun now shone on the opposite side of the planet.
Suddenly there was darkness.
The radio contact still remained with minor dropouts.
At 9:57 am, Gagarin, using the callsign “cedar”, reported incorrectly: “I am over America.” In reality, at that time he was flying thousands of kilometers west of the Chilean Pacific coast over the South Pacific.
What brought him to this report has never been clarified.
Sergei Korolev had actually given instructions to publish Soviet space missions only after they had been successfully completed.
In the case of Gagarin, that would have meant after the safe landing of the first human in space.
But this time the head of the space program deviated from it.
At 10.02 local time in Kazakhstan, Radio Moscow announced the current flight to the world: “The world's first spaceship, Vostok, was launched today from the Soviet Union with a person on board into an orbit around the earth.
The pilot of the spaceship is a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Major Yuri Alexejewitsch Gagarin. "
At that time, Vostok had just passed Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America, and was now flying on over the Atlantic.
Three radio messages from Gagarin during these minutes were not intercepted by the ground station, but recorded in the capsule.
At 10:25 a.m., when Vostok was just about 180 kilometers above Angola, the African coast was automatically fired.
Now the supply module should separate from the capsule with Gagarin on board.
Meeting of the Young Pioneers Organization in Erfurt in August 1961
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
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But that didn't work.
Instead, Vostok suddenly spun around itself, once every three seconds.
Some cable connections did not come loose as intended.
Gagarin remained calm and made no report to the ground station - in any case Korolev would have been just as unable to intervene as he himself. The high temperatures when re-entering the atmosphere solved the problem: the cables simply melted through.
The forces that now acted on Gagarin were extreme - Soviet doctors later calculated them to be ten g, that is, ten times the normal acceleration due to gravity;
at the start Gagarin had to endure a little more than half at most.
However, this load only lasted a few seconds.
At around 10.50 a.m. Kazakh time, the braking parachutes of the Vostok capsule opened at an altitude of 7,000 meters, and shortly afterwards Gagarin was automatically catapulted from his spaceship by an ejector seat.
Separated from his spaceship, he landed at 10.55 a.m. near the village of Smelowka near the Volga.
Strictly speaking, he had not completed the orbit because he was in orbit, but landed again about 1200 kilometers west of his starting point.
It was not until August 6 and 7, 1961 that Gagarin's substitute German Titow actually circled the planet - 17 times.
Jurij Gagarin in 1961 after his return
Source: picture-alliance / RIA Novosti
Yuri Gagarin was celebrated as a hero all over the Eastern Bloc, but he was not allowed to fly into space again.
Officially, he served as the commander of the Soviet cosmonauts - a purely formal command without any meaning.
After the USA had caught up considerably in the race to the moon in 1967, Gagarin was nominated again for a space flight, but only as a substitute.
That was his luck, because this mission failed and the cosmonaut died on landing.
Less than a year later, Yuri Gagarin was also killed.
He wanted to complete his training as a fighter pilot, which was interrupted in 1960, and flew with an old MiG-15 that crashed on March 27, 1968.
It was not until almost half a century later that the investigation report was made available to the public: it was a concatenation of botch and human error.
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