It was a spring morning on the arid, hot steppes of Kazakhstan, the morning of April 12, 1961—fifty years ago today. A breeze was blowing across the strange girders and blocky buildings of the secret Scientific-Technical Range #5, carved out of the grim stepped by conscripts and prisoners over the past five years.
At the base of a silvery cone-shaped rocket now covered with frost, a bus pulled up and several men emerged, including two wearing white fishbowl helmets and bulky orange-colored pressure suits—Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin. As Titov stood by in case of a last-minute hitch, Gagarin ascended to the top of this rocket, where he was strapped into the Vostok spacecraft for the first attempt a human spaceflight.
Once the hatch closed, Gagarin had nothing to do but wait. His radio link was a fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Popovich, who asked if he wanted anything. “A little music would be nice.” So the communications team fed him some music.
Imagine what it must have been like… wrapped in a bulky suit and helmet, strapped to an ejection seat, lying on your back, waiting to do something no human had ever done.
