The Trip.

The early space travelers were almost all male and were all in the military. Americans called their spacemen astronauts; the Soviets called theirs cosmonauts. The United States called its first manned space flight program Project Mercury; the first Soviet program was called Project Vostok.

The First Men in Space.

Yuri A. Gagarin, twenty-seven years old, was the first human in outer space. He was launched in the Vostok 1 space vehicle aboard a modified SS-6 Sapwood ballistic missile. He reached a maximum altitude of 203 miles above Earth and orbited Earth once in his 108-minute flight. The Soviets proved that a man could withstand the forces of lift-off and the space-capsule environment during a short space flight. On 5 May 1961 Alan Shepard, Jr., a commander in the navy, was launched into space in his Project Mercury space capsule Freedom 7. In military fashion...