Word: orbitals
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...song, How Spacious Is My Country. Then came the simple announcement that shattered forever man's ancient isolation on earth: "The world's first spaceship, Vostok [East], with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit...
Gagarin said that weightlessness in orbit makes everything easier to do. "One's legs and arms weigh nothing. Objects float in the cabin. I did not sit in my chair as before, but hung in midair. While in the state of weightlessness, I ate and drank, and everything occurred just as it does on earth. I even worked in that condition. I wrote, jotting down my observations. My handwriting did not change, although the hand did not weigh anything, but I had to hold the notebook. Otherwise it would have floated away. I maintained communications over different channels...
...base, undergoing a careful physical examination and presumably being questioned by experts. But whatever the Soviet space experts learned, they added little to Gaga's own story. They published only the bare statistics of the flight: it lasted 108 minutes, of which 89 minutes were actually spent in orbit; the rest was climbing to orbit and descent to the earth. Academician Evgeny Fedorov, one of the big brains of the Soviet space program, spoke briefly about the descent. It was accomplished with retrorockets, which slowed the Vostok and brought it down into a "braking zone" of gradually thickening...
Gagarin, dubbed the "first cosmonaut" the American press, was in orbit in outer space for an hour and 29 minutes, the time needed by his rocket to circle the earth at a speed of 17,000 miles an hour, Tass reported...
...Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge will attempt to track the last stage of the launching missile, presumably still in orbit. Don utman, Acting Head of the Research Analysis Division of the Observatory, said that the feat was "tremendous." And, he claimed, because the U.S. plans to attempt the same venture this summer, a Russian success was a predictable entry in the race for space. It was not an increase in the lead the Russians had already established, he maintained...