R-7 Vostok

The Vostok programme was a Soviet human spaceflight project to put the first Soviet citizens into low Earth orbit and return them safely. Competing with the United States Project Mercury, it succeeded in placing the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, in a single orbit in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961.

The orbital spaceflight consisted of a single orbit around Earth which skimmed the upper atmosphere at 169 kilometers (91 nautical miles) at its lowest point. The flight took 108 minutes from launch to landing. Gagarin parachuted to the ground separately from his capsule after ejecting at 7 km (23,000 ft) altitude.

The Vostok capsule was developed from the Zenit spy satellite project, and its launch rocket was adapted from the existing R-7 Semyorka intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) design. The name “Vostok” was treated as classified information until Gagarin’s flight was first publicly disclosed to the world press.

The programme carried out six crewed spaceflights between 1961 and 1963. The longest flight lasted nearly five days, and the last four were launched in pairs, one day apart. This exceeded Project Mercury’s demonstrated capabilities of a longest flight of just over 34 hours, and of single missions.

Vostok was succeeded by two Voskhod programme flights in 1964 and 1965, which used three- and two-man modifications of the Vostok capsule and a larger launch rocket.

~wikipedia