Re-Creating the First Human Spaceflight Experience
By Mark Brown, Wired UK
A collaboration between ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli and filmmaker Christopher Riley hopes to show what Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin — the first human to go into space and orbit the planet — saw on April 12, 1961.
Half-a-century ago, the world’s first cosmonaut took a 108-minute single-orbit trip around the planet and saw something no other human had ever witnessed before: our home planet, from space. “I marveled at the beauty of our planet,” Gagarin said at the time. “People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it.”
But while the explorer documented his journey in the Vostok 1 spaceship through a rather poignant and poetic voice recording, he only managed to snap a few photographs and couldn’t capture any video of the historic event.
So Nespoli, who is aboard the International Space Station, has recreated the journey and captured the whole event in HD video. He pointed his camera out of the ISS’s new giant cupola window, and recorded the same vistas of Earth that Gagarin saw.
But getting it right, and matching Vostok 1’s orbital path as closely as possible, was far from easy. The ISS only mimics the Russian’s journey — following the same trajectory, during the same time of day — once every six weeks. The ISS astronaut had to get it right the first time to capture Gagarin’s journey.
In 1961, the Russian pioneer left the launch site near the Aral Sea at 6 a.m., before passing over the Pacific Ocean on the night side of the Earth and emerging into sunlight again over the South Atlantic. The ship then soared across the whole African continent and the Middle East, before returning to ground at 7:55 a.m., just north of the Caspian Sea.
There is one major difference in this new footage: the moon phase. “When Gagarin flew into the night side of the Earth it was a crescent moon,” explains filmmaker Riley. “According to his autobiography Road to the Stars, he tried to look for the moon — out of curiosity, to see what it looked like from space. But unfortunately it was not in his field of view. ‘Never mind’ he writes, ‘I’ll see it next time.’”
Sadly, there never was a next time for Gagarin. He wasn’t allowed to fly into space again, and died in a plane crash seven years later. “We thought it was a nice gesture to put in the moon he never got to see.”
You can see a trailer for the film, First Orbit, above. The full video will premiere on YouTube on April 12, the 50th anniversary of Earth’s first orbit by a human.
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