Gagarin did not land in his capsule
Yuri GAGARIN became the first person in space on 12 April 1961, completing one ORBIT in 108 minutes. On the way down, at around seven kilometres up, he ejected from the Vostok CAPSULE and came down separately by parachute, landing in a field near the Volga where a farmer's wife and her granddaughter were the first people to meet him.
The SOVIET authorities concealed the ejection for years. International rules for aviation records required the pilot to land inside his craft, and admitting otherwise risked the record. Gagarin was 27, had been chosen partly because he was short enough to fit the cabin, and never flew in space again; he was killed in a training jet crash in 1968.
The computers were people, then very small machines
Before electronic computers could be trusted, trajectories were calculated by hand, and NASA employed rooms of mathematicians — many of them women, and some of them Black women working in a segregated unit at Langley in Virginia — to do it. Katherine Johnson checked the orbital calculations for John Glenn's 1962 flight; Glenn asked specifically for her to confirm the machine's numbers before he would go.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that flew to the MOON had about 4 kilobytes of working memory and ran at roughly 0.04 megahertz. Its programs were woven by hand into rope memory, with wires threaded through or around tiny magnetic rings to store each one or zero. A modern phone is millions of times more powerful. It worked because every instruction was written and tested with extraordinary care.
The landing nearly did not happen
During the descent on 20 July 1969 the guidance computer threw a series of 1202 and 1201 alarms that nobody in the lunar module recognised. A 26-year-old flight controller, Steve Bales, supported by a colleague who knew the codes, called that the alarms were safe to ignore — the computer was overloaded but prioritising correctly.
Then Neil ARMSTRONG saw that the automatic LANDING site was a boulder field around a CRATER and took manual control, flying on across the surface looking for a flat spot. When the lunar module touched down, the fuel remaining gave them something like half a minute before they would have had to abort. The footprints are still there; with no wind or rain on the Moon, nothing moves them.
What it cost and who built it
APOLLO cost around 25 billion dollars at the time — well over 250 billion in today's money — and at its peak employed about 400,000 people, most of them never famous: the ENGINEER who designed a valve, the seamstresses who stitched the spacesuits by hand, the technicians who checked the welds. The programme also had its losses; three crew died in a launch-pad fire during a test in January 1967, and the design was overhauled afterwards.
Twelve people walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, and nobody has been back since. The grid holds the rest of the story: the ROCKET, the LAUNCH and LIFTOFF, the SATELLITE, the COSMONAUT and ASTRONAUT, AMERICA, GRAVITY, the MISSION and the SHUTTLE that followed. Our astronauts page covers more of the people who flew, and our space page covers where they were going.