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    ESA > About Us > Welcome to ESA > ESA history > 50 years of humans in space

    Timeline of early spaceflights

    Gagarin met with astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt at the Paris Air Show in 1965.

    Vostok (Russian for 'East') was a Soviet human spaceflight project that developed the Vostok spacecraft which was used to place the first human in space.

    The first manned US spacecraft was Mercury, which was first launched in suborbital flights on Redstone rockets and then in orbital missions on Atlas launchers.

    The one-seat Vostok craft were replaced by Voskhod (in the Soviet Union), and two-seat Gemini replaced Mercury in the US.


    12 April 1961
    Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin (Flight duration: 1h 48 min)

    5 May 1961
    Mercury-Redstone 3, Alan Shepard (suborbital, 15 min 28 sec)

    21 July 1961
    Mercury-Redstone 4, Virgil Grissom (suborbital, 15 min 37 sec)

    6 August 1961
    Vostok 2, Gherman Titov (1d 1h 18 min)

    20 February 1962
    Merculy-Atlas 6, John Glenn (4h 55 min 23 sec)

    24 May 1962
    Mercury-Atlas 7, M. Scott Carpenter (4h 56 min 15 sec)

    11 August 1962
    Vostok 3, Andrian Nikolayev (3d 22h 22 min)

    12 August 1962
    Vostok 4, Pavel Popovich (2d 22h 56 min)

    3 October 1962
    Mercury-Atlas 8, Walter Schirra (9h 13 min 11 sec)

    15 May 1963
    Mercury-Atlas 9, L. Gordon Cooper (1d 10h 19 min 49 sec)

    14 June 1963
    Vostok 5, Valeri Bykovsky (4d 23h 7 min)

    16 June 1963
    Vostok 6, Valentina Tereshkova (2d 22h 50 min)

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