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Gagarin's Orbit and the Men Who Built the Rockets
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbit could happen, two scarred men — a Nazi-linked engineer and a gulag survivor — had to build the machines that made it possible. This episode traces the human cost behind the first human spaceflight and the presidential gamble it forced.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nobody knew if he'd come back alive. That's the honest starting point for April twelve, nineteen sixty-one.
Wernher von Braun was, by any measure, a brilliant engineer. He was also a man who joined the SS, developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde using forced labor drawn from concentration camps, and watched his weapons fall on London and Antwerp.
By the time Korolev's team was ready to fly a cosmonaut in April nineteen sixty-one, the Soviets had already beaten the Americans to orbit with Sputnik in October nineteen fifty-seven. They'd put a dog in space.
Twenty-five days after Gagarin's orbit, Shepard completed his flight. Mercury-Redstone.
Between Mercury and Apollo sat a program that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Gemini.
The lunar module, the vehicle that would actually touch down on the Moon, was built by Grumman, an aircraft manufacturer based in Long Island, New York. Grumman had no previous spacecraft experience.
The Soviet program was moving under its own pressure. And in nineteen sixty-seven, both programs paid for moving too fast.
By December nineteen sixty-eight, the Americans had regained momentum. Apollo Eight launched with three astronauts and flew to the Moon, not to land, but to orbit it and return.
Apollo Eleven launched on July sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins.
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