Beyond The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

Stephen Walker

eBook - 2024

A history of the 1961 space race between the US & USSR and Yuri Gagarin's flight into space—"High definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched" (Sunday Times (London)). "Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life." —Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road nine.seven am. April twelve, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile—originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead—and blasts into the s...kies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. Travelling at almost eighteen,zero miles per hour—ten times faster than a rifle bullet—Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a... more