Beyond

I was a small child when this history occured:

1957 October 4	Sputnik	and later on
1958 January 31	Explorer 1	1965 March 23	Gemini 3, Grissom & Young
this history		1965 December 15	Gemini 6 & 7 Rendezvous
1961 January 20	Kennedy inauguration	1966 November 11	Gemini 12, Lovell & Aldrin
1961 April 12	Yuri Gagarin - Vostok 1	1967 November 9	Apollo 4 first "all up" unmanned
1961 April 17	Bay of Pigs invasion	1968 October 11	Apollo 7 first crew
1961 May 5	Mercury Alan Shepard	1968 December 21	Apollo 8 to lunar orbit
1961 May 25	Kennedy moon speech	1969 July 16	Apollo 11 to lunar landing
1961 October 27	Saturn Apollo 1 rocket test	1971 April 19	Salyut 1 space station
1962 Feb 20	John Glenn - Mercury	1973 May 14	Skylab space station
1964 April 8	Gemini 1, no crew
1964 October 12	Voskhod 1, 3 cosmonauts no room for space suits

p003 1955, railway from Moscow to Tashkent, small stop at Tyuratam
p017 1958 end, project Mercury begun
p021 1959 April 9 Mercury astronaut first press conference
p016 1960 October 24 R-16 rocket explosion killed 74 including strategic missile chief Mitrofan Nedelin
p009 1960 December 24 . . . recovery of 2m diameter 2500 kg capsule with two dogs, 5th flight, barely survived
- most dog fights failed, 1960 August third flight Belka and Strelka survived
p016 two further dog tests
p021 1961 Mercury astronauts in Langley building 60, Glenn and Shepard front runners
p024 Glenn(1929) 57 WW2 missions, 59 Korea missions, 3 kills, 5 DFCs 1957 fastest cross country, Name That Tune
p024 Shepard(1923) Navy test pilot, no combat, looped Chesapeake Bay bridge ~1952
p026 Carpenter(1925) hobby playing guitar
p004 1961 6000 km2 ellipse Baikonur Cosmodrome ready for Vostok 1
p004 R-7 rocket type 8K27K 28.4 meters tall 280 tonnes, 3 (RDS-37) to 5 MT (RDS-46) warhead (5300 kg?)
- 3x more powerful than 118 tonne Atlas . . . US Mk 4 RV with 3.75MT W-38 warhead massed 1840 kg
p029 Tsentr Podgotovki Kosmonavtov Military Unit 26266, Shchyolkovsky district 41 km NE of Moscow
p030 6 cosmonauts shorter and in 20s, not 30s like Mercury
p030 Vostok simulator in LII Gromov Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky, 45 km SE of Moscow