BEYOND

'The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space'. At 9.07am on April 12th 1961, a top-secret rocket site in the USSR sees a young Russian sitting inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile. Originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead, it blasts into the skies and Yuri Gagarin is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles an hour, ten times faster than a rifle bullet, he circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity and the first human to leave the planet. This magnificent tome tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight and was published for its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first - the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable and in the end the race between them would come down to the wire. Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that have been hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens. He draws on extensive original research and vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before. With blast off colour photographs on the endpapers and dozens of colour photos and archive images in the Plates section, the exciting adventure begins 15 minutes before launch when dawn came quickly into the Kazakh Steppe. 502pp.