Mondo Knows Facts
Gagarin circled Earth once in 108 minutes
Vostok 1 flew a single automatic orbit before reentry over Siberia Yuri Gagarin launched on 12 April 1961 and completed one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes. The Vostok capsule flew under automatic control because no one knew how a pilot would cope with weightlessness. Gagarin ejected from the sphere and landed by parachute near Engels, in Saratov Oblast. It sits in Mondo's space collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: gagarin, vostok, firsts
Gagarin circled Earth once in 108 minutes: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Vostok 1 flew a single automatic orbit before reentry over Siberia. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.