He was less than four years out of flight school and had only two hundred and thirty flight hours under his belt, and he was a passenger in every sense of the word during his 108-minute ride; the entire mission was controlled from the ground and automatically. There were manual controls, but the numeric code to unlock them was placed onboard in an envelope to be opened only in an emergency, since Gagarin’s superiors weren’t sure how a human would react to extended weightlessness. He didn’t need the instructions, but because his capsule came down over land, Gagarin ejected at about twenty
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