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The document underscores what has often been overlooked by casual historians—that the flight of Gagarin's Vostok was fundamentally embedded in a military environment. His spaceship was actually an offshoot variant of a new spy satellite ("Zenit"), not, as many often claim, that the spy satellite was the offshoot of the human variant. Engineers basically took out the cameras from the spy satellite, added life support, an ejection seat, and redundancies, and rigged the spacecraft for a human being. Besides the document's comment about a "program of observation," we get an explicit confirmation of the military importance of Gagarin's flight in the next sentence, when the authors note that the flight has "opened up new prospects in the mastery of cosmic space and the use of these objects for the interests of defense." Despite the obvious note of self-congratulation about the flight ("all systems ensuring the insertion into orbit, flight in orbit, and return of the return module and the cosmonaut [back] to Earth, worked normally") the document notes there were numerous "basic shortcomings" during the preparation and implementation of the mission. Going through these we get a rare and peculiar glimpse into the Cold War Soviet space program and its functioning in a climate of high stakes and incredibly high risk. We find from the document that during the preparation of two precursor missions with dogs in March 1961, and then in manufacturing Gagarin's actual vehicle, at least 70 anomalies were detected in instruments on the vehicle. Yet, still, the flight went ahead! ...what does this all mean? Gagarin was an incredibly lucky man to have come out of this unhurt and alive. In rushing to accomplish a human spaceflight in the race with the US, Soviet engineers pushed the boundary of acceptable risk to its limits. Fortunately for Soviet planners everything went well. Sure, some of this was due to luck. Things that could have gone wrong didn't. But some of it was also the undeniably robust design of the Vostok spaceship itself.[/i]
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