Yuri's Duds

[beamjockey]

Copyright 1961 Time Inc.

For the curious, and for mmcirvin: I checked with the denizens of the Flyingclothing mailing list. They inform me that Time's artist, Boris Chaliapin, accurately portrayed a Soviet Gsh-4M/MS high-altitude helmet and VKK-4 partial-pressure suit. (Not that Gagarin wore this suit on his spaceflight, but chances are Chaliapin referred to a photo of Gagarin dressed for flying jets.) As several people remarked, these items do indeed resemble what U.S. pilots were wearing in the Western stratosphere at the time.

The golden Mercury capsule, doubling as the Communist hammerhead, is just wrong. But nobody knew what a Vostok looked like, Mercury was the only single-seat space capsule of which pictures were available, and Chaliapin was facing a deadline. So I think it's a forgivable lapse.

(Here's what Ray Pioch came up with over at Life in the same week. Not bad, but it doesn't resemble a Vostok more than a Mercury does.)

Tip o' the hat to Gary "Gato" Fritts and Doc Boink for the identification!

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

It was only today, looking at photos of Gagarin, that I realized how much he resembled a former coworker of mine.

[whl.livejournal.com]

The first images I ever saw of a Vostok was taken at the same photo op as the shot of the helicopter in this source. It was quite some time before the full configuration became clear. Even in my young adulthood, few images ever showed the biconal section, instead showing the cylindrical final stage.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This explains something I've occasionally wondered about.

My parents had a Rand McNally world atlas from sometime in the mid-sixties, which was one of my favorite things to pore over in my spare time (I was a very geeky kid). The front section of it was all about Man's Conquest of Space, and there was a grand diagram near the beginning showing relative altitudes of various space flights and other phenomena (including the ionospheric nuclear detonations!)

Anyway, the illustrations of the Vostok and Voskhod craft showed that cylindrical-conic shape, in hindsight the launch shroud for the actual spacecraft (the shrouds on Soyuz still look like that). I remember feeling some faint cognitive dissonance when I saw more recent illustrations depicting them as spheres with stuff attached.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

This was, of course, also the 30th anniversary of the launch of STS-1, but with the system now entering retirement, April 12th will probably become less worthy of note for that event...