Why Yuri Gagarin wasn’t the first in space – and who beat him to it

If you were to take off from Earth on a clear day—the kind you want for a launch—you’d see the sky change colors before your eyes. It would shine a bright blue outside your window, deepening as you climbed into the thin air of the upper atmosphere. At some point the blue would disappear completely and the black of space would surround your capsule.

None of this seems controversial today. Everyone knows that the blue daytime sky is an optical effect caused by sunlight interacting with the atmosphere. Astronauts have gone up to see for themselves, and returned with descriptions of the world’s darkness. But this was not always the case.

So who was the first person to experience this? You might instinctively say Yuri Gagarin, since he is often known as the first man in space. But was he?

The first thing we need to consider is where the space begins. And it really depends on what you mean by space. The conventional lower limits are those used by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale – which defines it as 100 kilometers above the Earth, a limit known as the Kármán line – and US government and military institutions, which draw the line 50 miles up (around 80 kilometers). Not surprisingly, these round figures turn out to have messy origins and justifications. However, the basic idea is that space begins where the atmosphere becomes too thin to support conventional airplane flight, based on aerodynamic or aerostatic lift.

But these definitions are ultimately arbitrary, not concerned with defining and delimiting space as such, but the possibilities of certain technologies and their use.

Alternatively, there is the dictionary definition. In accordance Oxford English Dictionaryis outer space “the physical universe (…) outside the Earth’s atmosphere.” Seems simple enough, but our understanding of where our planet’s atmosphere ends has changed many times over the centuries. Research now shows that it extends much further than previously thought. Only about 630,000 kilometers away from our planet, there are absolutely no atmospheric atoms left. No human has reached this place yet. NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission is set to take a crew about 7,500 kilometers beyond the moon – a historic feat that would break the long-standing record of Apollo 13, but still more than 200,000 kilometers short of space by this definition.

Still, it seems absurd to argue that the Apollo astronauts never visited space—and I won’t. But given the definitions we have, based on either practical or scientific criteria, I would still argue that something is missing. How about a definition based on historical, cultural or intellectual criteria? What is the most meaningful—if not necessarily the most useful or most accurate—definition of space?

Watching the sky disappear

From this perspective, one boundary stands out: the point where the atmosphere becomes too thin to refract sunlight, and the blue Earth sky disappears into the black void beyond. To understand its significance, we must understand that for centuries most Europeans believed that space was bright blue. When they looked at the daytime sky, they assumed they were simply looking into space. Unacquainted with the optical effects produced by the atmosphere, they believed that the night was merely the earth’s own shadow cast as the sun moved behind it, temporarily obscuring this blue universe beyond. Only in the 17th century did scientists begin to imagine a black universe, but the blue remained in the popular imagination until the threshold of the Space Age, three centuries later.

In historical and cultural terms, one could well argue that the first astronaut was the first person to fly high enough to see the sky turn black – the first eyewitness to the truth that shattered this ancient bright cosmos.

High-altitude balloon flights were already within touching distance in the 1930s. In 1935, the US Explorer II, piloted by Albert Stevens and Orvil Anderson, reached a record 22.1 kilometers. These “pre-astronauts” experienced much of what Gagarin later would. With almost all of Earth’s atmospheric mass below them, a pressurized nacelle protected them from the deadly environment outside. On the horizon they saw roughly the curvature of the planet. But above them – they radioed to the surface – the sky was “very dark, but it can still be called blue very dark blue.”

But then in 1956, Malcolm Ross and Lee Lewis piloted the Strato-Lab I balloon to 23.2 kilometers, staying there for several minutes before a malfunctioning valve caused them to descend prematurely. “This was the first time,” wrote a US Navy newsletter, “that the sky overhead was seen as black.” Just a year later, David Simons, who piloted the Manhigh II balloon, also reported a “totally dark” sky at a comparable 14 miles (22.9 km).

Such heights had already been achieved by rocket-powered aircraft, but the very first person to reach them may not have seen the black sky. In 1951, William Bridgeman soared to 24.2 kilometers in an air-launched rocket aircraft, the Douglas D-588-2 Skyrocket. But when the press asked him what the sky looked like, Bridgeman, who stayed at this peak height for mere seconds, couldn’t say. “I’m not sure what color the sky is. I think it’s dark, but I’m too busy to look out and see.”

Just a month before Ross and Lewis took flight, Iven Kincheloe flew the Bell X-2 to an unprecedented 38.5 kilometres, but his flight was also very short and his views equally limited. Again, the press asked to see a black sky, which was clearly understood at the time as a benchmark for reaching space. Kincheloe explained that he was shooting directly at the “very fiery white spot” of the sun, “and as a result the sky generally around the solar area appeared to be blue-black in color (…). But as we turned around and I had an opportunity to look down into the sun, the sky became definitely blacker in color – towards a sort of definitely black inky color.”

Kincheloe was also the first to go further than 100,000 feet up – another round figure cited as the limit of space at the time. In fact, Kincheloe’s biographer called him the “first of the Romans”. But it didn’t last long. With the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, and especially with Gagarin’s flight in 1961, the idea of ​​what counts as visiting space in a cultural sense shifted to reaching Earth’s orbit.

The hostile sky

But even though the test pilots technically got there first, the balloonists looked better. David Simons spent more than 24 hours in the stratosphere during the Manhigh II flight. From 30.9 kilometers above Earth, he observed in detail the alien horizon “where the atmosphere merged with the colorless darkness of the world.” He was “frightened” by the star’s appearance. With almost no atmosphere left to distort their appearance, they were “unblinded, living, colorful objects with their own places in the cosmos and depth in an endless universe.” For Simons, he was in outer space. “Our sealed one-man gondola was essentially a space cabin, suspended from a balloon rather than placed in the nose of a rocket.”

Another spectacular feat took place in 1960, with Joseph Kittinger’s Excelsior III: a much-publicized airplane and parachute jump from 31.3 kilometers above the planet. The cameras on Kittinger’s gondola were aimed downwards, aiming to capture the death-defying feat of America’s “new space hero”. However, Kittinger looked up. “There is a hostile sky above me,” he reported. “Empty and very black, and very hostile.” He returned from his flight, humbled by this hostility, saying, “Man will never conquer space. He may live in space, but he will never conquer it.”

Of course, not all space flights start during the day. But many do, and experiencing the boundary between our familiar blue sky and the black of space—no matter how blurred it may be—is still meaningful to astronauts, both military and civilian. In 2021, actor William Shatner participated in a Blue Origin flight, which rose to 107 kilometers. In an interview after the flight, Shatner said, “Seeing the color blue go right by, and now you’re staring into the darkness—that’s the thing.” The flight crossed the Kármán line, and by our modern standards he was in space, but the moment when Shatner subjectively felt in space—”the thing”—was when he saw the sky disappear.

The Kármán line is a number, an intellectual thing. The disappearing sky is a stomach thing. Those who first witnessed it could not possibly have realized the full historical significance of their experience, that the old notion of a luminous cosmos really ended. Were they the first people in space? In my book, their claim is at least as good as Gagarin’s.