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 colours before your eyes. It would shine a bright blue outside your window, becoming deeper as you climbed into the thinning air of the upper atmosphere. At some point, the blue would disappear entirely, and the black of outer space would surround your capsule.

None of this seems controversial today. Everyone knows that the blue day sky is an optical effect caused by sunlight’s interaction with the atmosphere. Astronauts have gone up to see for themselves, returning with descriptions of the darkness of space. But this wasn’t always the case.

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

The first thing we have to consider is where space starts. And that 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 kilometres above Earth, a boundary known as the Kármán line – and US governmental and military institutions, which draw the line 50 miles up (around 80 kilometres). Unsurprisingly, these round figures turn out to have messy origins and rationales. The basic idea, however, is that space begins where the atmosphere grows too thin to support conventional airflight, 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 uses.

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Alternatively, there is the dictionary definition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, space is “the physical universe (…) beyond 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 assumed. Only around 630,000 kilometres away from our planet are there absolutely no atoms of atmosphere left. No human has reached this space yet. NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission is set to take a crew some 7500 kilometres beyond the moon – a historic feat that will break the long-standing record of Apollo 13, but still over 200,000 kilometres short of space by this definition.

Even so, it seems absurd to argue that the Apollo astronauts never visited space – and I’m not going to do that. But considering the definitions we have, based on either practical or scientific criteria, I would still argue there is something missing. What about a definition based on historical, cultural or intellectual criteria? What is the most meaningful – if not necessarily the most useful or the most accurate – definition of space?

Seeing the sky disappear

From this perspective, one boundary stands out: the point at which the atmosphere becomes too thin to refract sunlight, and the blue terrestrial sky fades into the black void beyond. To appreciate its significance, we must understand that, for centuries, most Europeans believed space was bright blue. In looking at the day sky, they assumed they were simply looking into space. Unfamiliar with the optical effects produced by the atmosphere, they thought night was merely 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 conceive of a black universe, but the blue one remained in the popular imagination until the very doorstep of the Space Age, three centuries later.

In historical and cultural terms, a good case can be made that the first astronaut was the first person who flew high enough to see the sky turn black – the first eyewitness to the truth that shattered this ancient bright cosmos.

High-altitude balloonists 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 kilometres. These “pre-astronauts” experienced much of what Gagarin later would. With nearly all of Earth’s atmospheric mass beneath them, a pressurised gondola protected them from the lethal environment beyond. On the horizon, they saw, just about, the planet’s curvature. But above them – they radioed to the surface – the sky was “very dark indeed, but it can still be called blua very dark blue.”

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

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

Only a month before Ross and Lewis took flight, Iven Kincheloe flew the Bell X-2 plane to an unprecedented 38.5 kilometres, but his flight was also very brief, and his view similarly limited. Again, the press asked about seeing a black sky, which was clearly understood by that point as a benchmark for reaching space. Kincheloe explained that he launched directly facing the “very searing white spot” of the sun, “and as a result of this the sky generally around the sun area appeared to be blue-black in colour (…). However, as we turned around and I had an opportunity to look down-sun, the sky definitely got blacker in colour – toward a kind of a definitely black inky colour.”

Kincheloe was also the first to go further than 100,000 feet up – another round figure cited as the boundary of space at the time. Indeed, Kincheloe’s biographer called him the “first of the spacemen”. But that 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 counted as visiting space in the cultural sense moved to reaching Earth’s orbit.

The hostile sky

But even if the test pilots technically got there first, the balloonists had a better look. David Simons spent more than 24 hours in the stratosphere during the Manhigh II flight. From 30.9 kilometres above the Earth, he observed in detail the alien horizon “where the atmosphere merged with the colorless blackness of space.” He was “startled” by the appearance of the stars. With next to no atmosphere left to distort their appearance, they were “untwinkling, living, colorful objects with places of their own in the cosmos and depth in an endless universe.” As far as Simons was concerned, he was in space. “Our sealed one-man gondola was really a space cabin, hung from a balloon instead of nestled in the nose of a rocket.”

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

Of course, not all spaceflights launch in the daytime. But many do, and experiencing the boundary between the familiar blue of our sky and the black of space – however blurry it may be – remains meaningful to astronauts, both military and civilian. In 2021, actor William Shatner took part in a Blue Origin flight, ascending to 107 kilometres. In a post-flight interview, Shatner said, “To see the blue colour go right by, and now you’re staring into blackness – that’s the thing.” The flight crossed the Kármán line, and so by our modern standards he was in space, but the moment at which Shatner subjectively felt in space – “the thing” – was when he saw the sky disappear.

The Kármán line is a number, an intellectual thing. The sky disappearing is a gut thing. Those who first witnessed it couldn’t possibly have realised the full historical significance of their experience, with which the old conception of a bright cosmos truly came to an end. Were they the first people in space? In my book, their claim is at least as good as Gagarin’s.