The First Person to Sleep in Space
Aboard Vostok 2 in 1961, cosmonaut Gherman Titov circled Earth for a full day and became the first human to fall asleep in orbit.
When Gherman Titov lifted off aboard the Soviet spacecraft Vostok 2 on 6 August 1961, no one yet knew whether a person could endure more than a few minutes of weightlessness. Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight four months earlier had lasted a single orbit. Titov was sent to answer the harder question: could a human actually live up there?
Over roughly 25 hours, Titov circled the planet 17 times, experiencing a full day and night in space. During the mission he became the first person to sleep in orbit, dozing for about an hour and waking to find his arms drifting weightlessly in front of him. He tucked them under a restraint and slept on, overshooting his scheduled wake-up.
His day-long flight proved that humans could eat, work, and rest in space.
At just under 26 years old, Titov remained the youngest person ever to fly to orbit for sixty years. His ordinary-sounding day aloft quietly cleared the way for every long-duration mission that followed.
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