More FAQs (about the film).

1. Are they stars I can see in the night section of the film? During the night part of the film stars do become visible along with the Moon. Although Yuri never saw the moon he wanted to - so we put it in for him. There are some very bright stars caught on an image intensifier camera used to shoot the scenes over the Pacific at night, which we suspect to be planets - possibly the planet Venus - which Yuri also said he wanted to fly to one day. The other things which look like stars are so called 'dead pixels' in the camera's CCD chip. These are caused by cosmic rays which can damage the camera's sensors in space.

2. Who is refered to by the phrase 'The 20th"? The 20th was code for Korolev - the chief designer - who we hear at the start of the film using the call sign DAWN. After Gagarin passes out of direct radio contact with Korolev and starts to communicate through a new ground station called SPRING - they refer to Korolev as 'The 20th".

3. What is a 'Vzor' which you refer to in the translation? Click here to find out more about the Vzor.

4. There is a Russian report in the middle of the night which isn't translated. What is it? This archive audio recording is from the TASS news agency report broadcast whilst Yuri was in orbit. The announcer says: 'This is a public announcement from Moscow Radio - This is Moscow speaking - This is Moscow speaking - All radio stations of the Soviet Union are transmitting. Moscow time is 10.02. We are transmitting the news about the first human flight into space. On 12th April 1961 the Soviet Union, sent into orbit around Earth the world's first spacecraft - Vostok with a person on board. The pilot and cosmonaut of the spacecraft is a citizen of the Soviet Union, Major Gagarin Yuri Alexyvich."

5. Why does the picture break up occaisionally during the night shots. The night shots were recorded on board the ISS using image intensified cameras mounted on the outside of the space station and controlled remotely. These pictures were downlinked 'live' for us, rather than being recorded by an astronaut on board the station and later transfered to the ground as digital files, and so they occaisionally suffer from transmission interference. We are grateful to NASA for this footage.

6. Why doesn't Yuri speak much during the night and at all after sun rise? Yuri appears to stay quiet during most of the night. We think this is because he was out of range of any receiving stations during this period of his flight and so he just concentrated on events inside the spacecraft. After he emerged from the Earth's shadow over the South Atlantic and began his re-entry proceedures, he crossed the coast of Angola and had problems with his space craft which are well documented. (See here for more details). These problems probably gave him a rather uncomfortable ride for the next 15 minutes or so which stopped him speaking.

7. The time checks during the mission sometimes sound strange. For example at one point the mission time is noted as 10 hours...etc.. The mission audio sometimes records the mission elapsed time and sometimes records the local Moscow time which was 09:07am at launch and 10:55 on landing.