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Article: Human Spaceflight Program
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- Space Sciences
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Human Spaceflight Program
The first human to go into space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, made a one-orbit, ninety-minute flight around Earth on April 12, 1961. Up to mid-2001, only 407 additional humans (370 men and 37 women) have gone into orbit, some of them making multiple journeys into space. Most of these individuals were a mixture of career astronauts, trained either to pilot space vehicles or to carry out a changing variety of tasks in orbit, and
payload
specialists, who also went through extensive training in order to accompany their experiments into space. In addition, there were a few people who got the opportunity to go into space because of their jobs on Earth (e.g., U.S. ...