5 Astronauts More Badass Than Any Action Movie Hero
#5. Yuri Gagarin Invents, Defeats Extreme Sports
Remember that Felix Baumgartner guy who made global news because he parachuted out of space? Well, Yuri Gagarin did that 50 years ago in a rickety toboggan of a spacecraft with the floor panel missing. Since Garagarin was the first man to actually travel to outer space, he should be the first name anyone thinks of when making a list of space awesomeness. Or, for that matter, any other kind of awesomeness.
Every time some jerk shouts "First!" restore your faith in the species by thinking of Yuri instead.
The space race was moving so fast that Yuri was launched before anybody had bothered to invent brakes. That's not hyperbole. But before you even get that far, consider this orbital courage-testing chamber: Three minutes after launch, a bottom panel drops away to unveil the Vzor orientation device (aka "Window in the floor of the friggin' capsule"). This was used to orient the ship with respect to the sun and horizon, and only accidentally meant that the first man into space could see all the way down below him the entire time. For any normal human, this window on the world would have been rendered immediately useless by a covering of fear-rhia.
"It was fine. I like to see the things I'm defeating, like the entire world."
Yuri stayed conscious through 8 Gs of deceleration because he had to deal with the whole "no brakes" thing -- the re-entry plan of the first man in space being ... JUMP! The Vostok 3KA-3 capsule had parachutes, but its main stopping strategy was "There'll be a planet in the way," which is why a hatch opened and automatically ejected Yuri into the sky from the first manned craft to go shooting 7 kilometers straight up, instead of crashing to his death.
He upstaged Felix Baumgartner (who got to choose when he felt like jumping) eight years before the latter was even born. Having pulled off the most badass stunt in human spaceflight history (on top of personally being all of human spaceflight history), he never even mentioned it for the good of the program. Most people can't keep quiet about eating a particularly good burger. It was a sign of insane Soviet secrecy that this detail was kept under wraps -- plus, he had already married the woman of his dreams. Meanwhile, the Russians thought the world would be more impressed by "he landed in the capsule" than "our hero personally jumped from a plunging spacebomb and is quite happy about it." Never mind nuclear missiles -- if we'd known that Soviet soldiers did that sort of thing, Red Dawn would have been the tale of obedient Americans learning how to prepare a good kasha and butterbrots breakfast for our beloved Soviet overlords.
As it turned out, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) wouldn't recognize the record flight if the pilot didn't land in his craft. Listen, guys, if your records don't count Yuri Gagarin's achievements, then it's your records that don't count.