Somewhere over the Earth on August 6, 1961, a young Soviet pilot strapped into a cramped capsule closed his eyes and fell asleep. No human had ever slept in space before. Nobody knew for sure whether it was even possible, or what the body would do once it let go.
When Gherman Titov woke up, his arms were floating in front of him, drifting in the air above the controls. He was also running late. He’d overslept by more than half an hour.
The backup who got his own mission
Titov was 25, a test pilot who had come within a whisker of being the first human in space. In April 1961, he had served as Yuri Gagarin’s backup for Vostok 1, the history-making flight that orbited the Earth once in about 108 minutes.
Less than four months later, it was Titov’s turn. On August 6, 1961, he launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Vostok 2. This time, the goal wasn’t a single orbit. The Soviet Union wanted to see whether a human could spend a full day in space and still function.
Titov stayed up for a little over 25 hours, circling the Earth about 17 times. At just under 26, he was the youngest person to have flown in space.
Bedtime in orbit
Partway through the mission, during the seventh orbit, Titov was scheduled to sleep. He settled into his seat, switched off his radio so he wouldn’t be woken early, and drifted off.
Sleeping in space is stranger than it sounds. With no gravity, there’s no “lying down.” Nothing presses you into a mattress, and nothing keeps your limbs resting at your sides. When Titov’s muscles relaxed in sleep, his arms simply floated up.
He woke to find them hovering in front of him. That was more than just odd. In a cockpit full of switches, a floating arm could bump something important. According to Guinness World Records, he secured his arms under a belt and went back to sleep. Once his limbs were tucked away, he later said, he “slept like a baby.”
Oversleeping in space
Titov slept a little too well. He reportedly woke shortly before his scheduled wake-up time, decided to doze a bit longer, and ended up oversleeping by about 35 minutes. Some accounts put it at 37.
That may not sound like much, but on the ground, mission controllers had no way of knowing if the silence meant he was simply asleep or that something had gone wrong. Titov later recalled being annoyed at himself, worried the people on the ground would think he was in trouble.
He was fine. He had just become the first person to discover something astronauts have been rediscovering ever since: sleep in space can be surprisingly deep.
The first case of space sickness
Not everything about the flight was restful. A few hours after launch, Titov started feeling dizzy and nauseous. He became the first person known to suffer from what’s now called space adaptation syndrome, or space sickness, and the first to vomit in space.
At the time, it was concerning. Some feared it meant people couldn’t survive long in weightlessness. Titov downplayed his symptoms during the flight, and he’s said to have hidden how bad it was from Mission Control until he returned. Today, doctors know space sickness affects many astronauts during their first few days in orbit, and it usually fades as the body adapts.
More firsts
Vostok 2 was packed with milestones. Titov took the first photographs of Earth taken by a human in space, and he used a professional movie camera to film the Earth for about ten minutes. He also took manual control of the spacecraft for a short time, showing that a pilot could fly the capsule.
The return wasn’t entirely smooth. During reentry, part of the spacecraft didn’t separate cleanly from the capsule. As planned for Vostok missions, Titov ejected during descent and landed separately by parachute, coming down safely on August 7.
What his day in space proved
Titov never flew in space again, but his mission answered a crucial question. A human could live, work, eat and sleep in weightlessness for a full day, and come home in good shape. That opened the door to longer missions, and eventually to space stations where astronauts now spend months at a time.
Modern astronauts still deal with the problems Titov ran into. They sleep in sleeping bags tethered to the walls, partly to stop their arms from drifting. Many feel queasy in their first days in orbit. And some, like Titov, find that sleep in space can be some of the best rest of their lives.