List of Circumnavigations - Spacecraft

Spacecraft

• On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin made the first human flight in space, and completed the first orbit of the Earth, in Vostok 1, in 108 minutes.
• The second and third orbital circumnavigations, the first two to have multiple orbits, were made by Gherman Titov (17.5 orbits, a little over a day, for the Soviet Union) and John Glenn, in Friendship 7 (3 orbits, almost five hours, for the USA, first American orbital flight), respectively.
• The first woman to circumnavigate the Earth in orbit, and to also do so multiple times, was Valentina Tereshkova, who made forty-eight orbits between 16 and 19 June 1963, aboard Vostok 6.
• Frank F. Borman II, James A. Lovell Jr., and William A. Anders, 21–27 December 1968, first human circumnavigation of the Earth-Moon system, 10 orbits around the moon in about 20 hours, aboard Apollo 8; total trip to the moon and back was more than 6 Earth days.
• Sally K. Ride, Ph.D., 18–24 June 1983, the first American woman to circumnavigate the Earth in orbit, the youngest American to date to do so (aged 32 years, 23 days), and the first American woman to do so multiple times; she flew 97 orbits during STS-7 aboard Space Shuttle Challenger.