once in a lifetime opportunity to own a museum piece: 1961 technical report by Yuri Gagarin regarding his historic space flight and annotated by leader of the Soviet Space Program Sergey Korolev

Very detailed true technical report by Yury Gagarin about his flight onboard Vostok spacecraft. It was not published and even known outside OKB-1 rocket design bureau because of some facts which the Soviets did not want to give publicity to, such as communication troubles when in the orbit and two emergency cases during re-entry.

After the triumphant celebration of the first manned space mission Soviet engineers had to know the minutest details of the flight to take them into consideration for the future spacecraft design. That's why Gagarin presented the true report about his flight to the early Soviet space program Chief Designer Sergey Korolev.

On April 17th, 1961, this technical report was published, which was completely different from the officially published version. Here he described as much as he remembered from his 90 minutes in space. The report is typed on 5 pages of A4 format and signed by Gagarin. Korolev put his remarks on the report, sometimes on the back side of the pages.

After studying the report Korolev passed it to Gleb Maximov - the designer of the first Lunar probes, scientific sputniks and Mars/Venus spacecraft. Korolev gave the report to Maximov to pay his attention to some aspects of life support systems for Lunar and Mars spacecraft development using the experience received after Gagarin's flight. Maximov left OKB-1 in 1968 when Mishin became the Chief Designer after Korolev's death. So, since 1968 Maximov worked in IKI (Institute of Space Research) until 1975. Then he worked in VNIEM (USSR Scientific Institute of Electronic Machine Building). In 1990 Maximov passed the report to his IKI colleague Natalya Yampolskaya. She kept it for several years until Maximov's death in 2001 and then passed to his other IKI colleague who made it available for sale and asked to keep his name in secret.