Top ten spacecraft

4. Vostok 1
Despite successfully sending animals into space, no one knew what would happen to the first cosmonaut, so Yuri Gagarin must have had some iron-clad danglies to risk leaving the atmosphere. Plus it was one hell of a technical feat.

No list of the top spacecraft would be complete without the one that started manned space exploration. The Vostok 1 was the vessel that put the first human in space, and Earth orbit too.

No one knew how weightlessness would affect Gagarin, so he wasn't allowed any control of the Vostok, although in an emergency situation there was a code that could be used to unlock the controls. He was, essentially, at the mercy of a computer program with nothing to do except take notes and write a postcard to his mum.

The launch of Vostok wasn't entirely without trauma. Although Gagarin didn't know it at the time, the second stage of the rocket burned for longer than it was supposed to, putting him in a different orbit. That would have meant that if the braking engine didn't fire, he wouldn't have had enough oxygen to return to Earth.

In the end though, after a 108-minute journey, Gagarin returned to the atmostphere, ejected from the re-entry module, became a global superstar and best of all, really annoyed the Americans.

Photo credit: NASA