In 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space, the Soviet space program had no way of safely landing him. As a result, Gagarin had to purposely eject from his capsule and parachute to the ground. This was due to the difficulty of slowing a spacecraft down enough to make a non-lethal landing. Even today, spacecraft parachutes are incredibly difficult to design and develop, as the airflow around a chute is too complicated to model with computers. It took years to get the Apollo parachutes to work, and companies still struggle with them. In the 1960s, the Soviets’ plan was understandable, given the lack of knowledge at the time.