Vostok 3 (Orient 3 or East 3) was a spaceflight of the Soviet space program intended to determine the ability of the human body to function in conditions of weightlessness and test the endurance of the Vostok 3KA spacecraft over longer flights. Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev orbited the Earth 64 times over nearly four days in space, a feat which would not be matched by NASA until the Gemini program. Read more