So, maybe everyone else in the world already knows about this, and I’m just uninformed because I wasn’t around for the space race, but I thought this was fascinating. Apparently, before announcing successful missions into space, the Soviet Union made several secret, failed attempts. Even better, some amateur radio operators tracked some of these missions. There’s a great article about it here. It’s really, really worth the read. (Fair warning, I have no idea why, but you can only look at the article once per day. If you close the window and go to it again the same day, it asks you to register, if you come back the next day, it’s fine again. Weird.)
There’s also an article about the brothers from an April 1965 Reader’s Digest here. It’s a little dry, and covers a lot of the same things, but sort of interesting to see a piece from when it was happening.