Flown by cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov, it launched 12 October 1964, and returned on the 13th.

[4] As part of its payload Voskhod 1 carried a ribbon off a Communard banner from the Paris Commune of 1871 into orbit.

The ejection seat was removed and three crew couches were added to the interior at a 90-degree angle to that of the Vostok cosmonaut's position.

A solid-fuel braking rocket was also added to the space capsule's parachute lines to provide for a softer landing at touchdown.

This was necessary because, unlike the Vostok space capsule, no ejection seats were fitted in the Voskhod; the cosmonauts had to land inside the descent module.

[10] Aside from that, the Vostok booster had lacked sufficient payload capacity to support the extra weight of a retrorocket package, but the larger upper stage used on the 11A57 launch vehicle meant that this was no longer an issue.

As there was no launch escape system, the mission could not be aborted until three minutes after liftoff when the payload shroud was jettisoned and so a low-altitude booster accident would have meant the loss of the crew.

Much of the mission of Voskhod 1 was devoted to biomedical research, and to the study of how a multidisciplinary team could work together in space.

Incidentally, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power during the spaceflight, and it has been speculated that this led to the mission's being cut short.

When the crew returned to Earth the next day, they were greeted by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin in their first public appearance as leaders of the Soviet Union.

Despite the propaganda boasting around Voskhod 1, it was privately referred to by the leadership of the Soviet space program as "a circus" due to the messy process of crew selection, the cosmonauts needing to diet to fit inside their spacecraft, Khrushchev's expulsion during the flight, and also the extremely dangerous circumstances of it (the crew having neither pressure suits nor any way to escape from a malfunctioning launch vehicle).

Happening as it did before the beginning of the Project Gemini two-man flights, Voskhod 1 had a significant, but temporary, international impact.

In previous missions if the primary retrograde rocket failed the capsule would remain in orbit for 10 days before returning to earth.