Famous people. Yuri Gagarin

“This is radio “Moscow”. All broadcasting radio stations are on transmitting the statement about the first flight into the outer space.”

On April 12th 1961 at 9.07 Moscow time the first human space flight was made. A Mankind dream came true. Yuri Gagarin was 27 years old.

He made a circle around the Earth aboard the Vostok spacecraft. The flight took 108 minutes. He was the first human ever to see our planet from the outer space at an altitude about 187 miles.

The future first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near the city of Smolensk on the 9th of March, 1934.

At the age of seven he entered the school. Just one month after that Germans occupied the village. The occupation lasted for almost two years.

During World War II, the Gagarin family suffered like the rest.

The Germans forcibly removed Gagarin’s family from their home and kidnapped his siblings. They didn’t return until after the war was over. The family constructed a small mud hut where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation.

When the war ended the Gagarin family moved to Gzhatsk. Yuri attended an elementary school in this town.

Gagarin briefly attended a trade school to learn foundry work in the Moscow town of Lyubertsy, then entered a technical school.

He joined the Saratov Flying Club in 1955 and learned to fly the Yak-18.

Later that year, he was drafted and sent to the Orenburg Flying School, where he trained in the MIG jet. Gagarin graduated November 7, 1957, four days after Sputnik 2 was launched.

He married Valentina Goryacheva, a nursing student, the day he graduated.

Post-graduation, he was assigned to Luostari airbase in Murmansk Oblast, close to the Norwegian border, where terrible weather made flying risky.

In the summer of 1960 6 men were chosen out of the space group. Still it wasn’t quite clear how to pick the best one. Those six were asked to decide who was more reliable among them. Everyone decided on Gagarin.

Capable, strong, and even-tempered, Gagarin represented the ideal Soviet man, a peasant farmer who became a highly trained cosmonaut in a few short years.

Moreover space was limited in the small Vostok cockpit, and Yuri was rather short. Gagarin was 1.57 meters tall.

Vostok 1 was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergei Korolev.

Vostok 1 had no landing module, so Gagarin ejected from the spacecraft with his parachute at about 7 km above ground.

After the flight, Gagarin became a worldwide celebrity, touring widely abroad. He visited Italy, Finland, Germany, Japan, Egypt and Canada to promote the Soviet achievement. He visited the United Kingdom three months after the Vostok 1 mission, going to London and Manchester. When he visited Manchester in the United Kingdom, it was pouring rain. However, Gagarin insisted that the car hood remain back so that the cheering crowds could catch a glimpse of him.

Gagarin stated, "If all these people have turned out to welcome me and can stand in the rain, so can I." Gagarin refused an umbrella and remained standing in his open-top Bentley so that the cheering crowds could still see him.

When the plane landed in Cuba, the strong tropical rain started. None of the thousand Cubans along with Fidel Castro left.

After the success of Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin became a national hero. He was protected and he was even denied another space mission because the Soviets were afraid of losing their national icon in an accident.

Gagarin became a test pilot for Russian MiG fighter jets The closest Yuri ever came to flying back into space was his assignment as back up pilot on the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission, in which Yuri's friend met a tragic end when the spacecraft crashed.

Gagarin’s life ended abruptly when he was only 34 years old. On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight, he and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died in a MiG-15 crash near the town of Kirzhach. Gagarin and Seryogin were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square.

The real heroes leave us being young. He never got the second chance to see the earth from the window of the spacecraft. Although flying to other planets was his only dream.

Запись голоса Гагарина: «Лично я еще хочу слетать на другие планеты… хочу слетать к Венере, Марсу».

The date of Gagarin's space flight became a special date. Since 1962, it has been celebrated in the USSR and later in Russia and other post - Soviet states as the Cosmonautics Day. In 2011 it was declared the International Day of Human Space Flight by then United Nations. Since 2001, Yuri's Night, an international celebration is held every 12 April to commemorate milestones in space exploration.

American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin left one of Gagarin's medals on the moon as a tribute.

The cosmonaut training center where he had first trained was named after him.

A crater on the moon bears his name, as does Gagarin Square in Moscow with its soaring monument, along with a number of monuments and streets in cities throughout Russia.

At Baikonur, a reproduction of his training room is traditionally visited by space crews before a launch.

There were a few commemorative coins issued in the Soviet Union and later Russian Federation to honour the 20th, 30th,40th and 50th anniversaries of his flight.

In 2008, the Kontinental Hockey League named their championship trophy the Gagarin Cup.

In a 2010 Space Foundation survey, Gagarin was ranked as the #6 most popular space hero.

In the past 50 years more than 500 people have flown to space and 110 of them are Russian. Perhaps a couple of decades from now we won’t be counting them and space flights will become a daily routine.

But Yuri Gagarin will always remain the first one.