Yuri Gagarin: 50th anniversary of the first man in space

[Lewis]

It was only once dawn broke on the icy steppe that the small, shivering crowd could clearly make out the grinning face of Yuri Gagarin. Fifty years, almost to the day, after the Soviet cosmonaut became the first human being to travel into space, an image from the day of the launch had been painted onto the hulking Soyuz rocket, which was being tugged across the plain by an ageing diesel train. As the rocket was winched into its launch position, the face swivelled upright. Alongside it was the word â??Poyekaliâ?, or â??Letâ??s goâ?, Gagarinâ??s final statement before he was launched into history.

In the West, memories of the Space Race are dominated by Neil Armstrong and Apollo. But in Russia, it is the cult of Gagarin that rules. Last Thursday, prime minister Vladimir Putin visited Gagarinâ??s hometown near Moscow, and tonight he hosts a glittering party at the Kremlin. In Baikonur â?? the Russian space agencyâ??s launch station, now rented from the Kazakh government â?? there will be a star-studded reception, for which many former cosmonauts have been flown in from Moscow, and a concert in the cityâ??s main stadium.

According to Andrea Rose, a director of the British Council who is behind plans to erect a statue of Gagarin in London, this veneration is because Gagarin is â??the one untarnished figure from the Soviet eraâ?. And partly, it is because of the historical nature of his accomplishment. â??I truly believe on that dayâ?¦ humanity became a different species,â? says Ron Garan, a Nasa astronaut and one of the crew of last Tuesdayâ??s Soyuz. â??We were no longer confined to the boundaries of the earth.â?

To commemorate the 1961 anniversary, the Russian space agency went all out for Garanâ??s launch, given that he and his two Russian companions would be the last humans to head into space before April 12. As well as the painting, the rocket was renamed â??Gagarinâ?. For a launchpad, they chose â??Gagarinâ??s Startâ?, where his epic journey began.

The strange thing, however, is that they need hardly have bothered. At Baikonur, it is impossible to escape the cosmonaut's legacy: for every Soyuz launch, a complex cult of Gagarin dictates almost every detail of the preparations.

Before arriving at Bakonur, Garan and his companions had, as tradition dictates, laid flowers at Gagarinâ??s grave near the Kremlin wall, and also visited his study in Star City, the Russian space HQ. On arrival, they will have made the ritual visit to the cottage where the 27-year-old pilot spent his last night before launch, singing folk songs and reciting poetry with his back-up, Gherman Titov (who would soon become the second man in space).

Then, like every other cosmonaut, they will have planted a tree next to the one Gagarin left 50 years ago, and written a message in a special book, pledging that they would do their duty â??in the spirit of Gagarinâ?. Finally, in Baikonurâ??s oddest tradition, they would have relieved themselves on the back tyre of the bus that took them to the rocket. â??Gagarin just had to go,â? explains Bert Vis, the author of 'Russianâ??s Cosmonautsâ??. â??With this, he set a tradition that has been followed by every crew member who ever flew on a Soviet or Russian spacecraft.â?

Sergei Krikalev, the man responsible for training astronauts at the Russian space agency â?? and, at 803 days, the record-holder for total time spent in space â?? is reluctant to be drawn as to why the Gagarin cult is so pervasive. â??People follow the traditions for different reasons,â? he says. â??Each astronaut has their own.â?

Yet Brian Harvey, the author of Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier?, argues that it reflects the risks involved. â??Rockets are dangerous things, so those who fly them need all the luck they can get,â? he says.

Gagarin himself nearly burnt up in re-entry, after a cable failed to disconnect and swung his capsule around to re-enter the atmosphere backwards. â??Through the porthole I could see reflections of the raging flames which encompassed the ship,â? he said later. â??I was in a fireball, headed for Earthâ?¦ for a moment I was terrified.â?

In the end, the heat burnt the cable off, the capsule righted itself, and he had a smooth landing. But in an interview with Andrea Rose, his daughter Elena â?? who has traditionally been reluctant to discuss her fatherâ??s achievements â?? reveals that he was so aware of the enormous risks involved that he lied to his wife. â??When he was leaving for Baikonur,â? she says, â??he told her what he was doing. But he didnâ??t tell her the actual date. He told her the flight would take place a few days after the real date, so she wouldnâ??t be worried.â?

He also wrote a letter for his wife, â??saying that it was likely he wouldnâ??t return, because the flight was extremely dangerous, and that he wanted her not to remain on her own in that case. But he didnâ??t give her the letter. She found it by chance among his things when he came back.â?

It was not just his courage that made Gagarin the perfect hero. He came from humble origins â?? as Elena recalls, the family â??were thrown out of their house by the Germans, and had to live in a dugout in the garden for three years. There was no food, and no possibility of studying.â? Once the Soviets recaptured the area, the schools reopened, â??but life was tremendously difficult. They had almost nothing: there was no paper, for example â?? they had to hunt for bits of wood or scraps of paper from around the town to write on.â?

Perhaps it was this early deprivation that kindled Gagarinâ??s love of learning: a brilliant and sensitive man, he had a lifelong passion for books and literature, and loved to recite poetry to his daughters. â??He was also very interested in the engineering aspects of space flight and the construction of spaceships,â? she recalls, developing his own design for a fixed-wing space plane rather like the Space Shuttle. Sergei Korolev, the secret mastermind behind the Russian space programme, â??thought he would have been one of the leading astrophysicists had he had the education and trainingâ?.

Gagarin was also wonderful company â?? and it was, Elena believes, that charismatic, gregarious personality that got him the nod over Titov, and made him ideally suited to his new status as the worldâ??s most famous man. â??Gagarin was more personable than Armstrong,â? says Piers Bizony, one of his biographers. â??He was an exceptionally good diplomat. He was handsome, charming and generous.â? Harold Macmillan, prime minister when he visited London three months after going into space, thought him â??a delightful fellowâ?, as did one British nurse who broke through the crash barriers to give him a kiss: he was, she declared, â??the most kissable man in the universeâ?.

It is difficult, today, for us to understand the level of Gagarinâ??s instant celebrity. When he visited Britain, he was driven through cheering crowds in an open-topped Rolls Royce, with the numberplate YG-1, to take tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace (Elena recalls that she â??gave him some rather beautiful dolls to bring back for me and Galina). The Russophobe Daily Mail even ran the headline: â??Make him Sir Yuri!â?, while John F Kennedy was so alarmed by his popularity that he banned him from entering the United States.

It was not to last: on March 27, 1968, Gagarin died in a plane crash while on a routine training flight. Yet if he were alive today, he might enjoy the fact that the Russian space programme appears to have recaptured some of its former glories.

Admittedly, Baikonur looks surprisingly unchanged since his day: much of it has not seen a lick of paint for thirty years, and many of the hundreds of hangers and workshops are crumbling and deserted. Yet today, the site launches as many commercial satellites as the US and China combined.

And once the US Space Shuttle is retired later this year, every visitor to the International Space Station will have to get there via Soyuz, a rocket whose mechanisms are still based on those designed by Korolev in the 1960s. There, in the area of the station occupied by the Russians, those visitors will find just two pictures â?? one of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian writer who pioneered the idea of space flight, and the other of Yuri Gagarin, the man who, 50 years ago today, became the first to reach into the stars.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8443 ... space.html

[i_like_1981]

The Space Race happened quite a while before my time but it must have been a really interesting time to live in, knowing that humans were beginning to spread beyond the boundaries of the earth and discover what lay beyond. You never hear so much about space travel nowadays. But those were times before crap like Facebook, Twitter, celebrity slappers and overpaid sports "heroes" dominated the media. Indeed, truly revolutionary times in the human progress.

Best regards,
i_like_1981

[ChrisOH]

The Space Race happened quite a while before my time but it must have been a really interesting time to live in, knowing that humans were beginning to spread beyond the boundaries of the earth and discover what lay beyond. You never hear so much about space travel nowadays. But those were times before crap like Facebook, Twitter, celebrity slappers and overpaid sports "heroes" dominated the media. Indeed, truly revolutionary times in the human progress.

Hello 1981!

In addition to Gagarin's anniversary on the 12th, it was also that day 30 years ago (in your year! ) that the U.S. launched the first of the soon-to-be-retired space shuttle fleet, the now-lost Columbia. I remember as a child having a toy space shuttle, modeled after the Enterprise, the model shuttle that was never actually launched, but was displayed being carried piggyback on an airplane in the late 1970s.