Saturday, July 28, 2012

Celebrates the first man on outer space


Yuri Gagarin: The journey that shook the world


Yuri GagarinGagarin was just 27 when he made his epochal 108-minute orbital flight
Yuri Gagarin's single orbit of Earth 50 years ago this month ushered in the era of human spaceflight.
Gagarin's 108-minute flight was another major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union, which had successfully launched the first satellite - Sputnik - in 1957.
"I was a young fighter pilot in Germany I was flying F-102s in Rammstein Germany. We were more focused on the building of the Berlin Wall that year, rather than the space race," says Nasa astronaut Charles Duke, who walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972.
"When he flew, my first impression was - well, they beat us again."
Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Soviet premier at the time of Gagarin's flight, told BBC News: "We were very proud but we did not really understand how important it was. It was one more flight, one more achievement."

But he says his father was acutely aware of the significance, and orchestrated a celebration in Red Square upon Gagarin's return to Moscow.
"When we look at the response of the Muscovites, where everyone was in the streets, on the roofs of buildings and in the windows, I would compare this celebration with the May 9 victory day (the end of World War II for the Soviet Union)," says Sergei.
During the Cold War, such "firsts" were used by the USSR to claim technological might and ideological superiority.
But the architects of both the US and Soviet space programmes had loftier ambitions of sending humans on voyages around the Solar System.
The Americans and the Soviets experimented by sending animals into space prior to launching people.