ESA News
http://www.esa.int

12 April 2011

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful!"

Today is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight into
space. ESA is celebrating these five decades of human spaceflight with a
collection of articles, videos and interviews.

"The world's first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, was launched into
orbit from the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961. The pilot space-navigator of
the satellite-spaceship Vostok is a citizen of the USSR, Flight Major Yuri
Gagarin."

To the world of 1961, this was an electrifying announcement, made while
Gagarin was still in space. The Americans were stunned, but the
congratulations they sent to Moscow were genuine.

This historic 108-minute flight, orbiting Earth once, made Gagarin the first
human in space, and a global hero. He was only 27 years old.

His feat was historic. NASA rushed to get an astronaut into space and, the
following month, Alan Shepard became the first US astronaut, albeit making a
brief suborbital ballistic flight.

It was not until the next year that an American astronaut reached orbit,
when John Glenn circled Earth in his Mercury capsule.

Two days after the return of Vostok-1, Gagarin was back in Moscow, where he
appeared on the Kremlin balcony with Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Forty-eight hours earlier, he was unknown; now he was arguably the most
famous man on Earth. He embarked on a worldwide tour, greeted by cheering
crowds wherever he went.

Gagarin's international visits were remarkable because they came at the
height of the Cold War. Here was someone who could travel not only between
Earth and space, but also between the open and closed worlds of east and
west.

Ideological differences were momentarily forgotten as he was hailed around
the globe.

Gagarin never flew in space again. After touring, he returned home to Star
City to continue his work in the Russian space programme. He was in training
for an early flight of the new Soyuz spacecraft in 1967, but was grounded by
senior space managers who did not want to risk him in another hazardous
mission.

It is even more of a tragedy, then, that he lost his life during a routine
training flight, on 27 March 1968, when his plane crashed. His ashes were
placed in the Kremlin Wall and a lunar crater and asteroid 1772 Gagarin are
named in his honour.

[NOTE: Images and weblinks supporting this release are available at
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM5A57S9MG_index_1.html ]