Yuri Gagarin . Soviet cosmonaut . The December to April of 1961 , Gagarin became the first human to travel to space, doing so on board the ship Vostok 1 .
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Birth
- 2 Studies
- 3 His flight into space
- 4 Subsequent activities
- 5 Visit to Cuba
- 6 Death
- 2 Tribute
- 3 References in literature and fiction
- 4 See also
- 5 Sources
Biographical synthesis
Birth
Yuri Gagarin received numerous decorations from the Soviet Union and allied countries.
He was born on 9 of March of 1934 in the small town of Klushino near Gzhatsk , Oblast Smolensk , now Russia . He was the third of four siblings; As a carpenter father, his older sister was in charge of taking care of him while his parents worked. Gagarin was described as a smart and hardworking boy.
Yuri was a worker in the metallurgical industry until 1954 , the year he joined the Saratov city air club . He learned to fly a light airplane, a hobby that became more and more intense. Apparently he was a great fan of Russian rugby, and for this reason he later wanted the Academy recruits to practice the sport of the oval ball.
Elena Gagarina, daughter of Yuri Gagarin, affirms that the vocation of pilot came to Yuri during World War II , when a Soviet plane was shot down over her village and Gagarin along with another colleague rescued the pilot and kept it hidden from the Nazis until another friend came looking for him on another plane. Also the influence of a mathematics teacher who fought with the Red Army of the Air during the Great Patriotic War , was a fact that impressed the young Gagarin.
Studies
He graduated in 1955 from the Saratov Technical School, at whose flying club he attended flying classes. In 1957 he entered the Air Force Academy in Orenburg , in the Urals , and reached the rank of lieutenant, after completing his technical studies, he entered the Orenburg Military School of Pilots.
During his stay at the school he met Valentina Goriácheva , whom he married in 1957 , after getting his pilot wings. This same year the Soviet Government achieved great milestones in space exploration, ahead of the United States by putting the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 , into orbit on October 4 , and on November 3 by putting Sputnik 2 into orbit with Laika. , the first living being in space.
Shortly after, in 1959, Yuri ran as a candidate for the Soviet government’s risky space program.
Your flight into space
The Vostok 1 in space.
In 1960, the Soviet space program opened a selection process to which some 3,500 volunteers applied, all fighter pilots. The twenty selected received initial training and then a group of six men was chosen. Finally Gagarin is chosen as the first cosmonaut, and he is subjected to a series of experiments and tests to determine his physical and psychological resistance during the flight.
Gagarin competed in this selection with German Titov and Grigori Nelyubov . Gagarin got better grades and also had better physical characteristics in his favor: he was 1.57 meters tall, an advantage in the small cabin of the Vostok ship. Titov on the first flight into space stayed as a reserve in case Gagarin failed, whom he accompanied, also dressed in the cosmonaut suit, to the rocket. Three months later, Titov became the second Soviet pilot to fly into space and the third in the world after American Alan Shepard .
In 1961 he was elected to the corps of cosmonauts of the USSR , and on April 12 of that same year he was launched aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft , which took him to distances between 180 and 327 km from the earth’s surface. . The small spherical capsule, just over two meters in diameter, over whose movements the cosmonaut barely had any control, entered orbit around the planet at a speed of 28,000 km per hour, for almost an hour and a half, during which time the The vehicle went around the Earth twice and made Gagarin the first man to reach outer space.
During the landing maneuver, he decided to remain inside the capsule, without activating the ejection seat, which would have avoided the final impact of the landing. It completed its mission successfully, and landed unscathed in the intended place and on Soviet territory.
With this feat, the USSR once again overtook its American rivals in the competitive space race and achieved significant propaganda success. The protagonist of the events, Gagarin, was decorated with the highest distinctions of his country and rose to the rank of colonel. Become a national hero of the USSR and a legend of world astronautics.
Subsequent activities
Back on Earth , he became a famous person. Nikita Khrushchev saw Gagarin’s achievement as proof that the Soviet army should be reinforced with missiles rather than conventional weapons. This policy, antagonistic to the wishes of the Soviet army, contributed to the downfall of Khrushchev.
After his epic, Gagarin traveled around the world to promote the Soviet feat. He tried to adjust to fame but failed.
Visit to Cuba
Fidel and Yuri Gagarín in the Plaza de la Revolución
Day 24 of July of 1961 Gagarin visited Cuba, invited by the Revolutionary Government, for the celebrations of the 26 July . During the stay of the Hero of the Soviet Union among the Cubans, President Osvaldo Dorticós imposed the Playa Girón Order on him , imposing himself for the first time on the commander, in a gigantic act held in the José Martí Revolution Square , on the occasion of celebrating the eighth anniversary of the assault on the Moncada barracks , in Santiago de Cuba , and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes , in Bayamo. When placing it on the chest of the world’s first cosmonaut, the leader of the Cuban Revolution expressed:
“There is nothing fairer than to award the first Playa Girón National Order to the world’s first cosmonaut, Commander Yuri Gagarin, so that the memory of those feats that occurred almost simultaneously and the memory of those two great victories for world peace may always be united. “.
Death
He died in a plane accident when the plane he was piloting crashed near the town of Novoselovo (which is located 125 km east-northeast of Moscow ).
Gagarin died at 34 years, 27 of March of 1968 , when the fighter training MiG-15 UTI he was riding during a routine flight crashed near Moscow , in Novosyolovo . The actual causes of the accident were not published at the time, but in 1986 an investigation suggested that turbulence caused by another plane could have destabilized Gagarin’s ship.
The weather conditions that day outside Moscow were also not favorable. There was also talk that Gagarin’s ability to drive could have been affected by being drunk. A menhir marks the exact point where, at 10:30 a.m., the fighter flying the world’s first cosmonaut and his instructor, Vladimir Seryogin, plummeted, sinking six meters into the ground.
Soviet Colonel Igor Kuznetsov, after studying the case for seven years, with thousands of documents and evidence, came to the conclusion that Gagarin’s MiG-15 accident would have been the result of a panic attack when warning that a conduit of The cockpit ventilation was open, causing the plane to dive, causing it to vanish and then crash into the ground.
However, on June 15, 2013 , former cosmonaut Alekséi Leonov made a statement on Russian state television RT stating that, according to a declassified government report, Gagarin’s death happened due to human error. This error consisted of a Sukhoi Su-15 destined for a test flight in Novosyolovo on the same March 27, 1968, generating a supersonic shock wave when rising only 500 meters from the ground (and not 10,000 meters, as planned ) and passed too close to the MiG-15 aircraft where Gagarin and Seryogin were. Su-15’s supersonic shock waveFlying at such a low altitude caused Gagarin and Seryogin to lose control of their MiG-15 and crash. During his statement, Leonov indicated that he would not mention the name of the Su-15 pilot, just claiming that “he is now 80 years old and in poor health” and that identifying said individual “nothing would fix.”
Gagarin and his co – driver Seryogin were buried with state honors and recognition as heroes in the Necropolis of the wall of the Kremlin in Moscow on 30 of March of 1968 . At that time it was speculated in the countries of the western bloc that the accident that ended their lives could have occurred during the tests of an airplane capable of flying more than 40 km high.
Tribute
Posthumously, his hometown was named after him.
References in literature and fiction
- My brother Yuri , a biographical book written by his brother Valentín Gagarin , which deals with the life of the first man to arrive in the Cosmos, from his childhood to the momentous day that he travels into space. Editorial Progreso Moscow 1973.
- Gagarin, the First in Space , aRussian film from 2013, which recounts the details of his flight, as well as some scenes from his life, before the flight that would launch him into eternity.
