It was April 12, 1961, and the USSR officially detached the United States in the space race, with Yuri Gagarin to indelibly write his name in history. At 9:07 a.m. Moscow time, the Vostok-1, the first manned spacecraft, took off from the Bajkonur Space Base in Kazakhstan. In 108 minutes, the spacecraft went into a full orbit around the Earth, ending its incredible journey successfully.
This marked the beginning of the era of the space race and celestial missions, in the midst of the Cold War. Inside the capsule there was Gagarin, just 27 years old, later dubbed by public opinion as the “Christopher Columbus of the skies”. A man with a complex but incredibly captivating personality, and who inevitably became the symbol of an era.
Who was Yuri Gagarin: biography
Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in Klušino, a village in the Smolensk oblast, in the then Soviet Union. He was the third of four children, and his parents were employed as laborers in one of the many collective farms that were created in Russia at the end of the 1917 revolution: his father Aleksej Ivanovič Gagarin was a carpenter, while his mother Anna Timofeevna Gagarina was a peasant.
As happened to millions of citizens of the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family also suffered the Nazi invasion during the Second World War, and it was only in 1950 that the young Yuri began an apprenticeship as a smelter in a steel mill near Moscow, and then enrolled in a local school for young workers to attend seventh grade evening classes. After graduating in 1951, he studied again to become a metalworker at the Saratov Industrial Technical Institute. It was here that he manifested his passion for flying and enrolled in an aeroclub, where he took weekend lessons alternating with his hard work as a sailor on the Volga River.
As his daughter Elena Gagarina later recounted, during World War II a Soviet plane was shot down near the village where the Gagarin family lived. The then very young Yuri and a friend rescued the pilot and hid him from the Nazi troops, until he was picked up by the airborne troops. It was at that moment that he realized he wanted to become a pilot.
In 1955, Yuri Gagarin was accepted to the Orenburg Military Flight School, and two years later, with 166 hours and 47 minutes of flight time accumulated, he was appointed a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force. His career among the Russian Air Force was now on the rise, and after expressing interest in space exploration following the October 6, 1959, launch of Luna 3, his recommendation to the Soviet space program was approved by Lieutenant Colonel Babushkin. On November 6, 1959 he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant, exactly three weeks after being interviewed by a medical commission for the candidacy to the space program.
Yuri Gagarin: from space to glory
The 1961 marked a turning point in the space race, already started a few years ago between the two superpowers of the time: USA and USSR. The space competition and the consequent exploration of the cosmos had become an important part of the ideological and technological rivalry between the two countries, especially after the launch into orbit by the Soviets of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1.
It was, however, the launch of the Voskov-1 spacecraft, carrying Yuri Gagarin, that decreed the momentary victory of the USSR, which had repeatedly demonstrated its supremacy among the stars over its rival. Gagarin, on the other hand, represented the prototype of the Soviet “new man”, with the perfect profile to embody the role of the cosmonaut who would conquer space. In a historical period, that of the Cold War, very delicate for the international equilibrium.
To become a cosmonaut, he had to overcome very hard physical and psychological tests together with other 3460 candidates, all potential heroes after the Kremlin gave the green light to the project of sending a man into space, following the famous mission involving the unlucky dog Laika. The perfect candidate had to boast a number of well-defined characteristics: not only be young and physically fit, but also no more than one meter and seventy feet tall. Gagarin achieved the highest scores in the selection process, and his 1.57 meters (5 feet 7 inches) height made him the man chosen by the USSR government to perform the feat aboard Vostok-1.
On the morning of the launch, Gagarin and German Titov, the backup cosmonaut, were awakened at 5:30 a.m. They went through their routine exercises, including a briefing in the morning. They did their routine exercises, washed up and had a breakfast of mincemeat, blackberry jam and coffee. Then the duo donned their orange protective suits and the now-iconic white helmet with CCCP (USSR) written on it. Gagarin stopped to pee on the back wheel of the bus carrying the cosmonauts to the launch pad.
Since then, this has become a propitiatory ritual for all Soyuz astronauts. “We’re off!” was the phrase Yuri Gagarin uttered at 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961 when, once the hatch was closed, liftoff of the spacecraft began. The flight lasted 108 minutes: nine to enter orbit, and 99 to make an entire orbit around the Earth.
The Hero of the Soviet Union
Yuri Gagarin’s feat has undoubtedly kicked off a new era, paving the way for manned exploration of the cosmos. The flight of Vostok-1 is still celebrated around the world every April 12, with the International Day of Human Spaceflight established by the UN in 2011.
On his return from his first trip into space, Gagarin was greeted with top honors at home – and beyond. Chruščëv awarded him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest honor of the state, along with the Order of Lenin. Meanwhile, his international fame exploded when, as a member of the “Peace Mission”, he traveled the world for two years, recounting his feat. He met kings and prominent political figures, not to mention the many artists and excellent scientists.
Suddenly everyone knew the story of this boy of the people, son of a carpenter and a peasant woman, who had been able to make a trip between the stars, marking a new evolutionary frontier under the socialist flag. Gagarin never returned to space, especially after the failure of the Soviet Soyuz-1 mission, in which he was the backup pilot, which cost the life of the pilot Vladimir Komarov because the parachute did not open during the re-entry phase into the Earth’s atmosphere.
From humble beginnings, the Hero of the Soviet Union was now a propaganda symbol too important to be exposed to any kind of danger. Deputy director and trainer of the Cosmonaut Training Center, which now bears his name, among many astronauts he also trained the one who would soon become the first woman in space, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereškova. However, he was allowed to fly fighter jets, and ended up dying tragically during a training flight on March 27, 1968, at the age of only 34 years.
Yuri Gagarin’s death and theories
Yuri Gagarin was really the perfect simple, affable and talented guy who managed to break through with commitment and positivity. Unlike his colleagues, he was never involved in any kind of scandal. Titov, his second pilot, was always known as a drunkard and womanizer, while the other three astronauts of the group, Grigory Neljubov, Ivan Anikeyev and Valentin Filatiyev, were even expelled after a bender, falling into disgrace and leading to the deletion of their images from any official photos. The sudden disappearance without any explanation of the three Russian astronauts contributed to the birth of numerous legends around their death.
The same happened with the death of Yuri Gagarin. The space pioneer died after the crash of the MiG-15 on which he was with his instructor Vladimir Seryogin, for causes never clarified. Consequently, there are several versions of his untimely death. In 2011, the Russian government revealed the results of an investigation, according to which the most probable reason for the catastrophe was a sudden maneuver made to avoid colliding with a large weather balloon.
Other versions, report a heart attack of the instructor, a depressurization of the cabin, and even the crash with another aircraft. Conspiracists, then, have come to believe that, unable to accept the decline of his career, Gagarin was locked up in an insane asylum or that he was killed by the KGB for making an unauthorized flight. Today, the Soviet cosmonaut’s ashes lie inside the Kremlin in Moscow’s Red Square.