17.12.2022
Yuri Gagarin was the only Soviet superstar. The simple guy from the collective farm was lit up by luck and the attention of the Kremlin, and his wide white-toothed smile drove the women of the planet crazy. Here are the main facts about cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
1. Little Gagarin fought against fascists
Yuri was born to a family of peasants in a village near Gzhatsk and was 7 years old when the Germans came. The Germans threw his family out into the street to put Wehrmacht officers in a hut. The Gagarins had to build a 6-meter barn and live in it for 2 years during the German occupation.
Life was not sugar, when one of the soldiers tried unsuccessfully to hang his 5-year-old brother on his own handkerchief, little Gagarin began to fight Germany in his own way. He poured earth into the batteries of German tanks and the kid was lucky – the Germans didn’t discover the hero. And after liberation, Yura helped sappers to search for minefields.
2. Gagarin always dreamt of the sky
His passion for airplanes started when he was a child, when during the war a defective fighter jet YAK landed in his village. And even his career as a foundry worker in Saratov vocational school did not stop him. In his spare time, young Gagarin flew in the local DOSAAF aviation club, and at night he went to load the Volga ships to earn his bread.
3. Gagarin’s career as a cosmonaut was saved by a pillow
In 1955 his dream came true – Yuri entered an Orenburg flying school. But he could not pass the exam for flying the MIG-15, the little Gagarin did not have enough visibility from the cockpit for a normative landing on the airfield. And when a clever commander slipped a barracks pillow under Gagarin, the exam was passed.
4. Yuri Gagarin was one of twenty candidates selected to be an astronaut
Gagarin served and lived with his wife Valentina at a remote fighter air base in the Murmansk region. After serving for 2 years after college and only being promoted to senior lieutenant, Gagarin suddenly applies to the cosmonaut squadron. The nerve of the city takes, in addition the commission limited the recruitment exclusively to young pilots under 30 years old and again Gagarin was lucky.
In the final round of selection Gagarin was chosen out of 20 candidates equal for one chair. Rumor had it that his kolkhoz origins played a role, since it was important for the party to show the success of the common Soviet man. Together with the reserve candidate Titov, Gagarin went to Baikonur for final preparations.
5. Gagarin did not fly the spaceship
After the launch, Yuri Gagarin stayed in space for 108 minutes. No one knew what effect weightlessness would have on a man, whether Yuri would lose consciousness or not. That is why Gagarin did not control his flight. Like Strelka the barker, he sucked his food into a tube and looked out of the porthole. However, unlike the dog, Gagarin had an envelope with codes for manually controlling the ship in case of loss of communication with the mission control center. In order for the trip to be counted as a space flight, Yuri Gagarin had to land on the spacecraft or part of it. But the Vostok 1 did not know how to land, and the cosmonaut abandoned the Vostok by ejecting by parachute. This fact was concealed by the USSR until the 1970s.
6. After the space flight Yuri Gagarin did not belong to himself
Having received every conceivable award and traveled half of the world, the first cosmonaut of the Earth became a superstar. But Yuri himself dreamed of continuing space flights, which the party could not allow him, could not risk a socialist icon. The stubborn Yuri Gagarin got his way and almost returned to space, training as a backup pilot on the Soyuz 1. When Vladimir Komarov’s flight ended in disaster, Brezhnev finally shut Gagarin down, but couldn’t keep him out. In 1968, a mysterious plane crash took the life of the first cosmonaut and the most ridiculous rumors from drunkenness to Brezhnev’s order went around. It is now believed that another fighter jet that flew too close to Gagarin was to blame.
Yuri Gagarin was 34 and did not live to see mankind land on the moon.
