Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow
Fifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth.
Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation Street. Yuri was mobbed, the girls infatuated with the beaming Soviet pin-up Macmillan called ‘a delightful fellow’. And so he was by every account. Everyone loved him. But by 1968 he was dead, killed in a mysterious jet crash.
Last week, at a talk at the Royal Society, the British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers (who has logged over 559 hours in space) had a three-way discussion about the Soviet space achievement.
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