Celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s Accomplishment
Tuesday, on 12th of April, the entire world will celebrate the semi centennial of one of the most important accomplishments done by a human being.
It will be the day when the first flight of a man in the outer space, will celebrate its 50th birthday. Those were tensioned times, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, the two superpowers of the world at that time, being in a constant clash with each other. The Soviet Union was the first which managed to send a human being into space, an accomplishment which left the United States of America humiliated, until the Moon landing. Yuri Gagarin was the first man to fly into space on April 12, 1961; he was the one who set a new trend, a new goal, a new desire. His mission was very brief, as he was into space for less than two hours. 108 minutes more precisely. The flight was difficult as well, as he faced lots of problems. For starters the antennas of the rocket started to glitch, and then the modules separated. However, despite of the problems, the mission was successful and important.
According to an article on yahoo.com, one of the biggest questions of that time was what will happen to a man when he is not at the mercy of the gravitation. The scientists issued all sorts of theories which seem absurd to us nowadays, but which were very plausible to them back then. Oleg Ivanovsky, who was involved in the creation of the Vostok spacecraft which carried Gagarin into space, said that the scientists believed that a human will go insane in the outer space, that the lack of gravity will cause him to lose his mind. Gagarin did not have control of the space shuttle as it was fully automated. If something would have happened with the controls, he would have had to insert a three digit code in order to be able to manually control them. The code was created in order to make sure that he would have not messed with them if he would have lost his mind up there.
The scientists were wrong, as the flight did not mess with his mental sanity. He was fine when he got up there, and he returned fine to Earth. The flight made Gagarin one of the most important men in the Soviet Union and in the world. Unfortunately, he had a very short life, as he died at the age of 34 in a plane crash accident, while he was conducting a routine training flight. He, the man who managed to go into space, was killed by a simple airplane. The entire world was shocked by his death, and numerouys theories were created about it. Some said that the KGB killed him as he was against the political regime. People from the Soviet Union loved him and the ones who were involved in the flight, and who are still alive speak with honor and with pride about him. He was their pride and joy. Ivanovsky said that right after the launch of Sputnik, people started thinking about the first human flight in space. However, the problem was that the experiments conducted prior to the flight were very dangerous. One of them killed 126 people, but despite of this incident, the Soviet Union still desired to go ahead with its plan.
The Vostok aircraft had room for only one person, as the scientists were afraid of the effects of the flight on the sanity of the pilot. On top of that, the pilot was supposed to catapult himself from the capsule and to reach earth with the aid of a parachute. According to Ivanovsky, the majorities of the researchers and of the scientists were pessimistic about the flight, and they did not know if Gagarin would survive it or not. Gagarin was uncertain of it as well, and he even wrote a letter to his wife, in which he told her to remarry if he dies, and to raise their daughters “not as little princesses, but as real people.” James Oberg, a NASA veteran who has studied the Soviet space program said that the scientists made sure that he will be safe up there and that the rocket was as safe as the technology permitted it to be. There were 20 candidates for the flight, and Gagarin was told that he would be the one to fly into space three days before the blastoff.
Sergei Korolyov, the chief designer of the rocket said that Gagarin was very calm during the morning of the flight. He was the one who tried to keep the scientists and the engineers calm, making jokes on a constant basis. The flight had some technical difficulties. The hatch which was supposed to be closed hermetically had a problem and the engineers had to seal it manually. They lost contact with the space ship soon after it took off. They found out later that because of a problem at the antenna, the ship was sent into a higher orbit. There were problems during descend as well as the ship rotated when it reentered the atmosphere. He managed to parachute himself out of the capsule and he landed on a field near the Volga River. He even managed to scare a few locals who believed that he was a spy.
Gagarin was treated as a hero soon afterwards. He was promoted two ranks, and parades were held in his honor. The Soviet Union tried to change the story about the flight, as it said that he landed in his capsule and they mentioned a different landing site. This was done in order to hide the truth from the U.S, but the people from the West knew the way in which things happened. The Americans were shocked and terrified to hear that a Soviet managed to reach the outer space. NASA sent Alan Shepard 23 days after Gagarin’s flight into space, which indicated that the tension between the two countries was high. Kennedy promised that U.S will send a man on the moon, and they achieved the task in July 20, 1969. Yuri Gagarin really was a hero, who through his act reminded us that we are often much stronger than we believe.
