Legionnaire
03-04-2003, 02:14 PM
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Yuri Gagarin
Also known as: Yuri A(lekseevich) Gagarin, Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin, Yury Gagarin, Yuri A. Gagarin, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, Yuri Alexeivich Gagarin, Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin
Birth: March 9, 1934 in Klushino, Russia
Death: March 27, 1968
Source: Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Gale Research, 1993.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Biographical Essay
Further Readings
Source Citation
Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human to travel in space, making one complete orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino, 100 miles west of Moscow, near the town of Gzhatsk (now renamed Gagarin). His mother and father worked on a collective farm. Gagarin started school in 1941, but was forced to quit soon after when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. For a while the Gagarins were forced to live in a dugout shelter because their house was occupied by German soldiers. When the Germans retreated, they took two of Gagarin's sisters with them as forced laborers, but they were able to return home after the war.
When he finished school in Gzhatsk in 1950, Gagarin went to a school in a suburb of Moscow where he worked in a steel factory and learned how to be a foundryman. After a year, however, he was accepted into a four-year technical college in the Russian city of Saratov on the Volga River. There was a flying school and airfield near the school, and during his fourth year Gagarin took aviation courses at night. He made a parachute jump and got his first ride in an airplane. In 1955 he graduated from the technical college with honors and also got his ground school diploma from the flying school. In the summer of that year, he went to an aviation camp where he learned how to fly.
Gagarin was then accepted for training at the Orenburg Pilot Training School and graduated two years later. He then joined the Soviet Air Force. He was the shortest one in his class and had to take a cushion with him on the planes so he could reach the controls. While in Orenburg, Gagarin met his future wife, Valentina, a nursing student. Gagarin volunteered for a difficult assignment in the Russian Arctic while Valentina finished her nurse's training in Moscow. They were married in 1957 and had their first child, a daughter in 1958.
In 1959 Gagarin volunteered for the cosmonaut training school and after passing a series of tests was accepted on March 9, 1960. He then joined the Communist Party that summer. Gagarin's second daughter was born in March 1961, and at that time he told his wife that he was in training to go into space (his assignment was a secret before then) and that he had been chosen to be the first man in space.
The Soviets had been preparing for the first manned spaceflight since May 1960 when they launched a series of Vostok rockets. These tests were initially unsuccessful. The first rocket had not been able to return to earth, and the second one blew up in midair. The third one succeeded in launching two dogs into space and returning them back to Earth. In December 1960, however, two rockets crashed with dogs on board. The program was then shut down for three months while redesign work was done. Sputnik 9 was launched on March 9, 1961 and Sputnik 10 on March 25; both were successful. It was decided to go ahead with the manned flight.
The final assembly of the rocket took place on April 5, 1961. It took place at the Soviet space center of Tyuratam in the Republic of Kazakhstan. As part of a plan of deception, the Soviets always referred to it as the Baikonur Space Center, but Tyuratam is actually located 200 miles southwest of Baikonur on a spur of the main railroad line between Moscow and Tashkent. Gagarin was officially chosen as the first cosmonaut to enter space on April 8; Gherman Titov was to be his back-up. This was announced only to the other cosmonauts and not to the public at large. On April 10 at 4 p.m. the Soviet State Commission on Space approved the final plans for launch. At 5 a.m. on April 11 the rocket was towed to the launch pad.
At 1 p.m. on April 11, 1961 Gagarin was driven to the launch pad. He was accompanied by Sergei Korolov, the chief architect of the Soviet space program. (At that time, Korolov's name had never been released. The Americans, jealous of the success of the Soviets, called him the "Chief Designer.") Gagarin was presented to the assembly workers, and he and Korolov spent an hour going through the final checks and procedures. The next morning, Gagarin and Titov were awakened at 5:30 a.m., and sensors were attached to their bodies to monitor pulse, blood pressure, etc. Gagarin arrived at the spaceship at 7:30 a.m. Before getting into the space craft, he made a little speech: "Am I happy, setting out on this space flight? Of course I am. In all times and epochs the greatest happiness for man has been to take part in new discoveries."
After Gagarin was in the spacecraft, he had to wait an hour and a half for final countdown to take place. He would have no control over the rocket himself; it was all done by ground control. If there was a malfunction, he had an envelope to be opened that contained a code that would allow him to operate the controls manually. (The code was 1-4-5, but he never had to use it.) Gagarin took off at 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961. His first recorded words were: "Poyekhali!" (Let's go!). He reached the maximum pressure nine minutes into the flight when it reached 6 g's (six times the pull of gravity). The flight was officially announced on Radio Moscow at 10:00 a.m.
During the flight Gagarin went in an orbit that took him across Siberia, Japan, southeastward to the tip of South America, then northeastward across west Africa. As he passed over various countries, he radioed greetings from the Soviet people. Gagarin described his flight: "I saw for the first time the spherical shape of the Earth. You can see its curvature when looking to the horizon. It is unique and beautiful." He was the first human to actually see the roundness of the earth.
Gagarin made one complete orbit of the earth in a flight that lasted 108 minutes and reached an altitude of 327 kilometers. While in orbit, he experienced weightlessness and ate and drank to test man's ability to do those things in space. At 10:25 a.m. as he passed over West Africa, retro-rockets fired to send him back into the earth's atmosphere. He lost radio contact with the earth for a while, and his body was subjected to 8-10 g's of force. At an altitude of 8,000 meters, the hatch on the Vostok blew off and he was fired from his ejector seat and the parachutes unfolded. He landed in a potato field near the village of Smelovka not far from the city of Saratov. The first person he saw was a woman planting potatoes with her 6-year-old daughter. "I must report my return to earth!" he yelled to her. (It was years before the Soviets detailed whether he landed after being ejected or was inside the spacecraft with the parachutes attached to the craft.)
After he landed, Gagarin was taken to the nearest airstrip where Titov arrived in a plane to greet him. He was then flown to a villa on the Volga to rest and celebrate. On April 14, he flew to Moscow where he was greeted by Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, and an enormous crowd. He was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin. His arrival was broadcast live throughout the world, another engineering first. His mother and father came from their village to greet him: he wore a carpenter's cap and she had on her best shawl.
In the following years, Gagarin spent a lot of time traveling around the world and acting as a goodwill ambassador for the Soviet Union. He also carried out responsibilities in the Soviet space program, being named commander of the cosmonaut team in 1963. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet. In August 1966 he began training as a back-up for Soyuz I, which was launched on April 23, 1967. (The cosmonaut who actually flew was killed during re-entry.) There were rumors that he had been chosen to head the first Soviet landing on the Moon. On March 27, 1968 he flew on a training flight in a two-seat MiG 15 jet with another pilot. The plane crashed at 10:08 a.m. about 30 miles east of Moscow. At the time, it was said that his ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall. In 1984 it was revealed that his body had never been found.
FURTHER READINGS
Gagarin's own story of his historic flight is Road to the Stars (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961). For a critical view of the Soviet space program, see Leonid Vladimirov, The Russian Space Bluff, translated by David Floyd (London: Tom Stacey, Ltd., 1971). At about the same time an American reporter, who later was the object of a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and Washington, wrote a more complimentary view of Soviet space achievements: Nicholas Daniloff, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) as did Evgeny Riabchikov, Russians in Space, translated by Gary Daniels and edited by Nikolai Kamanin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). A few years later it was possible to take a more long-range view of the American-Soviet competition: Brian Harvey, Race Into Space: The Soviet Space Programme (London: Ellis Howard, Ltd., 1988).
SOURCE CITATION
"Yuri Gagarin." Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Gale Research, 1993.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2003. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC
Document Number: K1614000127
http://www.spacefame.org/gagarin.jpg
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC?c=3&ste=12&docNum=K1614000127&AI=32317&NA=Yuri+Gagarin&bConts=59&tab=1&vrsn=2.0&ca=1&tbst=prp&srchtp=name&n=10&locID=kcls_web&OP=contains
Yuri Gagarin
Also known as: Yuri A(lekseevich) Gagarin, Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin, Yury Gagarin, Yuri A. Gagarin, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, Yuri Alexeivich Gagarin, Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin
Birth: March 9, 1934 in Klushino, Russia
Death: March 27, 1968
Source: Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Gale Research, 1993.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Biographical Essay
Further Readings
Source Citation
Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human to travel in space, making one complete orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino, 100 miles west of Moscow, near the town of Gzhatsk (now renamed Gagarin). His mother and father worked on a collective farm. Gagarin started school in 1941, but was forced to quit soon after when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. For a while the Gagarins were forced to live in a dugout shelter because their house was occupied by German soldiers. When the Germans retreated, they took two of Gagarin's sisters with them as forced laborers, but they were able to return home after the war.
When he finished school in Gzhatsk in 1950, Gagarin went to a school in a suburb of Moscow where he worked in a steel factory and learned how to be a foundryman. After a year, however, he was accepted into a four-year technical college in the Russian city of Saratov on the Volga River. There was a flying school and airfield near the school, and during his fourth year Gagarin took aviation courses at night. He made a parachute jump and got his first ride in an airplane. In 1955 he graduated from the technical college with honors and also got his ground school diploma from the flying school. In the summer of that year, he went to an aviation camp where he learned how to fly.
Gagarin was then accepted for training at the Orenburg Pilot Training School and graduated two years later. He then joined the Soviet Air Force. He was the shortest one in his class and had to take a cushion with him on the planes so he could reach the controls. While in Orenburg, Gagarin met his future wife, Valentina, a nursing student. Gagarin volunteered for a difficult assignment in the Russian Arctic while Valentina finished her nurse's training in Moscow. They were married in 1957 and had their first child, a daughter in 1958.
In 1959 Gagarin volunteered for the cosmonaut training school and after passing a series of tests was accepted on March 9, 1960. He then joined the Communist Party that summer. Gagarin's second daughter was born in March 1961, and at that time he told his wife that he was in training to go into space (his assignment was a secret before then) and that he had been chosen to be the first man in space.
The Soviets had been preparing for the first manned spaceflight since May 1960 when they launched a series of Vostok rockets. These tests were initially unsuccessful. The first rocket had not been able to return to earth, and the second one blew up in midair. The third one succeeded in launching two dogs into space and returning them back to Earth. In December 1960, however, two rockets crashed with dogs on board. The program was then shut down for three months while redesign work was done. Sputnik 9 was launched on March 9, 1961 and Sputnik 10 on March 25; both were successful. It was decided to go ahead with the manned flight.
The final assembly of the rocket took place on April 5, 1961. It took place at the Soviet space center of Tyuratam in the Republic of Kazakhstan. As part of a plan of deception, the Soviets always referred to it as the Baikonur Space Center, but Tyuratam is actually located 200 miles southwest of Baikonur on a spur of the main railroad line between Moscow and Tashkent. Gagarin was officially chosen as the first cosmonaut to enter space on April 8; Gherman Titov was to be his back-up. This was announced only to the other cosmonauts and not to the public at large. On April 10 at 4 p.m. the Soviet State Commission on Space approved the final plans for launch. At 5 a.m. on April 11 the rocket was towed to the launch pad.
At 1 p.m. on April 11, 1961 Gagarin was driven to the launch pad. He was accompanied by Sergei Korolov, the chief architect of the Soviet space program. (At that time, Korolov's name had never been released. The Americans, jealous of the success of the Soviets, called him the "Chief Designer.") Gagarin was presented to the assembly workers, and he and Korolov spent an hour going through the final checks and procedures. The next morning, Gagarin and Titov were awakened at 5:30 a.m., and sensors were attached to their bodies to monitor pulse, blood pressure, etc. Gagarin arrived at the spaceship at 7:30 a.m. Before getting into the space craft, he made a little speech: "Am I happy, setting out on this space flight? Of course I am. In all times and epochs the greatest happiness for man has been to take part in new discoveries."
After Gagarin was in the spacecraft, he had to wait an hour and a half for final countdown to take place. He would have no control over the rocket himself; it was all done by ground control. If there was a malfunction, he had an envelope to be opened that contained a code that would allow him to operate the controls manually. (The code was 1-4-5, but he never had to use it.) Gagarin took off at 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961. His first recorded words were: "Poyekhali!" (Let's go!). He reached the maximum pressure nine minutes into the flight when it reached 6 g's (six times the pull of gravity). The flight was officially announced on Radio Moscow at 10:00 a.m.
During the flight Gagarin went in an orbit that took him across Siberia, Japan, southeastward to the tip of South America, then northeastward across west Africa. As he passed over various countries, he radioed greetings from the Soviet people. Gagarin described his flight: "I saw for the first time the spherical shape of the Earth. You can see its curvature when looking to the horizon. It is unique and beautiful." He was the first human to actually see the roundness of the earth.
Gagarin made one complete orbit of the earth in a flight that lasted 108 minutes and reached an altitude of 327 kilometers. While in orbit, he experienced weightlessness and ate and drank to test man's ability to do those things in space. At 10:25 a.m. as he passed over West Africa, retro-rockets fired to send him back into the earth's atmosphere. He lost radio contact with the earth for a while, and his body was subjected to 8-10 g's of force. At an altitude of 8,000 meters, the hatch on the Vostok blew off and he was fired from his ejector seat and the parachutes unfolded. He landed in a potato field near the village of Smelovka not far from the city of Saratov. The first person he saw was a woman planting potatoes with her 6-year-old daughter. "I must report my return to earth!" he yelled to her. (It was years before the Soviets detailed whether he landed after being ejected or was inside the spacecraft with the parachutes attached to the craft.)
After he landed, Gagarin was taken to the nearest airstrip where Titov arrived in a plane to greet him. He was then flown to a villa on the Volga to rest and celebrate. On April 14, he flew to Moscow where he was greeted by Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, and an enormous crowd. He was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin. His arrival was broadcast live throughout the world, another engineering first. His mother and father came from their village to greet him: he wore a carpenter's cap and she had on her best shawl.
In the following years, Gagarin spent a lot of time traveling around the world and acting as a goodwill ambassador for the Soviet Union. He also carried out responsibilities in the Soviet space program, being named commander of the cosmonaut team in 1963. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet. In August 1966 he began training as a back-up for Soyuz I, which was launched on April 23, 1967. (The cosmonaut who actually flew was killed during re-entry.) There were rumors that he had been chosen to head the first Soviet landing on the Moon. On March 27, 1968 he flew on a training flight in a two-seat MiG 15 jet with another pilot. The plane crashed at 10:08 a.m. about 30 miles east of Moscow. At the time, it was said that his ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall. In 1984 it was revealed that his body had never been found.
FURTHER READINGS
Gagarin's own story of his historic flight is Road to the Stars (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961). For a critical view of the Soviet space program, see Leonid Vladimirov, The Russian Space Bluff, translated by David Floyd (London: Tom Stacey, Ltd., 1971). At about the same time an American reporter, who later was the object of a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and Washington, wrote a more complimentary view of Soviet space achievements: Nicholas Daniloff, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) as did Evgeny Riabchikov, Russians in Space, translated by Gary Daniels and edited by Nikolai Kamanin (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). A few years later it was possible to take a more long-range view of the American-Soviet competition: Brian Harvey, Race Into Space: The Soviet Space Programme (London: Ellis Howard, Ltd., 1988).
SOURCE CITATION
"Yuri Gagarin." Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Gale Research, 1993.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2003. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC
Document Number: K1614000127