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If he had not died in a plane crash at the end of March 1968, he would have lived to live this March Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin 90 years old (born March 9, 1934). Who knows if he would ever look into space again, as he longed to do, but no one will take his primacy away from him. He was the first to confirm with his own eyes that our planet is indeed blue when viewed from orbit. There are facts that probably everyone remembers from textbooks, but his life was much more colorful.
Gagarin v Murmansk
He was born into an ordinary rural family in Klushin, in the Smolensk region of Russia. Father was a carpenter and joiner, mother a milkmaid. He was one of four children, and it is said that he first dreamed of being a pilot when, during the Second World War, the front approached their village and a damaged plane had to make an emergency landing in a field. It immediately became an attraction mainly for children – and the pilot even let little Yuri into the cabin for a while. Then you followed your dream. It was recorded that he was smart, an athlete and had the right background, so they offered him to continue as an industrialist after his apprenticeship. He managed it as one of the best and already during it he signed up for his first flight course. He also completed a school for fighters and in 1957 started his first job in Murmansk beyond the Arctic Circle.
He had already left there as a married man – he met Valentina Ivanovna, a paramedic, at an aviation school event. They had two daughters together, but they didn’t enjoy their father much. The main thing for him was work and then cosmonaut training. He flew into space when his younger daughter was a month old. After his return, he traveled a lot around the world and did not appear at home very often.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
Yuri Gagarin married the nurse Valentina – they had two daughters together, Jelena and Galja – in the picture from 1958, the first-born Jelena is with her parents Photo: Profimedia.cz
Why did they choose Gagarin?
Gagarin exactly met all the requirements for a future cosmonaut – he was not only a healthy and experienced pilot, but also had a small figure, which was a necessity due to the cramped space in the rocket cabin. He weighed less than 70 kilos and measured only 157 centimeters (some sources say 161 cm). Just for fun – even with this body he was captain of the school basketball club in high school.
He passed all the tests and interviews and was in a group of twenty applicants who moved to Star City to begin training. But it quickly became clear that there was not enough capacity for so many people, and only six of them remained – five of them eventually looked into space, but only one was the first. The training was really demanding – they had to last two hours in a thermal chamber at 70 °C, handle an overload of 12 G, handle it in a baro chamber simulating conditions at a height of two Mount Everest or overcome a fifteen-day isolation.
Everyone went through the training evenly and it was difficult to decide who would be the first cosmonaut and who would be his replacement. A few days before the start, it was clear: Yuri Gagarin and German Titov. It is said that what decided Gagarin as number one was that he was photogenic, smiling and likeable, and also his name – Yuri seemed more Russian than German to his comrades.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
An almost Hollywood smile and sympathetic demeanor was also said to be one of the selection criteria among candidates for the post of the first man in space Photo: Profimedia.cz
First flight into space
D-Day was April 12, 1961. The night before, Gagarin and Titov didn’t get much sleep, even though they allegedly pretended otherwise so that the doctor wouldn’t forbid them from flying due to lack of sleep. They had an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m., they ate “cosmic food” from a tube and were also examined by a doctor. Gagarin later admitted that he panicked on the way to the rocket. But it was hard to tell, and ten minutes before seven, both of them went out to the starting area in spacesuits. They reached the rocket, but only Gagarin took the elevator up to the cabin as agreed.
There was a problem at the beginning – the cabin hatch could not be closed. The technicians dealt with it, and Gagarin is said to have whistled to calm himself, listened to music in headphones and talked to the designers via radio. After two hours, i.e. at 9 hours and 7 minutes Moscow time, the Vostok 1 spacecraft took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The flight lasted 108 minutes, the maximum height was 327 kilometers. He was driving an automatic. In the 14th minute, Gagarin felt weightlessness and his pencil “floated”, which he used to make notes about how he felt. That’s how he dictated his feelings and impressions. From the notes, the line is often mentioned: “It’s really blue!” He had a snack towards the end of the flight.
During the descent, the instrument section should have separated, but it remained hanging by the cable, which spun the cabin. After ten minutes of violent spinning, Gagarin began to pass out. Fortunately, the cable burned through in the atmosphere and the rotation stopped. But the cabin deviated from the calculated impact path, and it and Gagarin on the parachute descended to the ground near the village of Smelovka, hundreds of kilometers away from the expected impact.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
Daughters Galina and Jelena did not enjoy their father much, even though after returning from space the family was often part of promotional campaigns together, picture from 1962 Photo: Profimedia.cz
Gagarin, alcohol and women
An ordinary airman quickly became a global celebrity. He was promoted to major, received the highest decoration and began to travel the world, as an advertisement for the success of Soviet cosmonautics – he was such a valuable commodity for propaganda that he was feared and forbidden to fly. It bothered him that he just “waves and talks”, started drinking more than before and was very feminine. He allegedly drank hundreds of liters of vodka and had hundreds of women. Some mainly wanted a child with the hero, and it is said that he did not refuse such requests either. During one of his flings, his wife almost caught him, so he jumped off a second-floor balcony and took a tumble that ended up in the hospital for a month.
How Yuri Gagarin died
He didn’t want to be just a puppet, and he wanted not just back to the plane, but back to space. He achieved the first on March 13, 1968, when he began training flights. The morning of March 27, 1968 was fateful for him. It was the last flight with an instructor, he was supposed to fly alone on a training course in the afternoon MiG-15UTI produced in Aeru Vodochody. Unfortunately, it ended tragically and the reason is not really clear to this day – conspiracy theories say that they needed to get rid of him because of his ever-deteriorating reputation.
In any case, the investigating commission did not find the cause of the accident, it was a failure of the pilot or instruments, a collision with a weather balloon or another plane. It was a big shock, Gagarin was identified only by his watch, a piece of his jaw and the pattern of his uniform. He was buried on March 30, 1968 with all the glory at the Kremlin wall cemetery in Moscow among the most important representatives of the Soviet Union.