Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is being honoured around the world Tuesday on the 50th anniversary of his pioneering flight in space.
Gagarin became the first human in space when he took off aboard a Soviet Vostok capsule on April 12, 1961 and completed nearly a full orbit of the Earth over 108 minutes.
The achievement, during the height of the Cold War, stunned people around the world, said Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
"It was a revelation to know that you could look up and people were leaving our planet — only very briefly and only very experimentally — but still, we'd figured out a way to do it for the first time," Hadfield said.
American Alan Shepard became the second man in space, 23 days after Gagarin's flight.
Four years earlier, the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. by launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, but that didn't have the same impact."Sputnik was a 'thing' in space, but Gagarin was another human being, and a wide-smiling, looks-like-anybody's-country boy," Hadfield said. "It suddenly made it real for people."The anniversary is being celebrated by space agencies around the world — and even some people in orbit. Astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station, commanded by Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, will link up with celebrations in Moscow as well as a news conference hosted by NASA.
Gagarin's photo is the only astronaut portrait on the wall in the central section of the space station, said Hadfield: "Because we recognize that he is the one who opened the door for all of us."
Piers Bizony, co-author of the book Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, said Gagarin was a military pilot posted north of the Arctic Circle in 1959 when a recruiting team came by looking for candidates to fly "what they called a new kind of machine."
Gagarin said it sounded interesting and signed up despite the dearth of details offered.
Proof that humans could survive space
He went through very rigorous training involving many psychological and medical tests because, at the time, no one was sure what space flight would do to the human body. Gagarin's flight answered a lot of questions.
"He proved that human beings could survive weightlessness," Bizony told CBC'sQuirks & Quarks. "He proved that they could survive the experience in space without going crazy."
Cosmonaut Boris Volynov, who trained with Gagarin, remembers him as a man who was always smiling and very generous. Once, Volynov told CBC News in a recent interview, "Yuri noticed I was down…so to cheer me up, he collected money from everyone and bought me a fridge. It was a rare commodity at the time."
Following Gagarin's return to Earth, he spent years being paraded around by Soviet authorities as an example of what could be achieved in the Soviet communist system.
Finally, he was allowed to return to his work, but died when his plane crashed during a training flight in 1968. Classified documents released by Russia on Friday indicate that the crash was likely linked to a manoeuvre to avoid a weather balloon, Agence France-Presse reported.
Though his career as a cosmonaut was short, he left a lasting legacy, Bizony said.
"He was and — for as long as human beings still have the words to utter the phrase — always will be the first man in space."
