Yuri gagarin
Yuri Alekséyevich Gagarin (Klúshino, Western Oblast, Soviet Union, March 9, 1934-Kirzhach, Vladimir Oblast, Soviet Union, March 27, 1968) was a Soviet cosmonaut and pilot who he became the first man to travel into outer space, achieving an important milestone in the space race; his capsule, Vostok 1, completed one orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. Gagarin became an international celebrity and was awarded numerous medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest decoration of his country.
Gagarin was born in the village of Klúshino, near Gzhatsk (a city later renamed after him, Gagarin). In his youth he worked in a steel foundry in the city of Liubertsi. He later joined the Soviet Air Force as a pilot and was stationed at the Luostari airbase, near the Norwegian border, before being selected for the Soviet Union's space program, along with five other cosmonaut candidates. Following his pioneering spaceflight, Gagarin became deputy director of training at the Cosmonaut Training Center, an institution that was also later renamed in his honor. In addition, he was first elected a deputy to the All-Union Soviet in 1962 and later to the Soviet of Nationalities, respectively the lower and upper chambers of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the highest legislative body of the Soviet Union.
His orbit in the Vostok 1 spacecraft was his only space flight, although he was designated as a reserve crew member for the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal accident that killed his friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Made a hero and fearing for his life, the Soviet authorities permanently prohibited him from further space flights. However, he was allowed to return to flying aircraft after completing a training course at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy on February 17, 1968. Finally, five weeks later, Gagarin was killed when the MiG-15 training fighter he was flying with his flight instructor crashed near the town of Kirzhach.
Childhood and youth
Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk (a town today named after him). His parents worked on a kolkhoz, a collective farm, where his father Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin was a carpenter and his mother Anna Timofievna Gagarina (née Matveeva) ran a dairy farm. He was the third of four children. His older brother Valentin was born in 1924 and by the time Yuri came into the world he was already helping with the cows on the farm. His sister Zoya, born in 1927, helped take care of little Yuri and his younger brother Boris, who would be born in 1936.
Like millions of Soviet citizens, the Gagarin family suffered from the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union during World War II, as Klúshino was occupied in November 1941 during the German advance on Moscow and a German officer settled in the Gagarin residence. The family received permission to build a 9 m2 mud hut on the land behind the house and lived there for twenty-two months until the end of the occupation. The two older brothers they were deported by the Germans in 1943 to Poland as slave labor and were unable to return until the end of the war in 1945. A year later the entire family moved to Gzhatsk, where Yuri continued his secondary education.
In 1950, when he was 16, Gagarin began his apprenticeship as a foundry worker at a steel works in Lyubertsi, near Moscow, while enrolling in a local school for evening classes for young workers. After graduating in 1951 from that vocational school, with honors in mold making and foundry work, he was selected for further training at the Saratov Industrial Technical School, where he studied tractors. In Saratov, he studied He volunteered at a local flying club for weekend training as a Soviet air cadet, where he was instructed to fly a biplane and later a Yak-18. At the same time, he earned extra pay as a part-time dock worker at the Volga river.
Soviet Air Force
In 1955, he was admitted to the First Chkalovsky Air Force Higher School of Pilots, an aviation school in Orenburg where he began his training to fly the familiar Yak-18 and, in February 1956, graduated from MiG-15 training. Gagarin suffered two crash landings with the two-seater training aircraft, risking dismissal from pilot training. However, the regiment commander decided to give him another chance at landing and his flight instructor put a cushion on his seat to improve his view from the cockpit, with which he managed to land well. Evaluation of him in the training aircraft completed, he began flying solo in 1957.
By November 5, 1957, he had accumulated 166 hours and 47 minutes of flight time, for which he was promoted to lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force. He graduated from flight school the next day and was posted to Luostari Air Base, near the Norwegian border in Murmansk Oblast, for a two-year assignment with the Northern Fleet. On 7 July 1959, he was commissioned Military Pilot 3rd Class. After becoming interested in space exploration following the launch of the Luna 3 space probe on October 6, 1959, Lt. Col. Babushkin endorsed and forwarded his recommendation of Gagarin for the Space Program of the Soviet Union. By then, he had accumulated 265 hours of flight time. On November 6, 1959, he was promoted to first lieutenant and three weeks later was interviewed by a medical commission for classification for the space program..
Soviet Space Program
Selection and training
Gagarin's selection for the Vostok Program was overseen by the Central Flight Medical Commission headed by Major General Konstantin Fyodorovich Borodin of the Soviet Army Medical Service. He underwent physical and psychological tests at the Central Aviation Scientific Research Hospital in Moscow. That medical commission was commanded by Colonel A. S. Usanov, and it also included Colonel Yevgeny Anatóliyevich Kárpov, later director of the Training Center, Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich Yazdovski, chief medical officer for Gagarin's flight, and Major General Aleksandr Nikolayevich Babiychuk, a medical officer on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force. The commission limited its selection to pilots between the ages of 25 and 30. The program's chief engineer, Sergei Korolev, also specified that candidates must weigh less than 72 kg and be no taller than 1.70 meters to fit into the limited space of the Vostok spacecraft; Gagarin was 1.57 meters tall..
Of the 154 pilots shortlisted by their Air Force units, military doctors selected 29 cosmonaut candidates, of whom 20 were approved by the Soviet Union Government Credentials Committee. The first twelve, including Gagarin, received approval on March 7, 1960; to these were added eight more in various subsequent orders issued until June. Gagarin began training at the Jodynka airfield in central Moscow on 15 March 1960 under a training regimen involving vigorous and repetitive physical exercises that Alexei Leonov, a member of the initial group of twelve, described it as similar to preparing for the Olympic Games. In April 1960, they began practicing parachute jumps in Saratov Oblast and each completed between 40 and 50 jumps, both through low as at high altitude, on land and in water.
Gagarin was favored by his peers, for when they were asked to vote anonymously for a candidate they, in addition to themselves, would like to see first to fly, all but three chose him. Among these candidates, Yevgeny Khrunov believed that Gagarin was very focused and pushed himself and others when necessary. On May 30, 1960, he was selected for an accelerated training group, known as the Vanguard Six. "or" The Sochi Six ", from which the first cosmonauts of the Vostok program would be chosen. The other members of the group were Anatoli Kartashov, Andrián Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, German Titov and Valentin Varlamov. However, Kartashov and Varlamov were injured and were replaced by Khrunov and Grigori Neliubov.
Since several of the candidates selected for the program, including Gagarin, did not have higher education degrees, they enrolled in a correspondence course program at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. Yuri enrolled in the program in September 1960 and did not obtain his specialist diploma until early 1968. He was also subjected to experiments designed to test his physical and psychological stamina, such as tests for hypoxia (lack of oxygen) in the that the cosmonauts were locked in an isolation chamber in which air was pumped slowly, or experienced centrifugal g-force. Psychological tests included placing the candidates in an anechoic chamber in complete isolation, in which Gagarin remained from 26 from July to August 5. In August 1960, a Soviet Air Force doctor assessed his personality as follows:
Modesto; ashamed when his humor is too acidic; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuri; fantastic memory, distinguishes from his colleagues for his sharp and wide sense of attention to his environment; a well-developed imagination; quick, persevering reactions, prepares thoroughly for his activities and training exercises, dominates the celestial mechanics and mathematical formulas with ease, as well as exceling in advanced mathematics; he does not self-define himself when he has a correct point. He seems to understand life better than many of his friends.
The Vanguard Six received the title of pilot-cosmonaut in January 1961 and participated in a two-day examination conducted by a special interdepartmental commission headed by Lieutenant General Nikolai Kamanin, the supervisor of the Vostok program. commissioned to rank the candidates based on their readiness for the first human Vostok mission. On January 17, they were tested in a simulator at the M.M. Gromov Flight Research Institute inside a life-size replica of the Vostok capsule. Gagarin, Nikolayev, Popovich, and Titov received excellent marks on the first day of the test, in which they were asked to describe the various phases of the mission, followed by questions from the commission. On the second day, they were given an exam. writing, after which the special commission ranked Gagarin as the best candidate. He and the next two most senior cosmonauts, Titov and Neliubov, were sent to Tyuratam for final preparations. On April 7, Gagarin and Titov were selected to train on the ready-to-flight spacecraft. Historian Asif Siddiqi wrote of the final selection:
In the end, at the meeting of the State Commission on 8 April, Kamanin stood and formally nominated Gagarin as the lead pilot and Titov as a supplement. Without much discussion, the commission approved the proposal and went to other last-minute logistical issues. It was assumed that in case Gagarin suffered health problems before taking off, Titov would take his place and Neliúbov would become supplementary.
Vostok 1
On April 12, 1961, at 6:07 a.m. m. UTC Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1) spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with Yuri Gagarin on board, the first human to travel in space. He used the call sign Kedr –Russian: Кедр, Siberian pine or cedar and during the rocket launch the following dialogue between the control room and the cosmonaut was recorded by radio:
Koroliov: Preliminary stage... intermediate... main... We wish you a good flight. Everything's fine.
GagarinCome on! Goodbye, until soon, dear friends.
Gagarin's farewell to Korolev using the informal word Poyéjali! (Поехали!, Let's go!) later became very popular in the communist bloc because it was used to refer to the beginning of the era The first stage's five engines burned fuel until the four side thrusters detached to leave the craft on a suborbital trajectory with only the center engine, at which point the center part separated and the top part carried it. to orbit. Once this part finished propelling the capsule, it also separated from the spacecraft. Gagarin orbited our planet for 108 minutes before returning to Earth in Kazakhstan, making him the first human to orbit the Earth.
In his post-flight report he described that “The sensation of weightlessness was somewhat unknown compared to conditions on Earth; you feel like you're hanging from straps in a horizontal position, as if suspended". Родина знает"). While he was flying, a special order from Soviet authorities recognized Gagarin as a qualified military pilot first class and he was promoted to the rank of major. At about 7000 meters altitude Gagarin was ejected from the descending capsule according to as planned and landed using a parachute.
There were concerns that the space flight record would not be certified by the International Aeronautical Federation (FAI), the world's governing body for standardization and record keeping, which at the time required the pilot to land the craft. The pilot and the Soviet authorities initially refused to admit that he had not landed his spacecraft in order to gain recognition, but the lie was exposed four months later, after Titov's Vostok 2 flight. the FAI, the mission would have been considered an "incomplete" spaceflight. Despite everything, the record was certified and reaffirmed again by the FAI, which revised its rules and recognized that the crucial steps of the launch, safe orbit and return of the pilot had been achieved. Gagarin continues to be recognized internationally as the first human in space and the first to orbit the Earth.
After Vostok 1
Gagarin's flight was a triumph for the Soviet space program and made him a national hero of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc, as well as a world celebrity. Newspapers around the world published his biography and details of his flight, while in Moscow a long caravan of vehicles was organized in which he paraded escorted by important officials from the Soviet Union to the Kremlin where, in a lavish ceremony, Nikita Khrushchev awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Other cities across the country also held massive celebrations, the scale of which was second only to the World War II Victory Parades.
Gagarin earned a reputation as a knowledgeable public figure and was noted for his charismatic smile. On April 15, 1961, accompanied by officials from the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences, he answered questions at a press conference in Moscow which was reportedly attended by 1,000 journalists. He visited the UK three months after the Vostok 1 mission, going to London and Manchester, the latter city where he refused an umbrella in heavy rain and insisted that the roof of the convertible car in which he was traveling remain open so that the cheering crowds could see him. In the four months after his historic flight he traveled to Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary and Iceland, though in all he accepted invitations to travel to some thirty countries in later years. Due to his popularity as a symbol of a Soviet triumph in the space race, US President John F. Kennedy prohibited him from visiting the United States.
In 1962, Gagarin began serving as a deputy of the All-Union Soviet, and was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol). He then returned to Star City, the cosmonaut facility, where he spent several years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Force on June 12, 1962, and to colonel on November 6, 1963. On December 20, he became Deputy Director of Training for the cosmonaut training facility. Soviet forces, including Kamanin, tried to keep him away from any flight, worried about losing their hero in an accident, noting that he was "too dear to mankind to risk his life for the sake of ordinary space flight". Kamanin was also there. worried about Gagarin's drinking and believed that his sudden rise to fame had affected the cosmonaut, because although some acquaintances say that he had been a "sensible drinker", his touring schedule placed him at social events where he he consumed a lot of alcohol.
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Two years later, he was re-elected as a deputy of the Soviet Union, but this time to the Soviet of Nationalities, the upper house. The following year, he began training again as a fighter pilot and served as a pilot for support for his friend Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov on the Soyuz 1 flight after five years without serving in this role. Kamanin had opposed Gagarin's reassignment as cosmonaut trainer because he had gained weight and his flying skills had deteriorated, which did not stop him from being considered a strong candidate to fly Soyuz 1 until he was replaced by Komarov in April 1966 and reassigned to Soyuz 3.
The launch of Soyuz 1 was rushed due to political pressure and despite Gagarin's protests because he believed more safety precautions were necessary. He accompanied Komarov to the rocket before launch and gave him instructions from rocket control. ground after multiple failures arose in the spacecraft's systems. Despite all his efforts, the Soyuz 1's parachutes failed to open and the craft crashed to the ground, killing Komarov instantly. After the crash Gagarin was permanently banned from training new cosmonauts and from spaceflight, as well as being prevented from flying solo, a demotion he never fully accepted and fought to regain. He was temporarily relieved of his military duties to focus on academics with the promise that he could resume flight training. On February 17, 1968, he successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on the subject of spaceplane aerodynamic configuration. and graduated cum laude from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy.
Private life
Gagarin loved sports: he played ice hockey as a goalie, was a basketball fan, and coached the ice hockey team at the Saratov Industrial Technical School, as well as being a referee.
In 1957, while a cadet at the flight school, he met Valentina Goryacheva, a medical technician who had graduated from the Orenburg Medical School, at May Day celebrations in Moscow's Red Square. With whom he married on November 7 of that year, the same day that Gagarin graduated from his flight school. They had two daughters: Yelena Yurievna Gagarina, born 1959, who is an art historian and has worked as the general director of the Moscow Kremlin Museums since 2001; and Galina Yurievna Gagarina, born 1961, a professor of economics and head of department at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Moscow. In September 1961, already a celebrity, Gagarin was discovered by his wife at a Black Sea resort having an affair with a nurse who had cared for him. after a boating accident, for which he attempted to escape through a window and jumped from a second-story balcony, but injured his face and left a permanent scar above his left eyebrow.
Some sources maintain that Gagarin remarked during his flight, "I don't see God up here", although no such words appear in the verbatim record of his conversations with ground stations during space flight. In a 2006 interview, Colonel Valentin Petrov, a friend of the cosmonaut, declared that he never said those words and that the quote originated from Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the anti-religious campaign of the state, who said that "Gagarin flew into space, but he did not see any God there". Petrov also commented that the pilot had been baptized as a child in the Russian Orthodox Church, whereas in 2011 in an article in Foma the rector of the Orthodox Church of Star City was quoted as saying that «Gagarin baptized his eldest daughter Yelena shortly before his space flight, his family used to celebrate Christmas and Easter and they had icons at home".
Death
On March 27, 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, Gagarin and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were killed when their MiG-15UTI fighter jet No. 612739, fuselage number 18, of Czech manufacture, crashed near the city of Kirzhach. The bodies of both were cremated and their ashes buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The cause of the accident in which they died is not clear because it has always been shrouded in secrecy, which has led to the emergence of various theories. At least three investigations into the crash were conducted by the Air Force, by official government order, and by the KGB. According to a biography of Gagarin written by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony titled Starman: The truth behind the legend of Yuri Gagarin, the KGB worked "not only with the Air Force and the members of the official commission, but against them".
The KGB report, declassified in March 2003, rejected several conspiracy theories and indicated that the actions of airbase personnel contributed to the crash. It maintains that an air traffic controller provided Gagarin with outdated weather information and that, at the time of his flight, conditions had deteriorated significantly. The ground crew also left external fuel tanks attached to the aircraft that were not required by their flight plan. The investigation concluded that the plane went into a spin, either due to a bird strike or a sudden maneuver to avoid another plane, but because of the outdated weather report they had, the two crew believed their altitude was higher than expected. it was and they were unable to react adequately to stop the MiG-15's spin. Another theory, proposed in 2005 by the original accident investigator, hypothesizes that the crew or previous pilot accidentally left a cockpit vent open, which caused them to suffocate and left the crew unable to control the aircraft. A similar theory, published in Air & Space, is that the crew detected the open vent and executed a dive, causing them to lose consciousness and crash.
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On April 12, 2007, the Kremlin – the Russian government – vetoed a new investigation into the accident because they saw no reason to launch it. In April 2011, documents from a 1968 commission created by the Central Committee of the CPSU to investigate the accident, which revealed that their original conclusion was that Gagarin or Seryogin had maneuvered abruptly, either to avoid a weather balloon or to avoid "entry into the upper limit of the first cloud layer"., leading the aircraft into a "supercritical flight regime and immersion in complex weather conditions".
Aleksei Leonov, a member of a state commission set up to investigate Gagarin's death, was conducting parachute training sessions that day and heard "two loud noises in the distance." He believes that a Sukhoi Su-15 was flying below its minimum altitude and "inadvertently due to bad weather conditions, it passed within 10 to 20 meters of Yuri and Seryogin's plane while breaking the sound barrier," creating turbulence. which would have sent the MiG-15UTI into an uncontrollable spin. Leonov said that the first explosion he heard was the plane breaking the sound barrier and the second was the plane crash. In a June 2013 interview with Russian television station RT, Leonov claimed that a report on the crash confirmed the presence of another aircraft, an "unauthorized" Su-15, flying in the area, but had been prohibited, as a condition of being allowed to discuss the declassified report, from revealing the name of the Su-15's pilot, a man who was already 80 years old and was not in good health.
Awards and Honors
Medals and Orders of Merit
On April 14, 1961, Gagarin was honored with a nineteen-kilometre-long parade attended by millions and ending in Red Square. After a short speech, he was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin, as Merited Master of Sports of the Soviet Union, and as the first Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR. On April 15, the Soviet Academy of Sciences awarded him the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal, named after the Russian pioneer of space aeronautics. He also received four Soviet commemorative medals over the course of his career.
In other countries he received countless awards. In 1961 he was honored as a Hero of Socialist Labor in Czechoslovakia and in Bulgaria, the latter country in which he was also awarded the Order of Georgi Dimitrov. On the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban Revolution (July 26), Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado named him the first Commander of the Playa Girón Order, a newly created medal. In November 1963, he was decorated by Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos with the Order of the Aztec Eagle during his visit to the City of Mexico.
Gagarin was also awarded the 1960 Gold Air Medal and the 1961 De la Vaulx Medal from the International Aeronautical Federation in Switzerland. He received numerous awards from other nations that year, including the Star of the Republic of Indonesia (2. 1st class), the Order of the Grunwald Cross (1st Degree) in Poland, the Order of the Flag of the Hungarian People's Republic, the Labor Hero Award of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Italian Medal of the Day of Columbus and a Gold Medal from the British Interplanetary Society. Brazilian President Jânio Quadros decorated him on August 2, 1961 with the Order of Aeronautical Merit with the rank of commander. During a tour of Egypt at the end of In January 1962, he was awarded the Order of the Nile and the golden keys to the gates of Cairo. On October 22, 1963, Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova were honored with the Order of Karl Marx of the German Democratic Republic.
Tributes
The date of Gagarin's space flight, April 12, has been commemorated since 1962 in the USSR and in most of its former territories as Cosmonautics Day. Since 2000 Yuri's Night has been celebrated annually, an international celebration that commemorates milestones in space exploration. In 2011 the anniversary was declared by the United Nations the International Day of Manned Space Flight.
Numerous buildings and places have been named after Gagarin. On April 30, 1968, it was named the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City. The launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome from which Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 launched is now known as the Gagarin Platform. Gagarin Raion is an urban district of Sevastopol, Ukraine, which received its name when the area belonged to the USSR, in the same way as Russia's Gagarin Air Force Academy. In Warsaw is Yuri Gagarin Street. and in Armenia the town of Gagarin, named after that in 1961.
Gagarin has been honored on the Moon by astronauts and astronomers. During the US space program's Apollo 11 mission in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a commemorative bag containing medals in memory of the late Gagarin and Komarov on the surface of the Moon. Apollo 15 David Scott and James Irwin left the small sculpture The Fallen Astronaut at their landing site as a memorial to the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts who died in the space race; among the fifteen names was Yuri Gagarin. In 1970, a 262 km-wide crater on the far side of the Moon was named after him. He was also inducted as a member of the 1976 inaugural class of the Salon International de la Space fame in New Mexico.
The world of music has also wanted to honor the pioneering cosmonaut. The composer Aleksandra Pákhmutova and the poet Nikolai Dobronrávov wrote a cycle of patriotic Soviet songs between 1970 and 1971 entitled The Gagarin Constellation (Созвездье Гагарина, Sozvézdie Gagárina). The most famous of these songs concerns the Poyéjali!. His deed was also the inspiration for the pieces "Hey Gagarin" by Jean-Michel Jarre in his Métamorphoses, "Gagarin" from Public Service Broadcasting, and "Gagarin, I loved you» by Undervud.
The Soviet space monitoring and control ship Kosmonavt Yuri Gagarin was in service between 1971 and 1991, while the Armenian airline Armavia named its first Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft after him in 2011. The USSR minted two commemorative coins on the 20th and 30th anniversary of his flight, while in 2001, the 40th anniversary, a series of four coins with Gagarin's portrait was put into circulation in Russia. In 2011 also in Russia a gold coin worth one thousand rubles and a silver coin worth three rubles were minted in commemoration of the 50th anniversary.
In 2008, the Continental Hockey League, a sport the cosmonaut was fond of, named its championship trophy the Gagarin Cup. In a 2010 survey by the US Space Foundation, he was listed as the sixth space hero most popular. A Russian docudrama titled Gagarin: First in Space (Гагарин. Первый в космосе or поехали!) was released in 2013. Previous attempts to tell his deed in the cinema were rejected; in fact, his family took legal action over his portrayal in a fictional drama and banned a musical.
Statues, monuments and murals
There are statues and monuments of Gagarin in the city that bears his name, as well as in Orenburg, Cheboksary, Irkutsk, Izhevsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Yoshkar-Ola in Russia, as well as Nicosia in Cyprus, Druzhkivka in Ukraine, Karaganda in Kazakhstan and Tiraspol in Moldova. On June 4, 1980, the Yuri Gagarin Monument was unveiled on Gagarin Square, Lenin Avenue in Moscow. The monument is mounted on a 38 m high pedestal and is made of titanium. Next to the column is a replica of the descent module used during his space flight.
In 2011, a statue of Gagarin was unveiled in London's Admiralty Arch, opposite the permanent statue of James Cook. It is a copy of the monument that stands opposite the former cosmonaut's school in Liubertsi. In 2013 the sculpture was moved to a permanent location opposite the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 2012 another statue was placed at the original site of the flights spacecraft on South Wayside Drive in Houston, Texas. This work had been completed in 2011 by Aleksei Leonov, who is also an artist, and was a gift commissioned by several Russian organizations. The city's mayor, Annise Parker, NASA administrator Charles Bolden and Russian ambassador Sergei Kisliak were present during the dedication of the monument. The Russian Federation also delivered busts of the cosmonaut to several cities in India, including which was unveiled at the Birla Planetarium in Calcutta in 2012. In August 2019, the Italian artist Jorit painted Gagarin's face on the facade of a 22-storey building in the Odintsovo district, near Moscow. This mural it is the largest portrait of the cosmonaut in the world. On October 4, 2019, with the assistance of cosmonaut Sergei Revin, the inauguration of a bust of Gagarin took place in the city of La Punta (San Luis), Argentina.
50th Anniversary
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On April 12, 2011, the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's space voyage was celebrated around the world with events around what has been called Yuri's Night. The European Space Agency (ESA) together with Expeditions 26 and 27 on the International Space Station (ISS) collaborated on a documentary film about their flight, First Orbit, which offers original audio recordings of the flight along with to filming of the Vostok 1 route. Expedition 27 —with Russian, American and Italian crews— embarked on the Soyuz TMA-21, named Gagarin in his honor. From the ISS they also sent a special video message to wish the world a Happy Yuri Night, with t-shirts with the image of the space pilot.
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