The head of Russia's space agency is jealous of US billionaires. Watch this rocket go sideways instead of up. Reality television is heading to outer space. These two things keep Airbus' head of space systems up at night. Cosmonaut yuri gagarin during last minute checks of vostok i control systems before launch, In office for less than three months, Kennedy was facing down what he and his advisers suspected to be an untrustworthy Central Intelligence Agency.
He would confirm his suspicion toward the end of the month, when Cuban rebels bankrolled by the agency invaded their Communist-held homeland. At a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others on April 12, Kennedy had stressed he wanted the invasion to be a Cuban operation as much as possible, and the CIA assured him that the rebels were up to the job. This is how the human heart adapts to space. The result, a week later, was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a military and political disaster that would only embolden Fidel Castro and his chief benefactor, the Soviet Union.
Kennedy blamed the Soviets for his bad April. Read More. Khrushchev's answer came 60 years ago, on April 12, , when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth aboard a spacecraft called Vostok 1.
After parachuting from the craft near the Russian village of Smelovka, Gagarin landed a hero — and a major embarrassment for the United States, already stung by the Soviet first-in-the-race launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite four years earlier. Embarrassed in turn by their failure to develop an atomic bomb before the Americans did, the Soviet leadership had poured a huge portion of the country's budget into scientific research, building a testing ground and rocket base in Kazakhstan that, wrote Stephen Walker in his new book " Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space ," was four times the size of Greater London.
There, Korolev worked his magic, building a series of rockets over several years. On April 12, , Gagarin was launched into orbit by a Vostok rocket and became the first man in space. After completing one orbit, the spacecraft's automatic controls brought him safely back to Earth.
The CIA reported, accurately, to President Dwight Eisenhower that thanks to Korolev's powerful fleet of intercontinental missiles, the Soviets would be ready to put a satellite into space by The Soviets were ahead of schedule by three months. And with Sputnik, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his frenetic classic of the space race, "The Right Stuff," "a colossal panic was underway, with congressmen and newspapermen leading a huge pack that was baying at the sky where the hundred-pound Soviet satellite kept beeping around the world.
Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. In fact, it would be almost a year before John Glenn accomplished this goal. In time, however, the U. The first co-op project between the two nations was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which paved the way for future joint missions. Then, there was the Shuttle-Mir co-op that began in In , in-orbit construction of the ISS was underway. Today, U. Not forgotten. When they left the surface of the Moon, they left behind many things.
Some of those items include an American flag, a plaque, a small disc with messages from U. Astronauts often overlooked politics to honor other space explorers out of mutual respect.
Even the launch pad Gagarin used in at Baikonur Cosmodrome is still operational and launches ISS missions to this day. Communities all around the globe continue to celebrate the monumental achievement of the Russian cosmonaut who dared to do what no person had before, on this day 58 years ago. A good night's sleep is crucial for a full day of space exploration.
Find and compare great local hotels with our search tool. This day in history: Yuri Gagarin becomes first person in space April 12, On April 14, the cosmonaut was flown to Moscow, where he was greeted by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and driven into town on a highway lined with cheering Russians.
He died on March 27, , after the MiG jet fighter he was flying crashed near the town of Novosyolovo. Published On 12 Apr More from Gallery.
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