Anniversary

On this day, fifty years ago:

Happy anniversary,
Comrade Gagarin, and Sputnik "Vostok"!

I remember the 1961 news only vaguely. According to this, Gagarin's flight was no big surprise to U.S. space scientists. They soon followed with Alan Shepard's suborbital flight the next month, and John Glenn's orbit in '62.

I came upon the Gagarin card twenty-plus years after the event. Beyond the heroic image-making, it seemed the sensitive face of this Soviet boy-next-door had something quite genuine about it.

That seems to have been a good read.

This suggests the first man in space was a highly likeable and accomplished person, shaped by humble origins and the deprivation of a war-time childhood.

On a tour of Britain three months after his space flight, Gagarin was such a hit that

... The Russophobe Daily Mail even ran the headline: "Make him Sir Yuri!", while John F Kennedy was so alarmed by his popularity that he banned him from entering the United States.

And he's still popular:

According to Andrea Rose, a director of the British Council who is behind plans to erect a statue of Gagarin in London, this veneration is because Gagarin is "the one untarnished figure from the Soviet era".

He died far too young, in a 1968 training plane crash.

Interesting to read about world reaction to Gagarin in 1961.

While I remember the flight just dimly, I have very strong memories of an American TV show, about three years later. Now I wonder: did the Gagarin image influence a certain fictional Russian?

He was an attractive, charasmatic Russian.

Sound out his name, with Hollywood Russian accent: hear the strong resemblance to Yuri Gagarin.