Yury Gagarin won the hearts of millions when he took off in his Vostok craft ?€” on a then-not so reliable R-7 rocket ?€” to become the first man in space April 12, 1961.
But before getting his ticket to space, Gagarin had to win one particular heart ?€” that of Sergei Korolyov, the legendary chief of the OKB-1 design bureau.
Korolyov had five other wide-eyed and enthusiastic candidates to choose from. All six young men, who'd gone through a many-tiered selection process, were more or less equally qualified for the job.
According to one of his aides, Korolyov racked his brain for a long time before settling on the 27-year-old fighter pilot.
In the end, what distinguished Gagarin from his rivals and left an indelible mark on the father of the Soviet space program was that before climbing inside a Vostok prototype for a quick look around, Gagarin took off his shoes.
According to Boris Chertok, then the chief designer of control systems at OKB-1, Korolyov was amazed by such a show of respect for his brainchild and his choice was sealed.
Gagarin was visibly thrilled about his selection, Chertok said in a recent televised interview.
But at least one man who helped propel Gagarin into orbit said he had no grandiose plans for celebrating the historical flight's 40th anniversary Thursday.
Vitaly Svershchek, deputy director of the Zvezda spacesuit manufacturer, who personally helped Gagarin settle into the Vostok minutes before take-off, recalled that he had been too immersed in his "painstaking work" to have experienced any elation.
Click here to read our special report on Russia's New Space Age. "We will of course put up some announcement at the office, but I don't plan anything grand," he said.
Svershchek said he and his colleagues mostly exchanged technical instructions with Gagarin.
"They were phrases like 'move left' or 'shift right,' nothing exciting," the 69-year-old veteran reminisced in a recent telephone interview from Zvezda's headquarters in Tomilino, outside Moscow.
Even when Gagarin safely completed his 108-minute flight and landed outside the remote village of Smelovka near the southern city of Engels, some of the team were just "surprised," Svershchek said, not overjoyed.
He recalled that even as he and his colleagues rushed with Gagarin to Moscow in an official motorcade from the Chkalovsky air force base outside the city to see fireworks go off in the night sky in honor of their effort, he wondered what the celebration was about.
"I remember thinking 'What are the fireworks for?'"
"Serious, painstaking work," was the only way Svershchek would describe his 44 years in the space industy.
But unlike the stoical veteran, some of the space industry's younger figures recalled the all-engulfing jubilation inspired by news of Gagarin's flight, which was kept secret not only from ordinary people but even from many space engineers.
"There was universal joy, people flooded the streets smiling and greeting each other," said Yury Grigoryev, deputy general designer at Rocket Space Corp., the main successor to OKB-1.
Grigoryev, who was a 20-year-old student of rocket science at the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1961, said he experienced "the strongest emotions of his life" upon learning of Gagarin's flight ?€” announced to the Soviet people by legendary radio announcer Yury Levitan.
Had the flight ?€” which Gagarin began with the now famous "Off we go!" ?€” ended in failure, it is unlikely that Levitan, with his trademark baritone, would have made any announcement about it at all.
But as it happened, Gagarin's mission allowed Moscow to claim perhaps the greatest technological and moral victory in its Cold War battle with Washington.
In addition to motivating Russian space engineers to rush to beat their U.S. counterparts, the Cold War had a much smaller, ultimately comical effect on Gagarin's flight.
In the frenzy of pre-flight preparations at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Korolyov's team didn't manage to stamp the U.S.S.R. logo on Gagarin's helmet, Svershchek said.
"Just before the flight we discovered this and a colleague of ours fetched a can of paint and painted 'U.S.S.R.' on the helmet," Svershchek said.
The team feared that ?€” since the public had been kept in the dark about the flight ?€” Gagarin, upon landing, could have been mistaken for a U.S. spy-plane pilot.
"You see, Powers had been shot down not long before ?€¦ and we thought there could be some misunderstanding " Svershchek explained, referring to U.S. pilot Gary Powers who was arrested after being shot down while flying a secret U-2 spy plane over Russia in May 1960.
With the Cold War lost a decade ago, the Russian government and space industry are scrambling to stage nationwide ?€” if not worldwide ?€” celebrations of their momentous, long-ago victory.
President Vladimir Putin will pay his respects to one of the nation's greatest heroes by visiting the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, while the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, or Rosaviakosmos, has already drafted a 13-page program of celebrations for Thursday featuring more than 80 events from the southern city of Taganrog to the Svobodny Cosmodrome in the Far East.
Among them is the opening of a memorial museum in the city of Gagarin, about 180 kilometers west of Moscow, where a monument to Gagarin's mother was already unveiled with fanfare Tuesday, and a "virtual museum" on the Internet. The plan also includes the release of a series of postage stamps, specially minted silver coins and the launch of a web site, even though both Gagarin.com and Gagarin.ru have already been snatched up by unlikely squatters ?€” a Russian prince in exile and a law firm.
The plan also provides for a space flight exhibition in Vienna, Austria, the "Space Exploration to Humankind 2001" conference in Berlin, a round table on space exploration to be held in Russia's cultural and science center in New Delhi and a space-related art exhibit in London.
The list of events features an address by the U.S.-Russian crew of the international space station in a live worldwide broadcast from their orbital outpost.
Even Russia's equivalent of the Ebay.com auction site ?€” Molotok.ru ?€” plans to celebrate the anniversary. The site announced earlier this month that it will auction off personal belongings of several Russian cosmonauts with proceeds to go to support space industry veterans.
Besides the predictable celebrations in the town of Korolyov, where Gagarin's Vostok craft was designed, and in Baikonur, site of the launch pad used 40 year ago, commemorative events also include plans for renovating a museum dubbed "Aborted Flight" in the city of Kirzhach near the place where Gagarin died in a mysterious plane crash on March 27, 1968.
A solemn mood will likely reign over Red Square on Thursday when Russian space veterans gather to lay flowers at Gagarin's grave in the Kremlin wall and in the woods near Kirzhach where dozens of the late hero's friends and colleagues will go to pay their respects.
Seven years after his stunning flight, Gagarin perished in a plane crash that still keeps aviation experts and the public guessing.
Gagarin's MiG-15 UTI spiraled down from an altitude of 4,000 meters in less than a minute, killing both the cosmonaut and his flight instructor, Vladimir Seryogin.
The cause of the accident was never determined.
But Lieutenant General Sergei Belotserkovsky ?€” who taught Gagarin at Moscow's Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and participated in the official probe into his best-known student's abrupt death ?€” has said it was poor organization and inferior equipment that killed Gagarin and Seryogin minutes after they took off from the Chkalovsky air force base.
Belotserkovsky believes it was the base's inattentive ground control that should have borne ultimate responsibility for the death of his students, but didn't.
The official commission, set up hours after the crash, ignored Belotserkovsky's findings. It wrote in its final report that no clear cause could be determined, giving rise to countless rumors ?€” the most outrageous of which was that both Gagarin and Seryogin had been suffering from a severe hangover during the flight.
But before getting his ticket to space, Gagarin had to win one particular heart ?€” that of Sergei Korolyov, the legendary chief of the OKB-1 design bureau.
Korolyov had five other wide-eyed and enthusiastic candidates to choose from. All six young men, who'd gone through a many-tiered selection process, were more or less equally qualified for the job.
According to one of his aides, Korolyov racked his brain for a long time before settling on the 27-year-old fighter pilot.
In the end, what distinguished Gagarin from his rivals and left an indelible mark on the father of the Soviet space program was that before climbing inside a Vostok prototype for a quick look around, Gagarin took off his shoes.
According to Boris Chertok, then the chief designer of control systems at OKB-1, Korolyov was amazed by such a show of respect for his brainchild and his choice was sealed.
Gagarin was visibly thrilled about his selection, Chertok said in a recent televised interview.
But at least one man who helped propel Gagarin into orbit said he had no grandiose plans for celebrating the historical flight's 40th anniversary Thursday.
Vitaly Svershchek, deputy director of the Zvezda spacesuit manufacturer, who personally helped Gagarin settle into the Vostok minutes before take-off, recalled that he had been too immersed in his "painstaking work" to have experienced any elation.
Svershchek said he and his colleagues mostly exchanged technical instructions with Gagarin.
"They were phrases like 'move left' or 'shift right,' nothing exciting," the 69-year-old veteran reminisced in a recent telephone interview from Zvezda's headquarters in Tomilino, outside Moscow.
Even when Gagarin safely completed his 108-minute flight and landed outside the remote village of Smelovka near the southern city of Engels, some of the team were just "surprised," Svershchek said, not overjoyed.
He recalled that even as he and his colleagues rushed with Gagarin to Moscow in an official motorcade from the Chkalovsky air force base outside the city to see fireworks go off in the night sky in honor of their effort, he wondered what the celebration was about.
"I remember thinking 'What are the fireworks for?'"
"Serious, painstaking work," was the only way Svershchek would describe his 44 years in the space industy.
But unlike the stoical veteran, some of the space industry's younger figures recalled the all-engulfing jubilation inspired by news of Gagarin's flight, which was kept secret not only from ordinary people but even from many space engineers.
"There was universal joy, people flooded the streets smiling and greeting each other," said Yury Grigoryev, deputy general designer at Rocket Space Corp., the main successor to OKB-1.
Grigoryev, who was a 20-year-old student of rocket science at the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1961, said he experienced "the strongest emotions of his life" upon learning of Gagarin's flight ?€” announced to the Soviet people by legendary radio announcer Yury Levitan.
Had the flight ?€” which Gagarin began with the now famous "Off we go!" ?€” ended in failure, it is unlikely that Levitan, with his trademark baritone, would have made any announcement about it at all.
But as it happened, Gagarin's mission allowed Moscow to claim perhaps the greatest technological and moral victory in its Cold War battle with Washington.
In addition to motivating Russian space engineers to rush to beat their U.S. counterparts, the Cold War had a much smaller, ultimately comical effect on Gagarin's flight.
In the frenzy of pre-flight preparations at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Korolyov's team didn't manage to stamp the U.S.S.R. logo on Gagarin's helmet, Svershchek said.
"Just before the flight we discovered this and a colleague of ours fetched a can of paint and painted 'U.S.S.R.' on the helmet," Svershchek said.
The team feared that ?€” since the public had been kept in the dark about the flight ?€” Gagarin, upon landing, could have been mistaken for a U.S. spy-plane pilot.
"You see, Powers had been shot down not long before ?€¦ and we thought there could be some misunderstanding " Svershchek explained, referring to U.S. pilot Gary Powers who was arrested after being shot down while flying a secret U-2 spy plane over Russia in May 1960.
With the Cold War lost a decade ago, the Russian government and space industry are scrambling to stage nationwide ?€” if not worldwide ?€” celebrations of their momentous, long-ago victory.
President Vladimir Putin will pay his respects to one of the nation's greatest heroes by visiting the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, while the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, or Rosaviakosmos, has already drafted a 13-page program of celebrations for Thursday featuring more than 80 events from the southern city of Taganrog to the Svobodny Cosmodrome in the Far East.
Among them is the opening of a memorial museum in the city of Gagarin, about 180 kilometers west of Moscow, where a monument to Gagarin's mother was already unveiled with fanfare Tuesday, and a "virtual museum" on the Internet. The plan also includes the release of a series of postage stamps, specially minted silver coins and the launch of a web site, even though both Gagarin.com and Gagarin.ru have already been snatched up by unlikely squatters ?€” a Russian prince in exile and a law firm.
The plan also provides for a space flight exhibition in Vienna, Austria, the "Space Exploration to Humankind 2001" conference in Berlin, a round table on space exploration to be held in Russia's cultural and science center in New Delhi and a space-related art exhibit in London.
The list of events features an address by the U.S.-Russian crew of the international space station in a live worldwide broadcast from their orbital outpost.
Even Russia's equivalent of the Ebay.com auction site ?€” Molotok.ru ?€” plans to celebrate the anniversary. The site announced earlier this month that it will auction off personal belongings of several Russian cosmonauts with proceeds to go to support space industry veterans.
Besides the predictable celebrations in the town of Korolyov, where Gagarin's Vostok craft was designed, and in Baikonur, site of the launch pad used 40 year ago, commemorative events also include plans for renovating a museum dubbed "Aborted Flight" in the city of Kirzhach near the place where Gagarin died in a mysterious plane crash on March 27, 1968.
A solemn mood will likely reign over Red Square on Thursday when Russian space veterans gather to lay flowers at Gagarin's grave in the Kremlin wall and in the woods near Kirzhach where dozens of the late hero's friends and colleagues will go to pay their respects.
Seven years after his stunning flight, Gagarin perished in a plane crash that still keeps aviation experts and the public guessing.
Gagarin's MiG-15 UTI spiraled down from an altitude of 4,000 meters in less than a minute, killing both the cosmonaut and his flight instructor, Vladimir Seryogin.
The cause of the accident was never determined.
But Lieutenant General Sergei Belotserkovsky ?€” who taught Gagarin at Moscow's Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and participated in the official probe into his best-known student's abrupt death ?€” has said it was poor organization and inferior equipment that killed Gagarin and Seryogin minutes after they took off from the Chkalovsky air force base.
Belotserkovsky believes it was the base's inattentive ground control that should have borne ultimate responsibility for the death of his students, but didn't.
The official commission, set up hours after the crash, ignored Belotserkovsky's findings. It wrote in its final report that no clear cause could be determined, giving rise to countless rumors ?€” the most outrageous of which was that both Gagarin and Seryogin had been suffering from a severe hangover during the flight.
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