Gagarin anecdote: Mistaken landing site, mistaken for "spy is coming"

On April 12, the website of the Spanish newspaper Abezai reported five anecdotes about the space journey of the first person to fly space, Yuri Gagarin, as follows:

Following the Russian tradition of going inside and taking off his shoes, gagarin took off his shoes on April 12, 1961, before entering the Vostok-1 spacecraft that sent him into Earth orbit. After adapting barefoot to the cabin environment, gagarin shouted "Come on! "Cheer yourself on.

Frequent failures

Although the flight completed the mission (which lasted 108 minutes, which is the flight time of the Vostok-1 spacecraft to circle the earth), not everything went according to the Soviet plan. There were more than a dozen technical glitches along the way, including the spacecraft rising to a higher altitude than expected. If the spacecraft's braking system fails, Gagarin will have to wait for the spacecraft to begin descending on its own. Although enough food, water and oxygen are prepared on board for ten days, higher altitudes mean longer wait times and Gagarin's supply could run out. Fortunately, the spacecraft braked very effectively.

"Here comes the spy"

There were also mistakes at the landing site: Gagarin ended up landing on a farm far from the expected landing site, in the Saratov region of southern Russia. After stepping out of the capsule, the astronauts saw a girl and her grandmother digging potatoes. Since he was wearing a white helmet and an orange spacesuit, and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing, Gagarin took a lot of effort to convince them that he was not a foreign spy.

A first move

Legend has it that before taking off, Gagarin asked the driver of the car who sent him to the launch pad to stop so that he could get out of the car and untie his hands. The driver agreed, and the astronaut urinated on the right rear tire of the vehicle. Russian astronauts have repeated the ritual for years before going into space, but this superstitious behavior that has lasted for decades may now be unsustainable: the new Russian spacesuit, introduced in 2019, has no zippers on the pants and is so bulky that it can't be worn and taken off flexibly.

Behind the scenes

When Gagarin became a household name in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world, few people for years knew about the mastermind of the Soviet space program: Sergei Korolev. The Swedish Academy of Sciences had nominated the Nobel Prize to be awarded to the "chief designer" of the Soviet space program, but the Soviet Union refused, and Korolev hid his identity until the end of his life. In fact, Korolev's name was not revealed until after his death in 1966. Under Korolev's leadership, the Soviet Union was the first to send humans into space not only, but also the female Valentina Tereshkova into space in 1963 and the first to perform a spacewalk.

Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to go into space (Russian Space Museum website)

Source: Reference News Network