2011 is to be Russia's Year of Space, marking a half century since the first manned spaceflight. The exact date is April 12th, and the man to remember, the Soviet Air Force pilot Major Yuri Gagarin. There will be a string of events, focused on Gagarin's birthplace in the region of Smolensk west of Moscow, on the Space Training Centre near the Russian capital, on the spaceport of Baikonur in Kazakhstan and on Gagarin's landing site in the Region of Saratov on the Lower Volga.
On Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Putin spoke before the national organizers of these events:
"The first manned spaceflight became a great national triumph and a great national unifier. Remarkably, this country pulled off that great project only a decade and a half after emerging from the fiercest of wars. The memory of the scientists, engineers, workers and soldiers behind Gagarin's historic orbit must live on as an inspiring beacon for new generations".
On October 4th 1957, the Soviet Union put the world's first artificial satellite into orbit. Less than a month later, it launched the first living creature into space, a mongrel dog named Laika. In 1959, unmanned Soviet probes photographed the back side of the Moon and placed a memorial plaque on the lunar surface. In 1960, the Soviet space dogs Belka and Strelka became the first Earth-borne creatures to go into space and return alive. In April 1961, there was Gagarin.
Later in the sixties, there was the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, the first dock-up in orbit, between Soyuz-4 and Soyuz-5 spaceships, and the first extravehicular spacewalk, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. A probe landing on the Moon sent back an astonishing photographic panorama of surface features around. The Soviet Union led the human race into space. The memory of this must be used as an inspiration for new recruits to space science.
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