Orion, thanks for the excellent photograph! I still want to be an astronaut, but there's all that silly business about physical fitness and knowing how to fly a spacecraft....
0235, I was in high school (11th grade a.k.a. junior year) when
Gagarin made his historic flight. Talk about a big deal! I can still see that huge black-and-white photograph of
Gagarin on the front page of the newspaper, though I can't recall whether it was the morning paper (
The Miami Herald) or the afternoon paper (
The Miami Daily News). Maybe it was both!
Thanks,
kaznokrad! Yeah, those are good-looking stamps and I'm glad "Chief Designer"
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev is shown with
Gagarin. I included those two tiny Vostok-1 rockets to achieve the proper 500x150 pixels resolution.
The wristwatch
There he goes!
The whole Megillah
The cover of 'Time'
Nice wheels!
Scene from "Yuri's Night" party. Yuri would approve, I'm sure.
Now we introduce the cute.
=^..^=P.S.: Speaking of cute, let's not forget the first woman in space!
Valentina Vladimirovna TereshkovaBut seriously....
During her flight in space,
Tereshkova orbited the Earth 48 times, more than the combined total of orbits compiled by U.S. and U.S.S.R. missions up to that time. On the first day of her three days in orbit, she advised ground controllers that her spacecraft was misaligned by 90 degrees. This was eventually albeit reluctantly confirmed and corrective measures taken, but the anti-female "flyboy" faction didn't like this display of competence by
Tereshkova and tried to belittle her efforts. Thankfully, their attempt didn't work. (The U.S. space-flight program had an even more misogynistic faction than the U.S.S.R. It succeeded in preventing women from flying on space missions for two more decades.)
Tereshkova did what she was asked to do, never complained and was in every respect an exemplary cosmonaut. The sexist asshats who control space-flight history still try to impeach
Tereshkova by asserting her flight was merely propaganda, whereas reality shows us all crewed spaceflights during that era — whether by the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. — were political propaganda to some extent.
