BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Yuri Gagarin – The First Spaceman

On April 12, 1961 with a “Let's go!”, the first spaceman blasted off. There was no fanfare or countdown when Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 became the first human to orbit the Earth. He was an exceptional individual who came from humble beginnings, and at 34 his life ended all too soon.

Yuri Gagarin – The First Spaceman

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left the Moon, they left some commemorative items behind. Did you know of them were medals in memory of the Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin? There is a respect between those who venture into space which transcends national boundaries or political differences.

This is a zinc-alloy statue of Yuri Gagarin in his spacesuit, standing on the globe. It's at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. The statue is a replica of a sculpture commissioned by the town where Gagarin trained as a steel foundry worker in his teens. The sculptor was Anatoly Novikov. The replica was a gift to Britain by Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency. It was placed in The Mall in central London in 2011, but two years later moved to its long-term home in Greenwich. (It probably feels more at home there.)

Russian astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyj discovered an asteroid in February 1968 that was given the provisional designation 1968 CB. When her discovery was confirmed, she named it Gagarin. It's a stony asteroid from the asteroid belt's inner regions and about 9 km in diameter, now officially designated 1772 Gagarin.

Click to find out more about Naming Asteroids.

A lunar crater was named in honor of Yuri Gagarin.

Gagarin is a 265 km crater in the southern hemisphere on the far side of the Moon. It's a huge impact crater, and here is Gagarin Crater as seen by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966.