If Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin had lived to this day, on March 9, 2019, he would have celebrated his next anniversary, the first cosmonaut on Earth would have turned 85 years old. In reality, Yuri Gagarin left us early, as really great people often leave. His life ended tragically on March 27, 1968. At the time of the ill-fated disaster of the MiG-15UTI fighter in the Vladimir region, he was only 34 years old. The death of a hero, and Yuri Alekseevich was a real hero, a pioneer in the exploration of outer space, forever left a gaping scar in the soul of the family and friends of the first cosmonaut, finding a response in the hearts of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union and other states.
Today Yuri Gagarin is a real symbol of our country, a person who is known and respected all over the world, he literally captivated everyone with his wide smile and kind face. By flying into space, he forever inscribed his name in history, ensured his immortality. It is no coincidence that April 12 is celebrated today not only for Cosmonautics Day in our country, but also for the International Day of Human Space Flight. The corresponding decision was made at the 65th session of the UN General Assembly, which took place on April 7, 2011. Today, this April day is forever and inextricably linked with the name of a simple Russian guy Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin.
Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934 in the maternity hospital in the city of Gzhatsk. In 1968, this city in the Smolensk region was renamed in his honor to Gagarin. The future cosmonaut was born into a simple family of Russian peasants. His father, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin, worked as a carpenter, and his mother, Anna Timofeevna Matveeva, worked on a dairy farm. The family was large, Yuri had two brothers and a sister, and he himself was the third oldest child.
The entire childhood of the future cosmonaut passed in the small village of Klushino, where his parents lived, here on September 1, 1941 he went to first grade - in the first year of the terrible war, which affected both his life and the life of his native village, which was already occupied by the Germans on October 12 troops. The Gagarins' family was driven out of the house by the invaders along with their small children, so they lived all through the harsh winter of 1941/42 in a small dugout dug out in the garden. According to eyewitnesses, it was no larger than an ordinary train compartment. In the occupation in a cramped dugout in the garden of their own house, in which they could not live (the Germans opened a workshop there), the Gagarins lived for almost a year and a half, until the soldiers of the Red Army liberated the village of Klushino from the Nazis on April 9, 1943. Until that moment, the elder brother of Yuri Gagarin Valentina and his sister Zoya were hijacked by the Germans for forced labor in Germany. Memories of the experience could have left their mark on Yuri, made him unsociable, closed, but the horrors of the occupation, and it’s difficult to call it another way, did not change the first cosmonaut. He, according to the recollections of loved ones, remained the same open and kind person. But in the future he tried never to mention the war and his experiences in interviews and articles.
In the fall of 1943, studies interrupted by the war continued, in 1949 Yuri Gagarin graduated from the sixth grade at the Gzhatskaya school (the family moved here in 1945, it was easier to find a job in the city) and decided to continue his further education already in Moscow, he was really drawn to Big world. Neither the persuasion of his parents, nor the persuasion of the teachers, who asked him to stay in Gzhatsk, helped. Having chosen a goal for himself, Yuri Gagarin steadily walked towards it, he was a very purposeful person and never lowered his demands on himself. After moving to Moscow, he simultaneously studied at the Lyubertsy vocational school No. 10 and at the evening school for working youth. After graduating with honors from college in 1951, he graduated from it as a trained molder-caster. But the thirst for knowledge was not satisfied, after graduating from college in the same year, Yuri Gagarin entered the foundry department of the Saratov Industrial College.
Later, the cosmonaut's daughter Elena Gagarina recalled that her father belonged to a generation of people who did not have many opportunities, especially because of the war and the hardships of the post-war period, so he always tried to make up for it, was interested in everything, was very curious, loved to study. According to Elena Garanina, Yuri Alekseevich was interested in history and literature all his life. From childhood, she remembered the story of how her father took his daughters to the battlefield of Borodino and told them the story of the battle, surprising them with interesting details of the battle of the armies of Napoleon and Kutuzov. Gagarin loved poetry, knew Pushkin well, as well as poetry related to the war, for example, Tvardovsky's poetry. He loved various literature and Russian classics, and the works of Saint-Exupery. For example, he liked the novel "Night Flight" by the famous French author.
Surprisingly, for the first time Yuri Gagarin came close to aviation only in 1954, when in October he came to the Saratov flying club at DOSAAF. As early as next year, a novice pilot achieves significant success in a new field for himself, which indicates his excellent learning ability and openness to the perception of new information. In 1955, the future cosmonaut performs his first independent flight on a Yak-18 training aircraft. Here, at the Dubki airfield (a sports airfield in the city of Saratov), he performs his first parachute jump in his life, it happened on March 14, 1955, so he mastered the course of not only flight, but also parachute training. In the summer of the same year, he completes his studies with honors at the Saratov Industrial College, and in the fall he completes his studies at the aeroclub with an overall final grade of "excellent" excellent ", flying" excellent ").
It is not surprising that with such assessments and success in piloting, after being drafted into the army in October 1955, Yuri Gagarin was assigned to Chkalov (today Orenburg), where he became a cadet of the 1st Military Aviation School of Pilots named after V. I. K. E. Voroshilov. Gagarin graduated with honors from the aviation school, like his studies at the DOSSAF flying club, and here you can recall the story of his growth. Remembering the first cosmonaut of the Earth, his smile always pops up in my head, which captivated the whole world, but in order to better imagine Yuri Gagarin, one must also remember that he was a small man. By today's standards, he was small, the height of the astronaut did not exceed 165 cm, but for men whose childhood fell on the war and the first post-war years, this was not something out of the ordinary.
At least one interesting story is connected with the growth of Yuri Gagarin. At the flight school in Chkalov, the pilot coped well with many disciplines, the cadet was in good standing and the teachers recorded his successes and excellent academic performance. However, one element was given to Yuri with difficulty, he had problems with the correct landing of the aircraft, the aircraft constantly nodded. This story is very fond of mentioning in the Russian mass media, from where it migrated to Wikipedia. It is believed that this problem with the landing could put an end to the pilot's career, but the head of the school noticed in time that the cadet Gagarin was notable for his small stature. From this, he concluded that small growth leads to a change in the viewing angle from the cockpit and changes the pilot's perception and feeling of the approaching ground. Therefore, Gagarin was recommended to fly with a thick lining, which would increase his height and improve visibility from the cockpit, this eventually bore fruit, and Yuri Alekseevich graduated from the school with honors. True, it is very difficult to say this or a beautiful bike today, but it is absolutely possible to say that for the cosmonaut, small growth was not a problem, but a necessity, and here he was 100 percent useful to Gagarin, becoming his dignity.
At the dawn of manned cosmonautics in the Soviet Union, there were quite stringent requirements for astronauts, including height, which could not exceed 170 cm. In the future, the requirements changed and gradually taller people began to be sent into space, but in the early 1960s, Korolev put forward just such a demand. However, even now, putting an extra centimeter or gram of payload into orbit is not an easy task, let alone the first stage of space exploration. At the same time, Yuri Gagarin was fully satisfied with the commission that selected candidates for the first composition of the cosmonaut corps.
Moreover, his small stature did not prevent Gagarin from playing basketball and volleyball and loving these games. While still studying at a vocational school, he received the TRP badge without any problems, having passed all the necessary standards. Yuri even managed to become a local record holder. In the school's sports day held in 1951, he ran the 100-meter distance in 12.8 seconds, improving his own achievement during the relay race 4 x 100 meters, when he ran his stage in 12.4 seconds. The fact that Yuri Gagarin was fond of various sports and, in general, was a very athletic person, we can judge by the numerous photographs that have come down to us, which are familiar to everyone. For example, the famous photo where he is standing with dumbbells on the balcony of his house, or photos where he is water skiing, even in the general photo of the first squad of Soviet cosmonauts, Yuri stands with a tennis racket in his hands.
Sport occupied a large place in his life. In basketball, the short point guard even managed to get the first adult grade. According to the recollections of the daughter of the cosmonaut Elena Gagarina, her father adored basketball and understood this game well. He was the captain of the team and a talented point guard during his student years, at one time he even participated in the trainings of the basketball team of CSKA masters, was a friend of the legendary Alexander Gomelsky. Among athletes and basketball players, there was even a kind of joke (with a great deal of truth) that on April 12, 1961, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin suddenly became the most famous basketball player in the world.
Water skiing and Gagarin are also a whole different story. Yuri Alekseevich became one of the first people in the USSR who was seriously carried away by this new, exotic at that time and somewhat extreme sport - water skiing. Many times the famous cosmonaut overcame the path from Yalta to Alushta on water skis in about 1.5 hours, while the average speed of movement on the water surface was under 100 km / h. After the first flight into space, Yuri Gagrin made a lot of efforts to ensure that the All-Union Federation of Water Sports appeared in the Soviet Union, the very idea of which was not supported by many sports leaders and was perceived as "bourgeois foppishness", but they failed.
No one will argue with the fact that Yuri Gagarin was a very brave man. Other people simply don’t go to study to be a pilot, don’t jump with a parachute, and certainly don’t fly into space. Even now, there is always a risk factor in manned space exploration, and at the dawn of this era it was a very dangerous occupation that required tremendous courage. The cosmonaut himself understood this perfectly well, who, before the first flight, just in case, wrote a touching letter to his wife and daughters. The wife of the cosmonaut, Valentina Ivanovna, received this message only 7 years after her husband died in a plane crash. Yuri Gagarin himself, like Sergei Korolev, perfectly understood the risk with which the first flight was associated.
And in fact, the first manned flight into space on April 12, 1961 was accompanied by a variety of technical problems, in total, at least 10 emergency situations occurred during the flight, and any of them could lead to a tragedy, starting from the launch into an off-design orbit (85 km higher than planned) and ending with troubles during landing (off-design point, problems with the valve of a sealed spacesuit, which had to be opened in order to switch to breathing with atmospheric air, etc.). Separately, one can single out the overload that the cosmonaut experienced in the descent vehicle, it reached 12 g, for a time Gagarin almost lost consciousness, his eyes began to turn gray, and the instrument readings began to blur before his eyes. However, the pilot coped with all emergency situations, survived, and his flight went down in history forever as the first manned flight into space. Could this have been done by a person who did not have extraordinary courage, of course not.
A lot can be said about the first cosmonaut and the clinical and psychological characteristics that were compiled in the first cosmonaut corps. Experts emphasized high noise immunity, quick reaction and the ability to navigate in a new environment, the ability to maintain self-control. During the research, the ability to relax even in the smallest pauses was revealed, Yuri Gagarin could quickly fall asleep and then wake up at a given time without using an alarm clock. Later, the daughter of the first cosmonaut spoke about this in numerous interviews. According to Elena Gagarina, the father could come after work tired, tell his family that he would sleep for 40 minutes, and sleep exactly 40 minutes, after which he could get up a minute. The character traits of the first cosmonaut also included the presence of a sense of humor, a penchant for jokes and good nature. Among the traits of his character, they distinguished curiosity, thoughtfulness, cheerfulness, self-confidence. It is difficult to argue with this, looking at the photographs of the first cosmonaut today.
For us, Yuri Gagarin will forever remain a fearless space explorer, inquisitive, striving for knowledge, well physically prepared, fond of various sports, but most importantly a kind, sincere and radiant person in every sense, a person whose smile is still familiar to millions of people all over the world. …
