The General Assembly on 7 April 2011, declared 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight “to celebrate each year at the international level the beginning of the space era for mankind, reaffirming the important contribution of space science and technology in achieving sustainable development goals and increasing the well-being of States and peoples, as well as ensuring the realization of their aspiration to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes.”
History Behind the Day
Exactly 55 years ago, on 12 April 1961, mankind pushed back the frontiers of science, when for the first time, a cosmonaut flew into space. Yuri Gagarin, a young Soviet pilot, travelled for 108 minutes around Earth, before successfully returning home.
Gagarin was born in 1934 in a village called Klushino near the small town of Gzhatsk to the west of Moscow. His family worked in one of the multiple communist “kolkhoz”, or collective farms, which were implemented by the USSR to organise agricultural production.
He decided he would become a fighter pilot when, as a teenager, he saw a military plane make a forced landing in a field close to his home. After studying physics and mathematics, and joining a flying club, his dream became reality. In 1955, Gagarin took his first solo flight. It was a few years before his attentions turned to space.
In 1957, the Soviet Union secured an important first victory by sending the first man-made satellite into space, Sputnik 1. From then on, both the US and the USSR worked hard to win the next race, to send a man into space.
On 12 April 1961, aboard the Vosotok 1 spacecraft, Gagarin thus became the first man to ever take a look at the view of Earth from space, as he orbited around the “blue planet” at a maximum speed of 18,000 miles an hour. He became an instant worldwide celebrity.
Just three weeks after Gagarin’s historic flight, the Americans caught up and sent their own cosmonaut into space. Alan Shepard flew around Earth on 5 May 1961, for 15 minutes. Two years later, the first woman in space was again a Russian. Valentina Tereshkova piloted spacecraft Vostok 6 in June 1963.
