[color=#FFFFFF]On this date exactly 50 years ago two men looked into the future. One with with his vision, the one with his bravery. Their names are Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin. On April 12th 7:55 A.M The spaceship Vostok-1 took off strapped on top of the R-7 rocket originally designed to carry nuclear warheads, the flight lasted 108 minutes in which the spherical capsule made a full orbit around Earth. Yuri became a hero the moment he returned to Earth, while Korolev the chief designed and mastermind of the Soviet space program lived in secrecy. The news of the first man in space united a separated world with a vision of the future.
Korolev died on 14 January 1966. He didn't live long enough to see what he begun first by launching the first artificial satellite and then sending the first man in space. Testament of his engineering genius is the fact that the very same rocket which launched Sputnik-1 and then Vostok-1 into space is still in use as Russia's main crew-lifting vehicle and has proven in the past 50 years to be the safest launch system ever designed.
Gagarin died on 27 March 1968 in an airplane crashed, it was his first flight since the launch. One year later when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon they left one of Gagarin's medals in commemoration of the first man to leave Earth
Nowdays the capitalists want to convince us that the horrible communism was extremely inhumane and if it cared about people (as the wunderbar Amerika does) the USSR would never win the space race.
Only if all that resources ionvested into sending men to space were used for medical research...
I'm not gonna debate on how much of that is true, or how better the Americans were at covering up, but seriously - putting the molten remains of Vladimir Komarov in an open casket.. why would you do that?
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Mephistoles
' Wrote:I'm not gonna debate on how much of that is true, or how better the Americans were at covering up, but seriously - putting the molten remains of Vladimir Komarov in an open casket.. why would you do that?
What was left of Komarov was cremated and put in the Kremlin's wall...not to mention the same thing was done for the Apollo 1 astronauts