Word: cosmonauts
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...That's right. Let the capitalist countries try to catch up with our country, which has blazed the trail into space and launched the world's first cosmonaut...
...came to light. And when newsmen checked back over the preflight publicity, more curious items turned up. For days, Moscow had been flooded with rumors about an imminent attempt at space flight. Before the Vostok flight, the Moscow correspondent for the London Daily Worker cabled his paper that the cosmonaut son of a famous Soviet airplane designer had orbited the earth three times and landed with serious injuries. The London Daily Sketch identified him as Gennady Mikhailov. Soviet authorities promptly denied both reports. But the rumors continued, and the papers stuck to their stories...
None of this was surprising to space scientists. Everything the first cosmonaut reported had been suggested earlier by the instruments of unmanned satellites or by earthbound theory. The narrow blue band that Gagarin saw was the familiar color of the clear sky-the blue component of sunlight that the atmosphere scatters upward into space as well as toward earth. Still, all such details held a fresh fascination: they were part of a firsthand observation, an eyewitness confirmation. They belonged to a tale told by an adventurer into the unknown, and if they added little to man's knowledge, they...
Fedorov's account suggested that the cosmonaut landed inside his space capsule, but according to other sources in Russia, Major Gagarin parachuted out of the capsule before it hit the ground. Space Scientist Nikolai Gurovsky said: "The cosmonaut came down smoothly in a glade near a field. Landing on his feet, without even tumbling, he walked up to the people...
...Just two days after his trip, Yuri Gagarin got a hero's reception in Moscow. Red Square, the city's ceremonial center, was decked out in festive dress. Banners fluttered from tall silver flagpoles; streetcars, buses, autos, lampposts and buildings were draped with bunting. Portraits of the cosmonaut were spotted all over the city, and bookstalls were already peddling his biography. Crowd barriers were in place and honor guards lined the 20-mile route to Vnukovo Airport...