Word: gagarin
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Never the Same. The extravagance was understandable. Yuri Gagarin had flown higher (188 miles) and faster (18,000 m.p.h.) than any other man ever before; yet even such startling statistics shrank into insignificance before the infinite implications of his trip. Suddenly man's centuries-old dream of space travel had been transformed into reality...
...this had been talked about before, but Yuri Gagarin's high ride made it all seem sure and possible. As the first man in space, his own contribution had been no more than his own survival, but the world to which he returned would never be the same again...
Kind Russian Eyes. The Soviet system has minimized personal publicity in the space field, but last week every segment of the state united to make Gagarin's achievement a personal triumph-ironically surrounding it with bourgeois trappings. Petitions were drawn up to rename a Moscow square after the cosmonaut. A glacier was given his name. An already prepared issue of a commemorative stamp began to roll off the presses. Reporters worked overtime to introduce him to his countrymen. One ebullient newsman described him as having "a kind Russian face, with eyes well separated." Another, who interviewed Gagarin soon after...
Eagle Scout. After all that, it was no surprise that Major Gagarin's authorized biography read as if it had been manufactured to fit the occasion. What was released to a curious world was a wordperfect picture of the "new Soviet man" -it might well have described a U.S. Eagle Scout from Iowa. Yuri was born on a collective farm near the small town of Gzhatsk, 100 miles west of Moscow. The young boy shone in the local school, and after completing the sixth grade, he was sent to manual training school in a Moscow suburb. He graduated...
...Gagarin said that weightlessness in orbit makes everything easier to do. "One's legs and arms weigh nothing. Objects float in the cabin. I did not sit in my chair as before, but hung in midair. While in the state of weightlessness, I ate and drank, and everything occurred just as it does on earth. I even worked in that condition. I wrote, jotting down my observations. My handwriting did not change, although the hand did not weigh anything, but I had to hold the notebook. Otherwise it would have floated away. I maintained communications over different channels...