Yuri Gagarin was the first person to be launched from Earth into space • Today will mark 60 years since the historic event in Israel and around the world in a series of events
First cosmonaut Yuri Gargarim // Photo: TASS Press Films
At 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a son of Soviet peasants, awoke from his sleep in his room at the new Cosmodrome Baconon space port established just a few years earlier by the Soviet Union.
Space launches were still a very rare event in those days of course.
The first launch into space of any man-made object, the Sputnik satellite, was made just four years ago, while now Yuri is about to sit alone on the head of a huge, fuel-laden missile.
A small spark and this whole structure, as tall as an apartment building, would rise to hot fireballs and plumes of smoke.
Yuri, a small, smiling man, sits in the Vostok spacecraft at the top of the missile with a frozen face, hoping it will all go well.
Hopefully the missile will work with perfect precision and without dangerous leaks, that the extreme conditions in the unknown space will not endanger its life while orbiting the Earth, and that the capsule that protects it will survive the hot entry back to Earth.
Now, he no longer has any role as the first space pilot in history.
All he had to do was wait inside his tiny capsule, a man slightly taller than the full 157 cm of Yuri's height could not be pushed into the spaceship, hoping that this whole journey would pass in peace.
This story is not suspenseful, because most of those who read these lines are well aware of the story of Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, the first space pilot in human history.
Gagarin's journey passed safely and he landed safely after orbiting the Earth in a flight that lasted 108 full minutes in space.
Slightly symbolically, his capsule missed the original landing site and he found himself landing in a potato field.
This, of course, did not detract from the glorious rehearsals he had won all that had come, throughout the Soviet bloc and throughout the world.
The name Yuri Gagarin was uttered by all and his picture was featured in newspaper headlines in dozens of languages, and he spent months on journeys celebrating the great Soviet achievement, and especially the fact that they managed to do so before the Americans!
The space race that took place between the Soviets and the Americans over several decades was the fuel for this pioneering flight.
But even that race between two rival and hawkish blocs failed to obscure the magnitude of Yuri Gagarin's universal human achievement.
His achievement was perceived by Russians but also Americans, Africans, Europeans, Asians and others as the triumph of the human spirit, the boundless daring, and the motivating urge of human civilization to explore and discover, to constantly expand the horizon.
Today marks 60 years since the first manned flight into space.
In recent decades, an international tradition of marking the date of the flight has developed in the "Yuri Night" celebrations, events held in honor of the daring and breaking of human boundaries, as well as in the spirit of brotherhood of peoples and international cooperation in space.
The Israeli Space Agency in the Ministry of Science and Technology has been celebrating the "Yuri Night" events in Israel for a number of years with various and happy events.
Since April 11, 2019, the date when the Israeli spacecraft arrived on the moon in the beginning, a little Israeli daring and audacity have also been added to the celebrations, and they are celebrated under the title "Myuri LeBrashit".
The space agency will hold dozens of activities for the whole family in the coming weekends on the subject of astronomy and space in collaboration with Space IL and the Nature and Parks Authority, in night camps around the country.
There will also be open public evenings at the agency's public observatories, lectures for school students, a variety of online activities (for those who can't leave the house) and of course a space party to be held on Yuri's night in Planetania in collaboration with the Space Agency's Horizon community and the Al Al Space podcast. The information can be found on the Israel Space Agency's website.
Itai Levy is the director of educational projects at the Space Agency in the Ministry of Science and Technology
