🚀 Today marks the 92th birthday anniversary of Yury Gagarin, the Earth’s first space pilot. His flight aboard the Vostok spaceship went down in history as the humankind’s greatest breakthrough in science and technology and showed the entire world the intellectual and scientific might of our country and Soviet specialists’ audacity and top professionalism. Yury Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino, Gzhatsk District, the Smolensk Region, on March 9 1934. It was here that in 1941, in the midst of the Great Patriotic War, young Yury first saw Soviet airplanes on sorties to defend the homeland and began dreaming about flying. In 1954, while in industrial college, Gagarin enrolled in the Saratov flying club and made the final decision to dedicate his life to aviation. After graduating from the flying course with honours in 1955, Yury Gagarin entered an aviation academy to become a Northern Fleet air force pilot since 1957. In 1959, Gagarin learnt about volunteers being recruited for a forthcoming space flight and submitted a report asking to enlist him in the cosmonaut team. Head of the country’s main design bureau Sergei Korolev wanted the first cosmonaut to be a fighter pilot: “He is a pilot, navigator, communications officer, and flight engineer.” In 1959, cosmonaut candidates began to be secretly selected in the units of the USSR Air Force: the commission reviewed the documents of 3,461 fighterpilots. Out of about 3,500 jet pilots, just 20 volunteers were selected. In 1959, along with 19 other pilots, Yury Gagarin arrived at the Star City 25 kilometres away from Moscow. There he had both theoretical and practical flight training, and experienced artificial weightlessness and overload in a centrifuge. In October 1960, a team of six people began training on the Vostok spacecraft simulator at a research institute in Zhukovsky. Following arduous training, exams and tests, Yury Gagarin was shortlisted to become cosmonaut Number One. YuryGagarin’s legendary flight into space, which marked the start of the manned space exploration era, took place on April 12, 1961. On that day, at 9:07 am at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Yury Gagarin uttered his famous “Off we go!” and the first Vostok spacecraft with a man on board was launched. Gagarin spent 1 hour and 48 minutes in space orbiting the Earth and safely landed in the Saratov Region. The newsflash about the flight instantly circled the world. Thousands of people greeted Gagarin in Moscow with flowers and welcome posters. 🌐 Within two years of that historic event, Yury Gagarin visited over 30 countries, including Britain, France, Cuba, Japan, India, and Liberia, where he was honoured as a hero. The tour was unofficially called the “Peace Mission.” The famous Gagarin’s smile captured the entire globe, aroused sympathy and respect for the Soviet man. 🕯 The first cosmonaut tragically lost his life on March 27, 1968, when he died in a crash during a training flight on a MiG-15UTI aircraft. Gagarin’s death shocked people all over the world and became an irreparable loss for all mankind. *** 🎖 The memory of the space pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Yury Gagarin is immortalized in the names of localities and outer space objects. The urn with his ashes was buried in the Kremlin wall next to the ashes of designer Sergei Korolev and other prominent figures of the USSR. Monuments and busts continue to be erected all over the world in honour of the great trailblazer. The Russian Foreign Ministry and Russian foreign missions are actively contributing to this. In recent years, the sculptural image of Yury Gagarin has decorated Brasilia, Islamabad, and Doha.