MOSCOW -- The Russian government and space industry are scrambling to stage a nationwide -- if not worldwide -- celebration of the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight to space, even though many of the industry's workers called the task of putting the first human in space more of a "tedious grind" than a technological triumph.
The Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviacosmos) has drafted a 13-page plan of national and worldwide celebrations, including as many as 86 nationwide events to be staged from the city of Taganrog in southern Russia to the Svobodny Cosmodrome in the nation's far east on April 12.
Part of the national celebration: the opening of a museum in a Russian city renamed for Gagarin that is dedicated to his flight and an Internet "virtual museum" that will release of an entire series of postage stamps (But its URL won't be gagarin.com or gagarin.ru. They have already been snatched away by a Russian prince in exile and a law firm, respectively.)
The plan, obtained by SPACE.com last week, also provides for a spaceflight exhibition organized in Vienna, a "Space Exploration to Humankind 2001" conference in Berlin, a round table on space exploration to be held in Russia's cultural and science center in New Delhi and a space-related art exhibition in London.
The plan also provides for renovation of a museum, dubbed "Aborted Flight," located in the city of Kirzhach near where Gagarin crashed to death, as well as predictable celebrations in Korolyov, where the cosmonaut's Vostok craft was designed, and Baikonur, where the first person in space was launched.
Also, the U.S.-Russian crew of the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday will address the world in a live broadcast from their orbital outpost.
Russian space veterans will gather in Red Square to pay respect to the world's first cosmonaut by laying flowers and wreaths at Gagarin's Kremlin Wall grave, while dozens of the late hero's friends and colleagues will go to a forested area near the town of Kirzhach, where Gagarin's plane crashed on March 27, 1968.
A life with stunning heights ends in disaster
Seven years after his stunning flight, Gagarin perished in a mysterious plane crash that still keeps both aviation experts and the public guessing. Gagarin's MiG-15 UTI spiraled down in less than a minute from an altitude of 13,123 feet (4,000 meters), killing both the cosmonaut and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin.
According to Lt. General Sergei Belotserkovsky, however, it was a poorly organized flight and inferior equipment that killed Gagarin and Seryogin minutes after they took off from the Chkalovsky air force base near Moscow. Professor Belotserkovsky lectured Gagarin at Moscow's Zhukovsky Air Force Academy and participated in the official probe into his best-known student's abrupt death. This aviation veteran insists that it was Chkalovsky's inattentive ground control that should have borne the main responsibility for the death of his students, but didnt.
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