Exactly half a century ago, we as a species left our home planet, if only for a little bit. Today we celebrate that achievement through a form of media that we hadn’t even dreamed of 50 years previous.
Below you’ll find a roundup of the many wonderful tributes to this inspirational day.
This wonderful video offers a simulated real-time experience of what Gagarin’s first orbit around the planet actually looked like. Trailer for the full-length film is below:
Universe Today: Yuri’s Photo Album
Check out fantastic pictures straight from the day of the historic flight. The assembled documentation was originally taken by Oleg Ivanvosky Evgeny A. Sivukhin, Lavochkin R&D, and Roscosmos. The site has some really intimate shots posted up. (And at least one really scary one of Yuri’s capsule placed adroitly atop the enormous exploding rocket that would carry him into space.)
The dominant search engine Google has a particluarly great logo redesign to commemorate the day.
Ian Anderson & Astronaut Cady Coleman (via NASA)
Dedicated to Yuri Gagarin, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull plays a heartwarming flute duet with Col. Cady Coleman who is currently in orbit aboard the International Space Station.
Space.com has some great interviews with Yuri Gagarin as he and his friends look back on his historic flight.
Here in our little stub rocket, we couldn’t be more choked up the first human space flight’s anniversary. Here’s hoping in 100 years we’ll be blogging about this from another planet!
Stubby the Rocket is the mascot of Tor.com and is the first rocket to dock with the Flatiron Building in NYC.
