Free Republic

The Space Foundation, an American non-profit organization founded in 1983, has renamed its Yuri's Night fundraiser, named in honor of the first man to travel into space, celebrated Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, "in light of current world events".

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has accused the U.S. State Department of spreading disinformation by not mentioning Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in a Facebook post about the International Day of Human Space Flight. […] “Not noting this is disinformation and a base trick of the post-truth epoch,” the Russian ministry said on its own page. …

If you are looking for an entertaining film to watch over the next week as you relax in this holiday season, I would highly recommend "Gagarin: First In Space." It can be found on Netflix and is a Russian movie with subtitles. It chronicles how Yuri Gagarin was chosen to be the first in space along with great SFX of the flight itself. What is interesting is it doesn't sugarcoat the story. For example, Gagarin's backup cosmonaut, German Titov, was genuinely pissed off that he wasn't chosen to be first and doesn't hide his disappointment. Also fascinating is the portrayal...

Less than seven years after his history-making mission, Gagarin died in a plane crash at only 38 years old. The cosmonaut and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were flying a routine training exercise when they were lost, and the mysterious circumstances of the wreck have inspired a half-century of wild speculation. With little more than Soviet-sponsored reports, KGB investigations, and long withheld testimony as explanations, conspiracy theories sprung up to explain why a plane piloted by two experienced Russian airmen suddenly just fell out of the sky. So what really happened to the first man in space?

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As one of the proudest and most memorable moments in Russia's history, Yuri Gagarin's space flight, 50 years ago today, has been the subject of much discussion among the Russian media and its political leaders. But what are they saying about it? The Russian president has spoken of Gagarin's achievement in glowing terms. “I believe it was a truly revolutionary event, a highly symbolic one", he said during an interview with Chinese television. "It was a tremendous achievement of Soviet cosmonautics, which divided the world into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the flight, what has been termed the ‘space era’. A lot...

Former Cosmonaut Offers First-Hand Account Of The Death Of Yury Gagarin Russian pilot and cosmonaut Vladimir Aksyonov has offered the most plausible account to date of the crash of the fighter jet that killed Yury Gagarin, the first man in space, and Vladimir Seryogin, a regimental commander at the cosmonaut training center where Gagarin was enrolled. Aksyonov, a two-time Hero of the Soviet Union, was with Gagarin at a pre-flight medical exam on March 27, 1968, the day of the crash. He flew in a different plane on that fateful day. Aksyonov presents his unofficial version of events in his...

Soviet officials lied about the success of Yuri Gagarin's historic 1961 flight into space and covered up the fact that he had landed more than 200 miles away from where they were expecting him, a new book discloses. The Soviet Union held up his mission, the first manned flight into space, as a major Cold War propaganda coup, portraying it as a glitch-free triumph of Communist ideology. However, a new book published on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Gagarin's famous flight has revealed that scientists twice miscalculated where he would land which is why there was nobody there...