It was established by the United Nations in 2011. It is celebrated on the day in 1961 when Yuri Gagarin completed the first orbital flight around the Earth
April 12 is celebrated theInternational Day of Human Space Flight. Dedicated to human space travel, the anniversary was established by the UN in 2011, and is celebrated on the day in which, in 1961, the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin entered history by becoming the first human to reach Earth’s orbit. .
The Russian astronaut, in an hour and 48 minutes, 320 km away from Earth, managed to make an orbital flight aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule, in an era marked by uncertainties. It was not, in fact, possible to know exactly the effects that the absence of gravity could have on the human body. But the extraordinary feat of Gagarin proved that the human being could take off in conditions of strong thrust and return to Earth safe and sound.
This important achievement is the basis of the decision taken by the United Nations to establish the International Day of Human Travel in Space. The aim: to raise awareness of the importance of the scientific and technological contribution given by space missions. Yuri Gagarin’s journey marked the beginning of a real historical era only 4 years after the first launch of an artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The same year it was also the turn of the dog Laika, embarked on Sputnik 2, which, however, did not survive the stresses of the journey.
After Gagarin, hundreds of men and women took part in space flights and missions. The first woman to orbit the Earth was Valentina Tereshkova on June 16, 1963. After the Soviet cosmonauts, it was the US astronauts who were sent into orbit. Eight years after the Soviet citizen’s flight, on July 20, 1969, the American Neil Armstrong was the first human to set foot on the moon. But, for the first international mission in space, we must wait until 1975: it is July 17 when docking was completed (in astronomical jargon it indicates the docking that takes place between two spacecraft when they are in orbit around the Earth. ) between the American Apollo and the Russian Soyuz. For Italy the first astronaut was Franco Malerba, who took part in the TSS-1 mission, and who traveled on July 31, 1982 aboard the Atlantis shuttle.
Space missions are very demanding both in terms of training the astronauts involved and in terms of rather high costs. To cope with the difficulties of implementation, also in 1975, the European Space Agency (ESA) was founded which, with NASA and the Russian Space Agency, is responsible for training the astronauts who in turn occupy the International Space Station (Iss ). The first ISS module was launched in 1998 and it took 40 space missions to assemble it piece by piece. Currently, it orbits about 420 km from the Earth’s surface and turns around the Earth every 90 minutes.
Thanks to space travel from the ISS it is possible to monitor the earth’s surface to control changes in the territory and understand which are the uninhabited areas. Not only. Thanks to the photographs, it is also possible to observe the development of hurricanes on the Atlantic Ocean. Particularly of further importance is that hundreds of experiments can be conducted in orbit that can lead to the development of new technologies in the medical field.
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