MOSCOW, April 12. /TASS/. On Wednesday, Russians and the entire world will celebrate Cosmonautics Day, the 62nd anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s space flight. On this day in 1961, at 10 a.m. Moscow time, TASS reported "About the first manned space flight," and at 12:33 p.m. Moscow time - "About man’s successful return from the first space flight."
Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to traditionally take part in events on the occasion of Cosmonautics Day. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin will visit the Lavochkin Research and Production Association on April 12, where he will inspect the floor of final assembly of space vehicles and speak with the staff.
Memorial events will begin in Moscow with the traditional laying of flowers at Gagarin’s grave near the Kremlin wall. Usually, representatives from the aerospace industry and cosmonauts participate.
At the International Space Station (ISS), cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (TASS’ special correspondent at the ISS) and Andrey Fedyayev will celebrate Cosmonautics Day with a holiday meal. Currently, the ISS is preparing for extravehicular activities slated for April 19. The spacewalk will be performed by Prokopyev and Petelin.
From April 12 to 16, Kaluga will host the Tsiolkovsky International Space Film Festival with TASS serving as its main information partner. Motion pictures from 18 countries, including China, Mongolia and India, will be screened. April 14 will be Roscosmos Day at the festival.
The Challenge motion picture and space dictation
The first screening of the film "Challenge," the first movie shot in space at the ISS, will be held in the State Kremlin Palace and the Oktyabr movie theater in downtown Moscow.
The Russian Znanie (Knowledge) society, with Roscosmos’ support, will hold an educational marathon entitled "Key to ignition." Cosmonauts, scientists, inventors and other experts will speak in nine Russian cities. The marathon includes the traditional all-Russian space dictation aimed at promoting space and preserving the achievements of domestic cosmonautics. The dictation will be held at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, at the Museum of Cosmonautics as well as in educational institutions in a number of Russian regions, including the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).
Exhibits in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad
This year, in St. Petersburg, the celebration of Cosmonautics Day coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Glushko Museum of Space Exploration and Rocket Technology. By tradition, the museum will be open with free admission and on April 16 it will become one of five venues where a full-scale celebration will be held with concerts, exhibits, film screenings, workshops and other events.
St. Petersburg will also host an annual conference called Cosmonautics Day at the Presidential Library presenting declassified and digitalized materials from Yury Gagarin’s personnel file. All the materials, including an autobiography the first cosmonaut wrote by hand will be kept at the Presidential Library.
On Cosmonautics Day, the Kaliningrad Museum of the World Ocean will open its Space Firsts Exhibit marking the 90th anniversary of the birth of Hero of the Soviet Union Viktor Patsayev. The exhibit is located onboard the Viktor Patsayev research vessel on the Pregolya River. The crew of the Soyuz-11 spaceship which included Patsayev died while landing but work conducted by the cosmonauts aided in making a number of scientific discoveries. The exhibit will include a "space greenhouse" - the mockups of plants on hydroponics that the cosmonauts cultivated at the Salyut-1 space station as well as observation diaries kept by Patsayev.
Documentary about Leonov and Soyuz re-entry module
The Rossiya multimedia center in Novgorod will host an opening of the Leonov. Space Inside documentary and a meeting with Alexey Leonov’s daughter Oksana. The movie’s creators will also attend the meeting. The documentary is based on an interview with Leonov, the first person to conduct a spacewalk.
In North Ossetia, the two-ton Soyuz spaceship re-entry module will be installed for the holiday on the astronomical platform at the School of Cosmonautics. The school has up to 460 full-time students and holds excursions, scientific lectures, educational workshops and astronomical observations using telescopes. The school was founded in 2020 on the initiative of renowned spacecraft designer Ruslan Komayev.
Sochi and Rostov-on-Don will hold a large-scale flash mob with its participants forming the phrase "Off we go!" (the phrase Gagarin uttered at takeoff - TASS).
History of celebration
On April 12, 1961, the Vostok carrier rocket took the Vostok-1 spaceship with Russian cosmonaut Yury Gagarin onboard into orbit. Making one revolution around the Earth, the flight was completed in 108 minutes and the cosmonaut landed in the Saratov Region. The following March, the USSR’s second man in space and Gagarin’s backup German Titov put forth an initiative to establish a holiday. The April 9, 1962 decree by the presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR recognized April 12 as a holiday "in order to commemorate the first flight of a Soviet man into space." In accordance with federal law on Russia’s days of military glory and commemorative days, Cosmonautics Day is a day of remembrance.
In 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing April 12 as the International Day of Human Space Flight. This initiative was co-authored by over 60 countries.