Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) Read Free Page A

too good to ignore, the writer of the piece noted that “Gagarin” derived from “wild duck.” And there was a cartoon from the Baltimore Sun that showed PremierNikita Khrushchev holding a red star in space with one hand and, in the other, a shoe, with which he was banging a likeness of Kennedy over the head. 6 (The shoe banging was a reference to Khrushchev's banging his shoe on his desk at a UN General Assembly meeting in the autumn of 1960 to protest the Philippine delegate's public reference to Eastern Europeans and others as having been deprived of their civil and political rights and “swallowed up” by the Soviet Union. It was widely used to portray Khrushchev as an obstreperous Slavic lout who lacked the poise that was necessary to be a statesman.)
    â€œBourgeois statesmen used to poke fun at us, saying that we Russians were running around in bark sandals and lapping up cabbage soup with those sandals,” Khrushchev told a Polish audience two years after Gagarin's flight. “They used to make fun of our culture, the culture of people considered, so to say, to be the last among the civilized Western countries. Then suddenly, you understand, those who they thought lapped up the cabbage soup with bark sandals got into outer space earlier than the so-called civilized ones.” 7
    Gagarin's feat, like Sputnik , made page-one headlines around the world. The hero was duly photographed in uniform with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and other dignitaries on Lenin's Tomb two days after his flight and separately with an obviously respectful Korolev. The Motherland was so proud of Korolev that it turned his home into a museum, and so proud was it of the other designers and cosmonauts—and the fact that their nation had started the Space Age—that the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics was opened at the intersection of Mir Avenue and Academician S. P. Korolev Street in Moscow on April 10, 1981, two days short of the twentieth anniversary of Gagarin's flight. Mir , which means “peace,” was the name of the Soviet space station. The large museum was filled with artifacts from that glorious time, including a Sputnik , complete with antennas; large models of the giant rockets that launched the manned andunmanned spacecraft; the Vostok spacecraft in which Gagarin made his epic flight; Veneras and other deep-space probes that represented the missions to Venus; spacesuits and other clothing; and art that depicted Sputnik , Gagarin in an orange flight suit surrounded by fluttering white doves, and cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov floating over the Black Sea; commemorative coins and pennants; tubes of space food; and posters that paid clear tribute to the space program. A typical poster by cosmonaut-artist Alexei Sokolov, titled Glory to the Conquerors of Space , showed Alexei Leonov, the first man to float outside a spacecraft (and the eventual vice president of Alpha Bank) heading for the Mir space station in a Soyuz capsule.
    On August 6, 1961, Gherman Titov flew in Vostok 2 , accomplishing the first manned mission that lasted a full day. Almost exactly a year later, Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich became the first to fly in formation in Vostoks 3 and 4 . On June 14, 1963, cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky made the longest solo orbital flight in Vostok 5 , and, two days later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman and the first civilian to get to space when she was carried there in Vostok 6 . She not only orbited the world forty-eight times, which was more than the total for Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter, America's first four Mercury astronauts, combined, but she and Bykovsky were connected by radio and flew in a virtual formation, which was planned to be as impressive as it was. Airplanes flew in formation and now, thanks to Soviet innovative leadership, so did spacecraft. And to make matters slightly worse for the Americans, the fact that Tereshkova was a