Fifty years since the historic flight of Yuri Gagarin, thirty years since the first flight on the Columbia shuttle

Soviet radio broadcast a simple message that forever changed the isolation of man on Earth. "The first spacecraft, Vostok (Mizrah) with a man on board, was launched on April 12 from the Soviet Union for a trip around the world

Victory music was heard all over the country. The Russian radio cheered that morning with the sound of the patriotic song "How wide my country is". Then came a simple message that forever changed the isolation of man on Earth. "The first spacecraft, Vostok (East) with a man on board, was launched on April 12 from the Soviet Union for a trip around the world," Time Magazine wrote in the cover story dedicated to the event.
After that no one heard more about Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, he was simply Yuri Gagarin, a hero and cultural icon. During his flight he was not allowed to activate the control systems because the effect of the lack of gravity had only been tested on dogs until then. The control center activated the devices remotely, and Gagarin was given takeover keys only in case of an emergency.
Due to his popularity, the government did not allow him to fly into space again. It was too dangerous and they didn't want to lose the icon. Disappointed, Yuri Gagarin returned to training on MiGs. On March 27, 1968, Gagarin and his instructor, Vladimir Seryogin, took off in a MiG-15 in bad weather and they crashed. He was 34 years old in all.

Twenty years later, on the morning of April 12, 1981, two astronauts entered their seats on the space shuttle Columbia, a new type of spacecraft - the space shuttle.
Astronaut John Young, a graduate of four space flights including walking on the moon in 1972, commanded the mission. Navy test pilot Bob Crippen was the pilot on the mission and later went on to command three more shuttle missions.