Plot
Manchester 1961 At the dawn of the space age, one man dared to be first. For 10-year-old John Thawaite, his only hero is Yuri Alexsayavich Gagarin. The first man in space. Three months after his pioneering flight Major Gagarin is due to visit Manchester and John is desperate to meet him. Trouble is, it's a school day and everyone is conspiring to stop John meeting his hero. Battling all odds, John journeys across Greater Manchester to bring back proof of his contact with a man who has touched the stars and returned to tell the tale.
Keywords: pioneer, yuri-gargarin
Every boy dreams of something
John Thwaite: What's it like up in space?::Yuri Gagarin: Big. Cold. Beautiful.::John Thwaite: Can you see my house from up there.::Yuri Gagarin: Yes. All the houses. I see.::John Thwaite: I want to be a spaceman too.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (Russian: Ю́рий Алексе́евич Гага́рин,Russian pronunciation: [ˈjurʲɪj ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ ɡɐˈɡarʲɪn]; 9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.
Gagarin became an international celebrity, and was awarded many medals and honours, including Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation's highest honour. Vostok 1 marked his only spaceflight, but he served as backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission (which ended in a fatal crash). Gagarin later became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow, which was later named after him. Gagarin died in 1968 when a MiG 15 training jet he was piloting crashed.
Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia), on 9 March 1934. The adjacent town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 in his honour. His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. While manual labourers are described in official reports as "peasants", his mother was reportedly a voracious reader, and his father a skilled carpenter. Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked. Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. After a German officer took over their house, the family constructed a small mud hut where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation. His two older siblings were deported to Nazi Germany for slave labour in 1943, and did not return until after the war. In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (Russian: Серге́й Па́влович Королёв,Ukrainian: Сергі́й Па́влович Корольо́в, Serhiy Pavlovych Korolov, also transliterated as Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov; born 12 January [O.S. 30 December 1906] 1907 in Zhytomyr, Russian Empire (now Ukraine); died 14 January 1966 in Moscow, USSR) was the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer in the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s. He is considered by many as the father of practical astronautics.
Although Korolev was trained as an aircraft designer, his greatest strengths proved to be in design integration, organization and strategic planning. Arrested for alleged mismanagement of funds (he spent the money on unsuccessful experiments with rocket devices), he was imprisoned in 1938 for almost six years, including some months in a Kolyma labour camp. Following his release, he became a recognized rocket designer and a key figure in the development of the Soviet ICBM program. He was then appointed to lead the Soviet space program, made Member of Soviet Academy of Sciences, overseeing the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects. By the time he died unexpectedly in 1966, his plans to compete with the United States to be the first nation to land a man on the Moon had begun to be implemented.