Tag: Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin Monument - UK!

USSR: Yuri Gagarin – “AD 1961” – First Man in Space! (13.4.2025)

Yet one of the most unexpected tributes to the first cosmonaut lies far from space museums or bustling capitals — on the windswept Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland.

Here, just steps from the Neolithic village of Skara Brae – a UNESCO World Heritage Site inhabited over 5,000 years ago – stands a carved stone that simply reads: “First Man in Space, AD 1961”. Nestled among markers of human milestones, it honours Gagarin’s place in our shared journey — from ancient stargazers to modern explorers.

This is a quiet reminder that Gagarin’s reach extends far beyond Earth’s orbit — and even beyond the expected.

💐 Recently Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin and Russian Consul General in Edinburgh Denis Moskalenko laid flowers at the site, paying tribute to the first man in space.

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USSR: Valentina Tereshkova (Валентина Терешкова) – First Woman in Space (1963) By Andrey SidorchikAiF (Андрей СидорчикАиФ) (2013)

Tereshkova, contrary to the opinion of experts, was personally chosen by Nikita Khrushchev, who liked the woman’s origin: Valentina’s parents were from a simple family. Her father worked as a tractor driver, he died in the Soviet-Finnish war, her mother worked at a textile factory. In addition, Valentina Tereshkova herself began her career at a weaving mill, where she became the secretary of the Komsomol. In this, she favourably differed from Ponomareva, who came from a family of engineers and had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Solovieva, a famous athlete, and world champion in parachuting. Tereshkova also parachuted, but Solovieva, for example, had about 700 jumps by that time, whilst Tereshkova had less than a hundred. 

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