The world salutes first man in space

Apr 12 2008 by Andrew Baldwin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

YURI Gagarin’s name entered the history books when he became the first man in space on April 12, 1961.

At just after 0700BST, he was fired from the Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan, Soviet central Asia, in the space craft Vostok (East).

Major Gagarin orbited the earth for 108 minutes travelling at more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometres per hour) before landing at an undisclosed location.

The Soviet Union had won the space race and Maj Gagarin, 27, was a hero.

Radio Moscow interrupted its schedule to give details to a jubilant nation after the news agency Tass made the first official announcement.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent the cosmonaut a message from his holiday home on the Black Sea congratulating him on his achievement.

“The flight made by you opens up a new page in the history of mankind in its conquest of space,” Mr Khrushchev said.

It was the culmination of two years of highly secretive training for Yuri Gagarin, who beat off thousands of other hopefuls.

A big reception for him at the Kremlin in Red Square was planned after his successful return to earth.

Later he was to be banned from more space missions because the Soviet state considered him too valuable a propaganda asset to risk his life.

In 1968 he was killed in a plane crash just outside Moscow in what some people believed were suspicious circumstances.

Major Gagarin’s safe return laid to rest worries that space flight would be fatal for humans.

It was also a blow to the Americans who had hoped to be the first to launch a man beyond earth’s atmosphere.

However, President Kennedy congratulated the Soviets on their achievement.

It would be some time before the United States caught up with the Soviets in the fields of rocket boosters, the president added.

SIDNEY POITIER broke new ground on April 13, 1964, when he became the first black actor to win an Oscar.

He won the acting profession’s top award for his role in Lilies of the Field, in which he played a construction worker whom a group of nuns believed was sent to them by God to build their church.

Alongside Rat Pack actor Sammy Davis Jnr and, earlier, Paul Robeson, Poitier was one of only a handful of black men to gain recognition in Hollywood for roles not involving singing or dancing.

It was the second time he had been in the running for an Oscar after losing out in 1959 when he was nominated for his part in The Defiant Ones.

“It has been a long journey to this moment,” the actor said after he was presented with the prized statuette by actress Ann Bancroft.

Poitier grew up in poverty in the Bahamas in the Caribbean where his father was a tomato farmer. In his first months in New York he was so poor he slept in the toilets of a bus station.

He was hampered in his efforts to break into acting by his strong Bahamian accent and was initially rejected by the American Negro Theatre.

His first film was No Way Out alongside Richard Widmark in 1950 in which he played a doctor.

But his big breakthrough came five years later in The Blackboard Jungle.