April 12 - World Day of Aviation and Astronautics
49 years ago, 12 April 1961 the world's first orbital flight around the world took place. For 108 minutes the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the space ship "Vostok" made a fullrevolution around the Earth, thus opening a new era - the era of manned spaceflight. In honor of this significant event, on April 12, World Aviation and Astronautics Day.
Unimaginable, mysterious expanses of space beckonedthe look of a man from time immemorial. But only in the twentieth century scientific knowledge of mankind helped to come close to embodying the idea of man's flight into space. In the 1930s the development of liquid-fuel rocket engines was in full swing, and already October 4, 1957 Soviet scientists managed to launch an artificial satellite for the first time into Earth's orbit.
The spacecraft on which Gagarin made his flight was the first in a series of Soviet spacecraft "East". However, before the first man flew into space, several training flights with different animals on board took place. Undoubtedly, the most famous of them are dogs Belka and Strelka. Belka and Strelka were the first to fly around the Earth and return alive and healthy.
Today, almost half a century after the first manned space flight, the space industry is actively developing. Automatic probes and apparatus have already visited the Moon and Mars, took soil samples from Venus
Around the Earth hundreds and thousands of satellites revolve, without which we no longer imagine modern telecommunications. And since 1988 into orbit launched International Space Station (ISS) is a joint space project of sixteen countries, including Russia and the United States, France and the UK, Germany, Japan and others.
