“From up here the Earth is beautiful, without frontiers or borders”, Juri Alexieievich Gagarin.
We rely on the memory made of it by our partner Silvia Vaccari, to remember this memorable undertaking.
It was April 12, 1961 when Juri Alexieievich Gagarin was the first human being to orbit the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft, beating America once again in the middle of the Cold War, after the successful launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957.
Gagarin entered the Vostok 1 spacecraft at 7:10 am, but a technical problem with the closing hatch, which was later solved, delayed the launch by almost an hour. Then the extraordinary feat began: the probe traveled in an almost complete orbit around the Earth in 106 minutes, a speed of 27,000 km / h and a distance from the Earth’s surface of 327 km.
No man had ever done this; America arrived in orbit only 23 days later with Alan Shepard on May 5th 1961 with the Freedom 7 spacecraft. Juri Gagarin was the first human being to see Earth’s spheric shape and to experiment the absence of gravity attending from the Vostok1’s small porthole to an unprecedented and wonderful show.
Upon his return, Gagarin became a national icon and an international celebrity; the Soviet propaganda machine was put to work and naturally also the philatelic one: just 24 hours after the landing of Yuri Gagarin, the first postage stamp of the USSR was issued on April 13, 1961 followed on 17 by two other copies celebrating the extraordinary feat and its protagonist and then from the rest of the world with hundreds of commemorative stamps of the first man in space.
In this tension between superpowers – and opposing ideologies – to conquer the unknown, the mail had the role and the task of constituting itself as a testimony of the moment, then, and in the future that came, up to the present day.