They were a cow and two Soviet peasants, mother and daughter apparently, the first witnesses, certainly stunned, of what was the first landing of an astronaut from space: Yuri Gagarin. It was April 12, 1961, 60 years ago, and the place was a farm, a kolkhoz near the city of Engels in southwestern Russia, a few hundred meters from a bend in the great Volga River, where our brave he risked ending up and drowning for sure.
The first words that came out of his mouth were: “I’m Soviet, I flew into the cosmos, I have to phone Moscow,” he said, fumbling with the parachute, a little to cheer up the poor people who had seen nothing but cattle, stables and fields since they were born in that village, but also to cheer himself up, given that in the last hundred kilometers of descent to land he had had a bad time.
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It is difficult to know how the end of that first human flight into space actually was, which changed the cards and started the era of the “human conquest” of space, as it was then said in a rather aggressive way compared to current standards. The final version was in fact known in its details only in 1991, since the Soviets of the time, masters in telling things in their own way, claimed for 30 years that it was the spacecraft, Vostok 1, that touched the ground, with the astronaut, probably because they were afraid of losing the homologation of this exceptional record.
But it was not so: the spacecraft was approaching the ground too quickly and the brave Gagarin had been ejected from his cosmic cage to travel the last stretch, 7,000 meters, thanks to a traditional but comfortable parachute.
“Blue planet, space black”
Everything expected? Maybe but it is unimportant. The truly incredible fact was that that small Russian farmer, 1.57 meters, who had worked a thousand jobs before joining the Soviet Air Force as a pilot student, had left the atmosphere, only about 290 kilometers above the ground, but still enough to enter orbit.