The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

g
See acceleration due to gravity, 1g spacecraft.
G
See gravitational constant.
Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center
A Russian center for training and preparing crews for
manned missions. Located at Zvezdny Gorodok (“Star
City”) outside Moscow, it includes equipment for simulating
missions aboard Soyuz and the Russian modules of
the International Space Station. The Center also has a
neutral buoyancy facility similar to that at the Marshall
Space Flight Center.
Gagarin, Yuri Alexeyevich (1934–1968)
A Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to travel
in space. The son of a carpenter, Gagarin grew up on a collective
farm in Saratov (later renamed Gagarin City), west
of Moscow. After graduating with honors from the Soviet
Air Force in 1957, he was selected as one of 20 fighter pilots
to begin cosmonaut training. Immediately before his historic
flight, the 27-year-old was promoted from senior lieutenant
to major. The flight itself aboard Vostok 1 took
place on April 12, 1959, lasted 108 minutes, and concluded
with Gagarin ejecting from his capsule after reentry
and descending by parachute to the ground near the village
of Uzmoriye on the Volga. In his orange flight suit, he
approached a woman and a little girl with a calf, all of
whom began to run away (it had only been a year since
U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers had been shot down over
Russia). Gagarin called out: “Mother, where are you running?
I am not a foreigner.” Asked then if he had come
from space, he replied, “As a matter of fact, I have!”
Arriving on motorcycles, Uzmoriye villagers purloined
the cosmonaut’s radio and inflatable rubber dinghy and
buried it for safekeeping. “The dinghy was a genuine gift
for the village fishermen ...it literally fell down from the
sky,” Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. But then the KGB
appeared on the scene and threatened to arrest the entire
community if the equipment was not returned. Despite
protests from the villagers that the dinghy was torn, the
KGB captain put it in his car anyway and drove off.
Gagarin was hailed as a hero and given a luxury apartment
in Moscow. However, he found all the attention
and publicity hard to deal with and began drinking heav-
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ily and sometimes behaving badly. Nevertheless, he was
assigned to a second space mission—Soyuz 3, which
would involve the first docking between two spacecraft in
orbit. On March 27, 1968, he took off on a training flight
in a MiG-15 alongside Vladimir Seryogin, a senior test
pilot and a decorated military hero. For reasons still not
clear, but possibly involving a sudden maneuver to avoid
another aircraft, the plane crashed and Gagarin and his
copilot were killed. He left a wife, Valentina, and two
daughters, and was buried with full honors in the Kremlin
wall along with the greatest heroes of the Soviet
Union. Statues commemorating Gagarin have been
erected in his hometown and in Moscow in the Yuri
Gagarin Square. At the spot where he landed after his historic
spaceflight, a 40-m-high titanium obelisk has been
erected. In addition, a crater on the far side of the Moon
has been named after him. 108
Yuri Gagarin Joachim Becker