International holidays - World Aviation and Cosmonautics Day

The UN General Assembly proclaimed April 12 as the International Day of Human Space Flight The same date is celebrated by another organization, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, as World Aviation and Space Day In Russia, this holiday is called Cosmonautics Day and is celebrated on the same day In 1961, on the twelfth of April, a spaceship was launched with a man on board "Go!" – this was Yuri Gagarin’s short exclamation before the start The first inhabitant of the Earth to find himself in outer space and spend less than two hours in it, or rather 108 minutes The astronautics pioneer was a citizen of the USSR; the aircraft was launched from the territory of the Soviet Union, from a cosmodrome located in Kazakhstan, from Baikonur The initiative to establish a memorial day in the Soviet Union was put forward by German Titov, Gagarin’s backup, who would have to fly out in case of any unforeseen circumstances The same pilot-cosmonaut approached the government with the idea of ​​proposing to the United Nations to take the holiday to the international level But within the UN, the date received world status only in 2011 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the flight The holiday is considered professional for many specialists The flight went completely smoothly, on schedule, without any collisions The braking propulsion system worked in time, the descent was carried out in a given square of a given area, which, under the conditions of the first space flight and enormous distances, was a significant achievement Behind all these successes was the work of many flight participants and their well-coordinated teamwork The person who first saw the pioneering cosmonaut land was a five-year-old girl, Rumiya Nurskanova Carrying out a completely prosaic order from his grandmother, the child planted potatoes that April day This happened in the Saratov region, a few kilometers near the village of Smelovka When something unusual began to happen overhead, strange objects appeared (and it was a capsule being lowered under a giant parachute), Rumiya tried to attract the attention of her grandmother “Don’t be distracted,” the elderly woman ordered and continued her farming The landing took place, and a humanoid creature in bright orange clothes emerged from the huge ball The grandmother had to stop planting, grab the girl and begin to escape; the woman was very scared and began to pray “Mommy, yours!” - the guest who descended from heaven shouted to them When the first fear and surprise passed, the cosmonaut was helped with heavy, uncomfortable clothes, unfastened the clip of the pressure helmet and was offered to drink milk, straight from the can The girl, whose name Yuri Alekseevich did not catch and called her Rita, told this story every year on Cosmonautics Day Since then, Rumiya has asked everyone to address herself as Rita And every year on April 12, in that same field, I planted potatoes not for the sake of root crops, but in memory of the April day of 1961 The field was named Gagarinsky, now a memorial with a Gagarin monument in the center of the composition has been built next to it