Moon shot: The amazing story of how America ultimately beat the Soviet Union in the great space race
What was once the most important potato field in the world belonged to the Nurskanova family in the town of Engels, in the Saratov region of southwestern Russia.The days moved unremarkably on the farms in Engels, and the morning of April 12, 1961, started out no differently.
Not long after breakfast, five-year-old Rita Nurskanova and her grandmother left their farmhouse and went into the field to tend the potatoes.They had barely begun their day’s work when they noticed something strange — an orange-clad man dragging a long parachute on the ground, approaching from a distant part of their property.
Rita and her grandmother, alarmed, turned and bolted for the house but the man called them back.“Don’t be afraid,” he said.“I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow.”“Granny, stop!” Rita said.
“He’s speaking Russian.He’s probably human.”And so he was — a particularly noteworthy human.
Earlier that morning, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the republic of Kazakhstan, the little five-foot, two-inch man — a one-time steel-worker and fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force known as Yuri Gagarin — had climbed into a spacecraft atop a 20-engine Vostok rocket and hurdled into space, completing a single 88-minute orbit of the Earth, reentering the atmosphere and then parachuting from his spacecraft to land on the Nurskanova farm.The family did let the returning cosmonaut use their phone, and soon the farm was overrun with space agency personnel, government officials and reporters from the official state news agency Tass.The newsmen excitedly broke the story.“A great event has taken place,” read the initial Tass dispatch.
“For the first time in history, man has accomplished a flight into space.The first man to penetrate space was a Soviet man, a citizen of the USSR.
By the will of the working class, by the will of the people, and inspired by the party of Communists, headed by Leni...