Celebrating 50 Years of Space Flight

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Apr 12

2011

by Raven Yu

Google and Youtube are celebrating 50th Anniversary of Space flight! 

The Google Doodle’s art wizards have created a distinctly 1960s-looking version of the famous logo. 

The first letter ‘o’ has been replaced with a drawing of Gagarin in his space suit while the second ‘o’ has become the planet Earth.

Charmingly, when you first see the logo, an animated spaceship launches from the planet’s surface. If you want to see it take off again, just hit refresh.

The Gagarin Google Doodle is the latest in a long line of artistic logo variations that the search engine has produced.

Yuri Gagarin: 50th Anniversary of First Human Spaceflight

Gagarin made history when his Vostok 1 spacecraft took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and completed a 108-minute orbit of the Earth on Tuesday April 12, 1961.

Unsurprisingly, he became a national hero and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Gagarin’s flight spurred the international space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, leading President John F. Kennedy to set the goal of being the first to land on the moon.

Seven years after Gagarin’s first journey into space, he was killed on a routine training flight. His pioneering legacy is remembered at Star City, Moscow’s oldest space-flight training facility.

Having a blast-off: Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin inside the Vostok 1 command capsule (Picture: AFP/Getty)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umY92y25DrA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9CXAAXdINQ