More than 6,000 Students Celebrate Yuri Gagarin

If one positive thing came out of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the space race might be at the very top.

Now 50 years later and after countless space missions, launches of satellites and even a rover in Mars, more than 6,000 students from 79 Bay Area schools gathered at NASA Ames in Moffett Field Friday to honor the man who made the dream of space exploration possible: Yuri Gagarin.

"For quite a few years , and it goes back to early parts of NASA's history, we've been struggling and hoping and working to collaborate with other countries," said Tom Clausen, K-12 education officer at Ames. "But now everyone realizes how expensive and dangerous it is to go into space, and that it makes sense ... to combine efforts.

"Today, Yuri Gagarin Day is an effort to honor that concept."

But all of those Bay Area kids on Friday—about half of whom attend Title 1 schools, those with large concentrations of low-income students, which received transportation support from NASA—weren't alone in their celebration. NASA's event was just one of 375 Yuri events planned in 65 countries on six continents this year.

At Moffett, elementary and middle school children had the opportunity to visit 70 exhibiters and listen to eight presentations, including one from former Astronaut Dan Barry.

Yuri's Education Day commemorated the first human space flight undertaken by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

Yuri’s spacecraft was a bell-shaped capsule called “Vostok 1,” and his flight lasted 108 minutes and orbited the Earth once. The 27-year-old's parachute landed near his capsule in the plains of Russia. Seven years after his flight, as he piloted a MiG-15 on March, 27, 1968, he crashed and died.

Other NASA centers have planned events for this week.