Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Spaceman Answer

Well, I gave it almost a month, but nobody got my spacemen question. Last month I asked if you could name the first person to take off from the earth in a spacecraft, reach space, and then fly that spacecraft safely back to the surface of our planet. The answer is Alan Shepard in Freedom 7. While Yuri Gagarin was the first person to reach space, he did not fly his spacecraft, Vostok 1, back to our planet. Soviet rocket scientists felt that the cosmonaut would not survive a landing (they were surely right – Vostok is said to have left a nice little crater), so Gagarin bailed out of the plummeting ship about four miles up. He parachuted into a farm, where he asked the first people that he met for a phone so he could call Moscow and tell them that he was alive. I wonder, what is the Russian word for cojones?

1 comment:

Marcia Space said...

Good thing they let him use their phone.