A documentary reconstructing Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin’s historic journey was posted on YouTube on Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight.
First Orbit, directed by Chris Riley, is based on video footage from the International Space Station, and shows similar scenes to those Gagarin witnessed from his Vostok spaceship on April 12, 1961.
The video footage, made by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, was accompanied by recordings of radio exchange between Gagarin (whose call sign was Kedr, meaning cedar) and flight operators on Earth (whose call sign was Zarya, meaning dawn). The transcripts of the recordings and other information about the flight were also published on Twitter (YuriGagarin50) in real time.
On the 27th minute of his flight, the cosmonaut says “hi to the blond guy,” meaning cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, whose voice is also heard in the record. Leonov became the first man to carry out a spacewalk on March 18, 1965.
The trajectory of the International Space Station repeats that of Gagarin’s Vostok spaceship once every two days, but coincides exactly with Gagarin’s flight only once every six weeks or so, which made preparations for shooting a complicated process.
MOSCOW, April 12 (RIA Novosti)