ADLER PLANETARIUM HONOURS YURI GAGARIN - ПЛАНЕТАРИЙ АДЛЕРА ЧТИТ ЮРИЯ ГАГАРИНА
| The Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois has honoured Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He was the first person to travel to space. He made the flight on April the twelfth, 1961. Now, fifty years later, the Adler Planetarium is celebrating with a new sculpture of the man. Russian officials in Moscow donated the Gagarin sculpture to Chicago. The planetarium opened in 1930, the country's first museum of astronomy. The Adler has always honoured scientific gains made by the Americans. But now the museum is working to honour astronomical achievements made by other nations as well. Former Romanian cosmonaut Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu attended the ceremony to honour Yuri Gagarin. Twenty years after he became the first man in space, Mr Prunariu flew to space on a Soyuz rocket. That was in 1981. He remains Romania's only cosmonaut. Mr Prunariu was eight year old when Gagarin made the flight. He remembers the moment he heard about it. "I was in the house together with my sister and mother listening to the radio. And the radio stopped and very important news was broadcast about the flight of the first human into outer space... Yuri Gagarin showed us how to break frontiers, the frontier of the atmosphere." James Andrews is a Russian history expert at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He says Gagarin's flight shocked Americans, coming just three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite. But America soon stole the world's attention with its Earth orbits and trips to the moon. The president of the Adler Planetarium is Paul Knappenberger. He says, in the past, the Adler had not really shown what other nations were doing in space. But he said, "that is something we are working on now." Mr Knappenberger says the Adler is expanding. He says plans include a new building. The new museum will feature the history of space exploration by Americans and Soviets. It will also show current, international activity connected to space travel; the private industry now involved in space flight will also be included. | |
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