Yuri’s Night to Mark 50th Anniversary of First Manned Orbit

March 29, 2011 — For Yuri Gagarin’s 50th anniversary, a simple party won’t do. Instead, the Russian who became the first man to orbit Earth on April 12, 1961, will be remembered with more than 262 Yuri’s Night events in 51 countries on six continents, as well as through a new film called First Orbit that is due for global release via YouTube. View the trailer here. Loretta Hidalgo and George Whitesides created Yuri’s Night, the world space party, in 2001 to celebrate humanity’s past, present and future in space. For the 50th anniversary celebration, April 12 is on a Tuesday, which means many of the celebrations will occur on the weekend of April 9. Click here to see if a party is planned near you. If there isn’t a party near you, why not host one? You can even show the108-minute First Orbit film made by British filmmaker Chris Riley, who had help from Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli on the International Space Station in shooting much of the footage. To download the film for free, click here. Riley told TechLand, "The idea of the film is to convey a sense of what a single orbit of Earth actually feels like." The team went to extraordinary lengths to make sure the finished film was accurate. They wanted the shots from orbit to be as close as possible to the ones Gagarin himself would have seen from his tiny capsule, TechLand reported. German orbital mechanics expert Gerald Ziegler found that the orbiting space station follows roughly the same orbit that Gagarin took about once a week. But that wasn't accurate enough. The film had to be shot at the same time of day that Gagarin flew, and the space station only covers that orbit once every six weeks. Because of its attention to detail and commitment to realism, there is even a 40-minute section of near darkness as Gagarin's Vostok 1 flies above the Pacific Ocean at night. Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed near Moscow. At the time of his death, he was in training for a second space mission. Yuri’s Night annually draws tens of thousands of space explorers, artists, engineers, musicians, scientists, and partygoers from around the world. In 2010, Yuri’s Night events were held in 222 cities in 67 countries on all seven continents. Events have been hosted in New York, Moscow, Tokyo, Sydney, the South Pole, and many other locations.

The 2007 Yuri’s Night party in the Bay Area was a success. Photo credit: Sam Coniglio Some partygoers really get into the space theme. Star Wars fans dressed as Darth Vader and Padmé Amidala at a 2010 party. Photo credit: Great Lakes Science Center Yuri Gagarin exchanges smiles with Parisians as he arrives in Paris on September 27, 196 to attend the International Astronautical Congress at UNESCO Headquarters. Photo credit: Bettmann/Corbis

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