Yuri Gagarin's place in American history is being solidified. A lot of people have commented about this remark of yours. I'm old enough (barely) to remember Ga

Yuri Gagarin's place in American history is being solidified. A lot of people have commented about this remark of yours. I'm old enough (barely) to remember Gagarin's first venture into space (I distinctly remember live TV coverage of the launch of John Glenn's first American orbital space launch) and I have never forgotten about Gagarin, nor about Valentina Tereshkova, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova whose flight into space, the first by a woman by a large number of years, was just in the news on its fiftieth anniversary. A sufficiently old American grew up in the Space Age, and remembers the names of all the space pioneers. If younger readers of Hacker News would like to move their minds back in time to learn more about (the American phase of) the early age of manned space flight, I recommend the documentary movie In the Shadow of the Moon, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0925248/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0925248/ which I watched with my children just yesterday evening. There is, alas, little mention of the Soviet space program in the film, because the focus is on manned missions to the moon, but the interviews with surviving astronauts are fascinating, and the film-maker does a good job of setting the historical context.