Google Doodles in Honour of Space Travel

Particularly in honour of Yuri Gagarin.

Padmini Harchandrai|Apr 12, 2011, 09:54:51 IST

Google's been on a roll with their Doodles this year and today's is pretty cool. It's in honour of Yuri Gagarin, who on April 12, 1961, became the first human to venture into outer space. His spacecraft, the Vostok, completed a full orbit around the earth. Yuri was born in Russia on the 9th of March in 1934. Growing up in Russia at that time, he went through the Nazi occupation of Soviet Russia. As a youth, he dreamed about space travel and he entered the Air Force in 1957. In 1960, he and 19 other pilots were chosen for the Soviet Space Program and in 1961, he became the first human to fly into space. He died in 1968 on a routine training flight which crashed.

The rocket launches!

The Doodle itself is representative of Yuri's space travel. One of the O's could be Yuri in his space suit and when you scroll over the Doodle, the rocket on the other 'O' launches. The colours are nicely muted yet a little wild. Check it out at www.google.com.

By Padmini Harchandrai

Paddy does not, we repeat, definitely does NOT belong in the category of Mac-head (yeh right!). She does get excited by her iPhone and her iMac and her iPod Nano and her Macbook and Bali's iPad and her future iHouse (patent pending). Ok, so maybe her head is a little bit forbidden fruit shaped. She likes shooting video (iPhone 4 camera zindabad!) and editing montages (Final Cut Pro zindabad!), whether the scene calls for it or no. In her spare time, she's either kicking it on stage with KB the keyboard or kicking butt at Taekwondo.