History of the Yu.A. Gagarin is inextricably linked with the birth and development of manned astronautics. At the end of the 50s of the XX century, all the necessary scientific and technical prerequisites for a man’s flight into near-earth orbit were created in the USSR. In October 1959, the selection of candidates for cosmonauts began in the Air Force units, during which Sergei Korolev, together with the Air Force Commander-in-Chief Konstantin Vershinin, petitioned the government to create a specialized organization to prepare people for space flight.
61 years ago, on January 11, 1960, the Air Force Commander-in-Chief issued directive No. 321141, which determined the organizational structure of the Cosmonaut Training Center and its total number of personnel. And after three months, the first 12 candidates for space flight were officially enrolled in the detachment of Soviet cosmonauts. All are pilots of the Air Force, Air Defense and Naval Aviation, among them: Ivan Anikeev, Valery Bykovsky, Boris Volynov, Yuri Gagarin, Viktor Gorbatko, Vladimir Komarov, Alexey Leonov, Grigory Nelyubov, Andriyan Nikolaev, Pavel Popovich, German Titov and Georgy Shonin. Later, the first cosmonaut corps included: Evgeny Khrunov, Dmitry Zaikin, Valentin Filatyev, Pavel Belyaev, Mars Rafikov, Valentin Bondarenko, Valentin Varlamov and Anatoly Kartashov. Subsequently, this part was transformed into the Cosmonaut Training Center.
The absence in Moscow of a base for preparing for a space flight, as well as the lack of housing for cosmonauts and CTC specialists, demanded a search for an area with an extensive infrastructure that would accommodate the necessary part of the cosmonaut training contingent. Such a place was chosen on the territory of the former military unit of signalmen, far from noisy highways and industrial enterprises, surrounded by a forest, next to a military airfield and half an hour’s drive to the space enterprise of the city of Kaliningrad (now Korolev). The future cosmonauts and specialists of the CTC were initially accommodated in the Chkalovsky garrison, and at the same time the construction of a training base and housing for the Center’s cosmonauts began. In the summer of 1960, the Cosmonaut Training Center began to function in Zeleny (now the world famous Star) town. The name of the first cosmonaut on Earth, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, was given to the Center in 1968.