Aug. 24, 1962 - The first trip to the moon will be a team effort, not a one-man job, Lieut. Col. Yuri A. Gagarin (pictured lower right) said today. The first Russian to orbit the earth, now commander of the Soviet astronauts unit, was quoted in Soviet Weekly, a Russian newspaper published in London. He said, “Only a well-prepared team will be able to fulfill the task of making the initial study of the moon.” Colonel Gagarin said he hoped that long before 1981, the first astronomical observatory and the first cosmodrome for flights to Venus or Mars will have been constructed on the moon.
