A Hero Forgotten on America

With the recent death of Neil Armstrong, an American space hero, I've been noticing that there is a serious lack of acknowledgement and remembrance of another space hero - Yuri Gagarin, the first human to go to space. It did not matter if he was from the Soviet Union, just like it didn't matter that Neil Armstrong was from the United States. They're both human hero's, and shall be remembered for the rest of eternity.

Gagarin died in 1968 in a plane crash. There is some mystery around his death and the things that went on before it. He was part of the backup crew for the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in the deaths of the primary crew. He had pushed for more safety procedures and they had not been taken. Any death in a space program is terrible because it is a setback. It makes the public less enthusiastic about exploring space (look at what the space shuttle Challenger did to NASA's hopes for the 1990s). We need to support space exploration, whether it is American, Russian, European, Chinese, or even Iranian and North Korean. Space exploration can bind us together. It can show us that even though we have many difference, we are all still one race.