Yuri's Lunch Traditional Cache

A camo’d micro cache in Santa Clara, placed in a public area. A little stealth is advised. Parking is available on the street. There is an active beehive in a tree about 30 feet/9 m west of the coordinates, use caution.

The first manned space flight took place  April 12, 1961 as Vostok (“East” or “Orient”) 1 carrying cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit of Earth. Total flight time was about 108 minutes start to finish.  Yuri Gagarin became an instant hero throughout the world, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

Gagarin’s spacecraft was primitive and he was more of a passenger than a pilot.  But like the U.S. Mercury program, whose first launch followed on May 5^th, the Vostok flights demonstrated that a person could fly in space and return alive.  Later craft, such as the Russian Soyuz and American Gemini, established that space missions were capable of useful tasks. The Soyuz craft, with its first manned launch in 1967; is still in use today. After several modification cycles, it is still the workhorse crew ferry of the International Space Station.

Some questioned whether Gagarin’s flight was actually the first, citing some inconsistencies in various releases of information from Soviet censors. These censors followed a paranoid tradition in doctoring photos (old-school photoshopping) of the cosmonaut corps to edit out men who died in ground training or dropped out of the program.  With the end of the Soviet era in Russia, most of these conspiracy theories were discredited as the original records were unsealed.

Gagarin, along with an instructor pilot, died on March 27, 1968 in the crash of a MiG-15 two-seat training jet while training for the Soyuz 3 mission .  It was an odd coincidence that the inaugural flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle program (STS-1) took place exactly twenty years after Yuri’s on April 12, 1981.  Since 2001, April 12^th has become “Yuri’s Night”, a worldwide celebration of manned spaceflight. Events take place live on the internet, and also on amateur radio. Legend has it that Yuri was a ham operator as well as a pilot.

Initial stock is a FTF prize and 10 rubles. The cache is NOT on the other side of the wall. But the wall may shadow your GPS antenna from the north depending on your approach, and coordinates will be bouncy.

Update 5/18/2020: Moving because of bees. Almost back at original spot.

Update 6/1/2023: Although the area is posted for limited parking hours, there are camping vehicles on the street. Stealth is suggested.

Congratulations to Astrid85 and MHBrainiacs for FTF honors.