posted 04-10-2015 03:37 PM               

Yuri's Night Celebrated Around World for the 15th Year in a Row From Greenland to Antarctica

Yuri's Night, the World Space Party, is launching this weekend with almost 200 events in 39 countries around the globe. Thousands of people on all seven continents and the International Space Station will participate in parties, events, and educational programming to celebrate humanity's past, present, and future in space.

In 2001 a few friends decided that the humanity needed a way to celebrate the decades of our collective achievement in reaching beyond our pale blue dot. In Russia and many former soviet republics Cosmonautics Day has been celebrated each anniversary of the April 12, 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin. Noting the coinciding dates of Gagarin's flight and the first U.S. Space Shuttle flight (STS-1) in 1981, the founders of Yuri's Night decided that this was the perfect day to bring the world together and celebrate human progress in reaching the heavens.

Fast-forward 14 years later, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have celebrated and continue to celebrate human spaceflight on and around April 12. Throughout this weekend in locales from Washington D.C. to Irkutsk, Russia and from Daejeon, South Korea to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station, Antarctica, people from all walks of life and of all cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities will be celebrating human spaceflight together through Yuri's Night.

Some of the Yuri's Night events will be small gatherings of friends and family, while others will feature government representatives and celebrities, such as astronauts Dr. Buzz Aldrin (in Colorado Springs), Dr. Mae Jemison (in Los Angeles), and Dr. Cady Coleman (in Cocoa Beach). Even the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, orbiting from 402 kilometers above, are celebrating Yuri's Night; NASA and ESA have both released special Yuri's Night greetings to the world from Astronauts Terry Virts and Samantha Cristoforetti respectively.

Yuri's Night Chairman Dr. Ryan Kobrick remarked that "as we celebrate the 54th anniversary of the first human in space, we are excited about the many changes in the spaceflight environment around the world. Russia is proposing its own successor to the International Space Station, the United States is developing not one, but many human-rated launch vehicles, and China is working on an ambitious space program of their own." He reminded people around the world that "this is an exciting time to celebrate where we've been and where we are headed."

Even fans of Yuri's Night who are not near an event this year are invited to join in the fun on their favorite social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. They can also participate in multiple online events happening online for Yuri's Night, such as an event in the Second Life virtual world and a live Google Hangout with the Yuri's Night team and team behind the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto.

To learn more about the 2015 Yuri's Night events worldwide and how to find events being held nearby, fans should visit the Yuri's Night Worldwide Event List.