“Cosmonauts who vie to show their devotion”

The Economist reports on a new kind of “space race” that I would not have expected even a few years ago:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/09/faith-space

Famously, it’s often been claimed that Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), the first man in space, said after his historic flight of April 1961,  “I looked and looked and looked, but I didn’t see God.”

However, he very likely didn’t say those words.  They probably originated with Nikita Khrushchev, who was, at the time, the ruler of the Soviet Union.  At a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union not long after the space flight, Khrushchev was reporting on the Soviet campaign against religious belief.  “Gagarin flew into space,” said Khrushchev, “but didn’t see any god there.”

Yuri Gagarin was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.