Description of the attraction
You rarely see a monument to a dog, and even an astronaut. In Izhevsk, thanks to TV journalist Sergei Pakhomov and sculptor Pavel Medvedev, the astronaut dog, nicknamed Zvezdochka, was immortalized.
It all began on March 25, 1961 on board the fifth spacecraft - a satellite launched into orbit and successfully landed in the Votkinsk region of Udmurtia with the last cosmonaut dog (on April 12, 1961, for the first time in the history of mankind, Yuri Gagarin made a flight). From the field where the descent vehicle landed, Zvezdochka was brought to the Izhevsk airport (now the area of Molodezhnaya Street), where the affectionate mongrel lived for some time before leaving for Moscow.
In 2005, children from the sleeping area, together with S. Pakhomov, sculpted a trial version of the monument out of snow, and then, having collected pocket money (300 rubles), they have already molded a sculpture out of plaster with a metal coating. The well-known sculptor P. Medvedev liked the idea of the TV journalist and based on the children's idea he created a model of the monument.
On March 25, 2006, in the park on Molodezhnaya Street (near the former runway of the old airfield), the opening of the now cast-iron monument "To those who paved the way into space" took place, which is a launch vehicle from which a dog peeps. On the outer layer of the apparatus, in ordinary font and Braille for the visually impaired, the story of Zvezdochka is described, a list of previously classified names of participants in the organization of the flight and the nicknames of ten other astronaut dogs who prepared the manned flight into space.
