Visiting Russian Physicist Applauds Astronaut's Feat

"How do you expect me to react? It's beautiful!" an eminent Russian physicist visiting Harvard declared yesterday about the epoch-making flight into space of jet Air Force Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.

"Now that we have space in our possession, we must use it to solve the remaining problems of this new transportation," Yuri Novozhilov, Vice-Rector for Scientific Research and professor of Physics at the University of Leningrad, declared. In little more than a generation, he predicted, interplanetary travel will be "as easy going from Boston to the Pacific is now."

"Gaga's" hour-and-48-minute flight on April 5 in a five-ton Russian missile verified theories that a human being could return from space "without serious difficulties," Novozhilov explained.

World-wide response to the recently released news of Gagarin's odyssey has copied Novozhilcv's praise. A British scientist termed the feat "the greatest achievement in the history of science," and a huge crowd in Moscow danced in streets in the most impressive display spontaneous enthusiasm in the history the Soviet regime. For President Kennedy the flight was "an outstanding technical accomplishment."

First "Cosmonaut"

Gagarin, dubbed the "first cosmonaut" the American press, was in orbit in outer space for an hour and 29 minutes, the time needed by his rocket to circle the earth at a speed of 17,000 miles an hour, Tass reported.

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge will attempt to track the last stage of the launching missile, presumably still in orbit. Don utman, Acting Head of the Research Analysis Division of the Observatory, said that the feat was "tremendous." And, he claimed, because the U.S. plans to attempt the same venture this summer, a Russian success was a predictable entry in the race for space. It was not an increase in the lead the Russians had already established, he maintained.