When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, they honored soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by leaving behind one of his medals.
Buzz Aldrin and fellow Moonwalker Neil Armstrong chose to go to the Moon with an Apollo 1 patch. It was selected to honor the ultimate sacrifice of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed Whiteand Roger Chaffee, who perished in a fire during the first test of the Apollo command and service module. The astronauts also chose to remember their fallen Soviet competitors and carried with them two Soviet medals, honoring cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who died in the Soyuz 1 spacecraft in 1967 and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, who was killed in an aircraft in 1968. Aldrin and Armstrong understood that even as Americans raced the Soviets to the Moon, success would be shared by all.