gagarin biography

April 12, 2021

First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut

It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind— Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond.

Walker discusses his new book  Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space , out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy—happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively.

Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event; how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission; and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.

By Pakinam Amer

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space.

Getty Images

Pakinam Amer: It was at 09.07 am Moscow time on April 12, 1961 that a new chapter of history was written. On that day, without much fanfare, Russia sent the first human to space and it happened in secrecy, with very few hints in advance.

Yuri Gagarin, 27-year-old Russian ex-fighter pilot and cosmonaut, was launched into space inside a tiny capsule on top of a ballistic missile, originally designed to carry a warhead. 

The spherical capsule was blasted into orbit, circling the Earth at a speed of about 300 miles per minute, 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

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Accounts vary on exactly how long Gagarin spent circling our blue planet before he re-entered the atmosphere, hurtling towards Earth, gravity rapidly pulling him in.

Some say it was 108 [ one hundred and eight ] minutes. Stephen Walker, my guest today and the author of a new book on Gagarin’s historic feat and the world it happened in, puts at 106 [ one hundred and six ].

Give or take a few minutes, that space venture aboard Vostok 1 — orbiting the earth at a maximum altitude of roughly 200 miles and putting the first man in space — still set the record for space achievement.

It sparked a space race between the US and Russia that, 8 eight years later, put other men on the moon for that small step hailed as a giant leap.

It is said that Gagarin whistled a love song as his capsule prepared for launch

One man, five feet five, in an orange space suit, strapped into a seat inside a capsule attached to a modified R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. … 

… 106 minutes or 108, man’s first pilgrimage around the planet we call home

... a solitary journey that is still celebrated as monumental and game-changing 60 years on.

This is Pakinam Amer, and you’re listening to Science Talk, a Scientific American podcast. And today, my guest Stephen Walker and I will talk about a legendary astronaut and a super secret space mission that changed everything.

Stephen Walker: [I] came across a book that was written by a guy called [Vladimir] Suvorov who had kept a diary, a secret diary of the secret Soviet space program which he was filming from about 1959 right the way through into the 60s and it was fascinating because it was so secret that he wasn't even able to tell his wife what he was doing but he was away filming all this stuff and he says in his diary this felt like science fiction.

It was just so incredible what was happening in secret and I thought myself I want to find the footage because if I can find that footage which is apparently shot in color and on 35 millimeter I can appraise that footage and turn it into a theatrical feature film which gives you the inside image, the inside sight into this incredible first step to space to the beyond.”

That was Stephen Walker, British director and New York Times bestselling author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima. And this was his attempt to dust off decades-old footage showing months of preparing Vostok 1 to put a Soviet citizen into orbit before the Americans.

Stephen traveled to Russia, tracked down eye witnesses who worked at the top secret rocket site in the USSR, shot the interviews in high-definition and gathered some raw, never-before-seen insider material shot between 1959 and 61, that he describes as pristine.

But he couldn’t get access to the rest of the footage. What he had was great but wasn’t enough for a full feature film.

So instead, he wrote a book.

It’s called Beyond and it’s published by HarperCollins.

Pakinam Amer: So Stephen, you’re one of those people who actually wrote a book in lockdown.

Stephen Walker: It was incredibly exciting in a way but it was weird, because all this other stuff was going on outside. And I didn't see it. Really. Of course, I did see it. But when people talk about Corona for me at that point, I wasn't thinking about the Coronavirus, I was thinking about the corona spy satellite system that the Americans had in 1961, which I talk about in my book where they were spying on secret Soviet missile complexes. I mean, I was in a different world. I was literally in 1961. And I was also in 2020. It was a really weird experience>

Pakinam Amer: But you began weaving the yarn in 2012?

Stephen Walker: Yeah, I mean, I've done lots of other things since then. I did three trips to Russia. One in 2012. One in 2013. I think I actually had another in 2014 or 2015. The last one was actually a short trip to St. Petersburg, where I met this incredible couple and one of things is wonderful about the Soviet space program at that time, was that actually very unlike NASA, which seemed to have a real major problem about women being anywhere near NASA.

I mean, actually women were not even allowed in the launch blockhouses at Cape Canaveral in 1961. They were forbidden to get in them … There was one woman, a wonderful woman, I interviewed called Joanne Morgan, who was the only woman engineer of all of them [who was allowed] in the launch Center at Kennedy Space Center in 1969. For the moon landing, she's the only one woman and everybody else is a guy. And back in 61, she was telling me over crab cocktails in Cape Canaveral. She told me that you know, she was actually not even allowed to go into the launch of the launch blockhouse, she was forbidden to go in.

Whereas actually in the USSR, oddly enough, it wasn't like that. And I interviewed this couple called Vladimir and Khionia Kraskin, and they're in my book. And they were this wonderful husband and wife in their 80s. And they entertained me in this wonderful little Soviet-style flat in Saint Petersburg, and told me glorious stories about how they were both engineers, telemetry engineers, that have moved there with their child to this weird place in the middle of the Kazakh Steppe, you know, where this new rocket cosmodrome was being built.

And they actually were working right at the epicenter of the Soviet space program, and for that matter, the Soviet missile program, and these were their glory days. It was quite an incredible thing to sort of talk to them both about and they were there when Gagarin launched and with all of that stuff, they were there all the way through it. It was wonderful; it was so Russian, we ended up sitting and drinking vodka until four o'clock in the morning.

I interviewed them on camera, and we had this wonderful, it was quite glorious. This guy had actually out of chocolate wrappers from Ferrero Roche chocolates had constructed a two-meter-high replica of the R-7 rocket that took Yuri Gagarin into space and it was in his sitting room. It was Incredible. It was all made out of chocolate, you know, gold wrappers, it was beautiful.

And, and so I kind of fell in love with these people. And I also sort of felt, you know, I want to tell their stories because they just aren't being heard by anybody. It's all moon, moon, moon, lunar, lunar, lunar. And that's great. Don't get me wrong, it's really important. It's a landmark. It's all of that I get it. But this is an amazing story. And these are amazing stories that people don't know about, and they are really exciting, and really dramatic and really touching and really moving and really, you know, epoch changing, in my opinion.”

Pakinam Amer: Stephen, when I read your book, it almost felt like a novelization of that era. It's a very intricate and intimate account of the people who were involved in that space mission. A very rich account, not just of the orbit itself, but of the tensions reminiscent of the cold war between the US and the Sovient Union, then the space race. But yours is primarily a human story. What inspired you to write it, decades down the line?

Stephen Walker: It is a major philosophical leap for humankind, this is not just advanced Soviet v. America, it really isn't. And to think of it in those terms, is to miss the essential point. Because what I believe

is that the first human being in space is one of the most epoch call moments in all human history.

For essentially three and a half billion years since, or any life began on this planet, anything, okay? This man is the first to leave, he is the first human eye to look down on the biosphere from outside, he is the first--to use the words of Plato--he is the first to escape the cave that we are all in. He steps into the beyond; it is that very first step outside. Nobody had seen this before.

It is one of the things that when you actually put yourself back into that world at that time, and Gagarin very quickly became the most famous man on the planet. You understand why? Because what this is all pre-moon, none of that had happened is this guy was seeing something that no one else in all history whether a human or anything had ever seen. When he looked out in that porthole window, he saw the stars, he saw the earth. And he saw a sunrise in fast motion, and a sunset in fast motion. He saw the incredible fragility of the earth. He saw what we're all destroying, frankly, right now, he saw all of that. And he was the first to see it.

So for me, that is a philosophical psychological quarter, which will be emotional, it is somebody stepping out of the cave into the sunlight as it were to pursue the metaphor and blinking in the light and going, Oh, my God, what's this? What's this that's out here? What is this? He was the first to do it at incredible risk.

It happened because of the politics. It happened because of the race. It happened because of the iron curtain. We know all of those things are valid at all that but actually, in the end, the event, the achievement, better than that the moment is bigger than all of those things way, way, way bigger than all of those things, three and a half billion years. And something changes on April the 12th 1961, at you know, ten past nine in the morning, Moscow time. And that's this. And that's the story.

So for me, it's everything. That's the first thing that kind of animated me to write the book. And I felt that I even had a sign above my desk saying, “remember, Stephen, three and a half billion years, remember,” I kept thinking that when I started to get into the politics too much or got a bit lost in whatever details, as one always does, and pull back from it. What is this really about?

And the other thing that I thought was really important about this. And it animated my writing too. I'm not interested in writing history books that end up in library stacks for decades. I mean, I'm a filmmaker. I want to reach people. And what I tried to do in this story was tell people about people. What interests me most of all, I'm interested, obviously in the technical achievement and really interested in the politics. Of course I am. I couldn't write this book if I wasn't. But what I'm really, really interested in people.

Who was this guy? What was this rivalry like between him and this guy, Titov? He was [the Soviet] number two.

There's an incredible story there, which I kind of talked about, where you get these two men who are both competing to be the first human in space. They are best friends. They are next door neighbors. And they have a child each the same kind of age little infant child, but Titov's child Igor dies at the age of eight months, right in the middle of their Cosmonaut Training, and the Gagarin husband and wife with their own child about the same age, a little girl ...  they are incredible to him. They are and his wife, Tamara, they are locked in embrace, they are supportive, they are wonderful. And I know this because I interviewed Titov's wife in Moscow. And she told me all of this, it was quite incredible. She was in tears when she told me this stuff.

And yet, these two men with this love with this tragedy that they kind of shared and helped each other through living next door and on adjoining balconies and crossing over each other's balconies to spend time with each other and late nights talking and drinking vodka and all those sorts of things. They're also rivals for immortality, effectively. And we're not really talking about Titov today, we're talking about Yuri Gagarin. So he lost, he lost. And yet underlying that rivalry is love.

And to me, that becomes human that becomes rich and interesting. It's not just ‘Oh, who came first,’ it's actually a real, it's a relationship of brothers, with all the complexities that fraternal relationships like that would have, you know, the rivalry, the kind of male rivalry, but also the love and the connection in the background. So it's complicated, difficult, it doesn't fit easily into boxes, but a very, very human mix of emotions that drives forward. So characters, people who make the story, this pivotal moment in human history happen, is what really excites me.

Pakinam Amer: Stephen painted an interesting picture of the world where Gagarin’s extraordinary mission happened. How back then, the Soviet Union and the United States were head to head, taking colossal risks in the race to be first in space.

Before Gagarin’s mission, the Soviet Union had already blasted the first satellite in into space, Sputnik 1.

Only three weeks after Gagarin’s earth orbit, American astronaut Alan Shepard--part of the so-called Mercury-7--was launched into space aboard a rocket called Freedom 7.

Less than a year later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962.

But Gagarin’s leap into the unknown, being a first, was terrifying.

No one knew what would happen to a person once they’re launched into space. Would they go mad? Can their body withstand it?

Like Stephen aptly describes, there was no textbook for that mission … anywhere. So what exactly were the challenges …

Stephen Walker: The challenges are physiological and psychological, the physiological challenges, some of which had been kind of looked at and dealt with some of the animal flights they do, which I write about in the book with dogs in a Soviet Union and with monkeys, and then finally, obviously a chimpanzee called Ham in the United States. But what actually, they didn't know really was what a human physiology would do in that environment.

So what you're talking about are unbelievable, first of all, acceleration forces in a rocket. Nobody, let's just get this really clear. From the beginning. Nobody had sat on top of a nuclear missile, replacing the nuclear bomb, and then firing it upwards, nobody.

And this particular missile, the R-7, was the biggest missile in the world, it was much bigger than any missile the Americans had, it was powerful enough to fly from Kazakhstan, to New York with a thermonuclear weapon on top of it... It was astonishingly radically advanced for its time. And no human had sat on top of one with a million pounds of thrust and lit the fuse and see what happens.

So they didn't know. I mean, it could blow up straight there on the pad. It could be that the physiological experiences, the actual acceleration, or G-forces could be too much for a body to withstand. And once this rocket had actually got into orbit, and the capsules there, nobody knew what weightlessness would do to a human body.

There were real fears that a human wouldn't be able to breathe properly, even obviously, in an oxygenated atmosphere. The human being wouldn't be able to swallow, for example, that weightlessness would do really, really strange things to the heart, they wouldn't beat properly. You know, nobody knew because nobody experienced weightlessness of any kind for more than a few seconds in one of those aeroplanes that simulated weightlessness with his parabolas, they kept flying. But that was only for about 20 seconds. This is going to be much, much longer than that.

So they just didn't know. They were tremendous concerns about how he'd get down again, everybody knew that a capsule returning through the atmosphere would build up massive amounts of friction, the temperatures would reach 1500 degrees centigrade, even more, you know, would it burn away? Would whatever protection he had in the form of a heat shield, or in the design of the capsule itself? Would it work already burn up as he came down? You know, would that be a problem?

And then, beyond all of those problems, there was, as I said, the psychological problem. And the psychological problem basically boiled down to very simple sentence, or rather a very simple question, but with a very simple answer. And that was, would he go insane? Was he going mad in space, because the real fear, and it was a real fear at that time.

And there were, there was psychological textbooks that were written about something called space horror , was that the first human being divorced from the planet below divorce from life or life as we know it divorce for all of that sailing alone, and this is ultimate loneliness or isolation, in the vacuum of space in his little sphere, might go mad.

So they had to think about that, too. And what they thought about as I described in my book was a very Soviet response, they decided that flight will be completely automated. So the guy wouldn't have to do anything at all inside it, except essentially endure it, whatever “endure” actually meant. But they then decided at the last moment, that if actually, something did go wrong, and he needed to take manual control, then how are they going to let him have manual control.

And they came up with this extraordinary solution, which is just utterly mad, where they basically had a three digit code, which you press on, like, the kind of thing you have in a hotel safe on the side of his capsule, and you press these three numbers, which I think will one to five; it's in the book, and that would unlock the manual controls. But then they worried that he might go so crazy that he might just do that anyway, take control, and God knows what he'll do, you know, destroy himself, defect to America, in his spacecraft.

These were proper discussions that took place, literally a few days before he flew. And in the end, what they decided to do was to put the code in an envelope, and seal the envelope, and glue it somewhere in the lining of the inside of his spacecraft. The idea being somehow-- this is crazy logic, it's not even logic-- that if he was able to find it, open it, read the code and press the correct numbers, then he won't be insane. And that was seriously discussed in a state commission of the top politicians, KGB people and space engineers, one week before Yuri Gagarin flew in space.

That's, that's what they dealt with, because they were they didn't know space, horror, insanity. So you're, again, it comes back to my saying at the very beginning, everything here is a first everything is an unknown, nobody's done it before. Nobody. And what increases that feeling of isolation that would have made the possibility of insanity a real one. Why they were so frightened was because they didn't have reliable radio communications with the ground.

They didn't have what the [American] Mercury astronauts would have, which was a chain of stations basically, in circling the globe, where they would always have somebody to talk to, and we're very used to the moon landings and there's all those, you know, communications with beeps on the end, and even with Apollo 13, the one that went wrong, they're always communicating with Mission Control in Houston. But for Gagarin's flight, I would say a substantial part of his flight.

I'm not sure if you'd actually say the majority, but a substantial part of his flight hidden nobody's talked to. He had nobody to talk to, except a microphone with a tape recorder that was installed inside his cabin. And as I say, in the book, it turns out that whoever installed the tape in the tape recorder didn't put enough tape in. So he ran out halfway around the world. And he sat there and made probably one of the few independent decisions that he made in the cabinet, in that Vostok spacecraft, which was to rewind the tape to the beginning, and then record over everything he just said. This is the first mind in space and that's what happened.

You can't really make this stuff up.

Although the radio communication with the first human who stepped beyond our planet involved few words, what we know for instance was that Yuri’s first spoken words were, “The Earth is blue, how wonderful,” Stephen includes part of the transcript of the tape that Yuri recorded during orbit aboard the capsule, as he looked out of the porthole of his capsule.

“The Earth was moving to the left, then upwards, then to the right, and downwards … I could see the horizon, the stars, the Sky,” Gagarin said. “I could see the very beautiful horizon, I could see the curvature of the Earth.”

Pakinam Amer: You’ve heard from Stephen Walker, filmmaker and author of Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space. His book is on sale today. You can get it through HarperCollins, its publisher, or wherever you buy your books. For more information visit www.stephenwalkerbeyond.com

That was Science Talk, and this is your host Pakinam Amer. Thank you for listening.

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Remembering yuri gagarin 50 years later, johnson space center.

“Poyekhali!!” With that one Russian word, meaning “Let’s go!” on April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to become the first human to travel in space.  Upon his return from his history-making single orbit of Earth, the Soviet Union treated Gagarin as a national hero.  Completing many goodwill tours, he became an international celebrity.

For several years, Soviet officials were hesitant to assign him to a second space flight for fear of losing him in an accident.  He became the deputy training director of the cosmonaut training center, helping other cosmonauts prepare for their space flights, and successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on space plane design at the prestigious Zhukovski Air Force Academy.  Gagarin persisted in his desire to return to space and eventually he was assigned as Vladimir Komarov’s backup for the first Soyuz mission.  After Komarov’s death in the Soyuz 1 accident in April 1967, Soviet officials felt justified in their caution and allowed Gagarin to fly aircraft only with a flight instructor.

On March 27, 1968, while on a routine training mission from Chkalovskiy Air Base near the Star City cosmonaut training center with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin, the MiG-15UTI jet in which they were flying crashed in inclement weather, killing both pilots.  Gagarin was 34.  His ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall and are ritually visited by space flight crews prior to their departure for Baikonur.

Upon hearing the news, the NASA Astronaut Office sent a message of condolences to the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., saying in part: “We join you in mourning the loss of Yuri Gagarin.  Nothing will dim the memory of his achievement in becoming the first pilot to fly in space.”

After his death, many prominent space facilities were renamed in his honor.  Outside of Moscow, the facility where cosmonauts train for their spaceflights was renamed the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.  Once a secret facility, today international crews, including U.S. astronauts, train there for missions to the international space station (ISS).  At the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launch pad from which Gagarin began his historic journey is known as the Gagarin Start.  The pad is still in use today to launch multinational crews to the ISS.

To symbolize the current cooperation in space between two former rivals, in 2012 the Dialogue of Cultures – United World Foundation donated a bronze statue of Gagarin to the city of Houston, along with a bronze monument to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.  The side-by-side sculptures stand outside the building that once housed the original headquarters of the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center), before the Clear Lake facility was completed.

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“Let’s go!” — Remembering Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, 60 years later

Last month, three smartly dressed spacemen took time from their training to pause for a moment of reflection. As their greatcoats held back the chill of an early Moscow spring, they laid a splash of red blooms at a grave embedded in the brickwork of the city’s Kremlin Necropolis.

Earlier, in the half-gloom of a tiny office, they surveyed a faded world map, archaic telephones, and a clock perpetually halted at the instant of its former owner’s death. These three space farers — Oleg Novitsky, Pyotr Dubrov, and Mark Vande Hei — surely felt the presence of Yuri Gagarin. And before they left Earth last Friday, they paid tribute to that unassuming hero who, 60 years ago, kicked off a space adventure that will likely never end.

Yuri Gagarin’s early life

Gagarin’s upbringing betrayed little of the icon he would become. Born into peasant stock in the Russian village of Klushino in March 1934, his formative years were brutalized by World War II. He learned to read from old military manuals, pestered his father into helping him build miniature gliders, and found work as an apprentice foundryman. A love of aviation drew him to the Soviet Air Force, where he flew MiG-15 fighters over Murmansk — until he was hired for cosmonaut training in March 1960.

In true Soviet propagandist fashion, the ordinariness of this fresh-faced twentysomething helped him win selection as the world’s first space traveler. According to his backup, cosmonaut Gherman Titov, Gagarin was “a lad who made his dream come true, all by himself.” And while Titov was a poetry-loving teacher’s son, Gagarin represented the ideal communist pin-up: a humble farm boy who rose up from rags to reach the stars.

Yuri flies to space

On April 12, 1961, Titov and Gagarin breakfasted on meat puree and toast with blackcurrant jam. They then donned their orange pressure suits before being bussed to the Baikonur launch pad on the windswept Central Asian steppe. (Legend maintains that Gagarin answered the call of nature by relieving himself against one of the bus tires.) Once the pair arrived at the launch site, and unable to share the Russian going-away tradition of three kisses on alternate cheeks, Gagarin and Titov instead clinked their helmets together in brotherly solidarity.

Inside the spherical cabin of his Vostok 1 capsule (nicknamed the sharik , or “little ball”), Gagarin’s harness was tightened, his ejection seat armed, and his oxygen hose fastened. The spaceship was meant to function autonomously, for fear that separation anxiety might cause the cosmonaut to go mad once in space. But Gagarin was also furnished with a three-digit, not-so-secret code, which would disengage the autopilot and cede control of the craft over to him, if necessary.

At 9:07 A.M. Moscow Time, the rocket — a converted R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, known as Semyorka , or “Little Seven”— roared to life before climbing toward the heavens. “Poyekhali!” shrieked Gagarin, which translates to “Let’s go!”

Gagarin later recalled “an ever-growing din,” partly muffled by his helmet, as the R-7 climbed higher. The g-forces he experienced during ascent made speaking difficult. His heart rate soared from 66 to 158 beats per minute. By 9:18 A.M., he was safely in orbit. Before his very eyes, a tiny Russian doll comically floated in mid-air, an indicator of weightlessness, which started a tradition that endures to this day. In fact, last week, a toy kitten rode to space with Novitsky, Dubrov and Vande Hei for the same purpose.

Reaching 203 miles (327 kilometers), Gagarin smashed the World Aviation Altitude Record. And as Vostok 1 progressed eastwards, tracking stations peppered across Siberia — from Novosibirsk to Kolpashevo and Khabarovsk to Yelizovo — serenaded him with musical greetings. At Yelizovo station on the Kamchatka peninsula, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was treated to the first crude television image beamed from space. “I could not make out his facial features,” Leonov remembered, “but I could tell from the way he moved that it was Yuri.”

At 9:32 A.M., as Vostok 1 cut across the South Pacific and headed for the Strait of Magellan, Radio Moscow broke the electrifying news. “The world’s first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, was launched into orbit from the Soviet Union.” And although U.S. listening posts were already aware of the mission, the tensions of the Cold War meant the announcement was still incredibly jarring. A struggling nation full of simple farmers (or so many observers in the West thought) had achieved the singular technological triumph of the 20th century.

Less than two hours later, as Vostok 1 plunged back to Earth, Gagarin ejected from the craft and safely parachuted to the ground. The spot where his feet found terra firma, near the small town of Engels, is today marked by a 40-foot-tall (12 m) inscribed obelisk. The pioneering astronaut’s launch pad at Baikonur, known as Gagarin’s Start, also still remains in use.

The beginning of a new era

Vostok 1 was a transformative moment. Over the next six decades, 504 men and 65 women representing 41 sovereign nations and a half-dozen religious faiths would venture to space, with their ages ranging from 25-year-old Gherman Titov to 77-year-old John Glenn. Twenty-four of these astronauts have voyaged to the Moon, with 12 of them actually leaving their footprints on the dusty surface. Additionally, 42 men and women have spent more than a year of their lives in space.

Gagarin, however, saw little of this unfolding adventure. Fearing for his life, officials barred Gagarin from a second spaceflight after the Soyuz 1 crash claimed the life of his fellow cosmonaut and close friend, Vladimir Komarov. Gagarin, the highly prized Soviet poster-boy, eventually battled his way back to active-duty cosmonaut status. He might have even flown again, but before that chance presented itself, he tragically died in an airplane crash in March 1968. Gagarin was 34 years old.

Now, as the world prepares for a new space race not based on a simmering Cold War, America’s Artemis Program aims for boots on the Moon by 2024. And later this year, the four crew members of Inspiration4 hope to carry out the first all-civilian spaceflight inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

And that’s only the start of the commercial spaceflight to come: Houston-based Axiom is planning private missions (and add-on modules) to the International Space Station beginning in the next few years. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo draws ever nearer to making suborbital tourism a reality, aiming to commence commercial operations around the start of 2022. And the dearMoon project hopes to see the first-ever lunar tourists fly to the Moon aboard a SpaceX Starship in just two years’ time. Others, including Bigelow Aerospace, envisage inflatable, Earth-circling habitats designed for commercial research. And China and Russia have even outlined plans to collaborate on a Moon base later this decade.

The future seems brighter than ever, if we’re willing to embrace it. And as Gagarin, the man who started it all, once said: “Poyekhali!” Let’s go.

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Yuri Gagarin: Facts about the first human in space

Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space when he orbited Earth in 1961 aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule.

Yuri Gagarin FAQs

Childhood and cosmonaut selection, vostok 1 mission, soyuz 1 and death, additional resources.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human in space. In 1961, he orbited Earth aboard the Vostok 1 space capsule, the first-ever crewed spacecraft. As a result, he became an international celebrity and received many awards for this achievement, both within and outside the Soviet Union.

Vostok 1 was Gagarin's only spaceflight. He was on the backup crew for the Soyuz 1 mission but wasn’t allowed to go to space after that mission ended in a fatal crash because officials worried that Gagarin, a national hero, would be killed. Though he was eventually allowed to continue flying regular aircraft, he died five weeks after being cleared to fly again, when his flight-training airplane crashed. The exact cause of the crash is still unknown.

Related: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1: How the 1st human spaceflight worked (infographic)

Who was the first man in space?

Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, was the first person in space and the first to orbit Earth. 

How old was Yuri Gagarin when he died?

Yuri Gagarin was 34 when he died. 

How many times did Yuri Gagarin go to space?

Gagarin went to space only once, aboard the Vostok 1 capsule. He was also the backup crewmember for the Soyuz 1 mission. 

Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the Soviet Russian village of Klushino to parents who worked on a collective farm, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Beginning in October 1941, German soldiers occupied Klushino as part of their advance on Moscow during World War II. The occupation lasted 21 months, according to the BBC . In 1946, his family moved to the nearby town of Gzhatsk (now named Gagarin), where he went to secondary school and studied math and physics, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History .

After six years of secondary school, Gagarin went to technical school in Saratov, where he also joined a local flying club and began learning to fly a plane. He went on to attend the Soviet Air Force Academy and graduated in 1957. He was one of 20 Soviet fighter pilots chosen as cosmonauts, in part because of his small size, according to ESA. To fit in the small Vostok capsule, cosmonauts couldn't be taller than 1.75 meters (5 feet 9 inches), according to Star Walk , and Gagarin was 1.57 m tall (5 feet 5 inches), according to ESA. In fact, in a 1961 interview , Gagarin described the capsule as quite roomy, especially compared with airplane cockpits of the time.  

Alongside other cosmonauts, Gagarin participated in intensive preparation for spaceflight, including various physical and psychological experiments. A doctor doing psychological testing on him praised his "high degree of intellectual development," noting his attention to detail, strong imagination, quick reaction time and skill in doing mathematical calculations, according to ESA.

" Vostok " means "East" in Russian, as opposed to the Western world, signifying the mission's importance in the Cold War-era space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The crewed part of the capsule was spherical, with an inside diameter of about 7 feet (2 m), according to The Planetary Society . The spacecraft launched on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan.

In response to a statement from ground control that everything seemed to be working fine, Gagarin famously replied "Poyekhali!" — an informal phrase meaning "Off we go!" in Russian, according to ESA.

Gagarin orbited Earth in the capsule for about an hour before the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere . For the most part, the flight went smoothly, though Gagarin lost communication with ground control several times. The two parts of the spacecraft also failed to correctly separate for a while during reentry, and the spacecraft shook violently. But when the capsule was about 4 miles (6 kilometers) above the ground, Gagarin parachuted back to Earth as planned, landing on farmland outside the city of Engels, Russia.

After the mission, Gagarin became an overnight international celebrity; the Soviet Union had kept his spaceflight secret until it was successful. Gagarin was known not only for his accomplishments but also for his charismatic personality and smile, according to the BBC. Though he was barred from visiting the United States, he traveled the world and received many honors, The Telegraph reported . This included the title " Hero of the Soviet Union ," the nation's highest honor.

On April 23, 1967, the Soyuz 1 mission launched with cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov as its sole crewmember, with Gagarin as the backup. During the spacecraft's landing, the parachute failed to deploy, instantly killing Komarov when it hit the ground. Though Gagarin had nothing to do with the crash (and even reportedly tried to get the launch postponed due to safety concerns), the Soviet Union barred him from spaceflight after the crash, out of fear that their national hero would be killed, according to the BBC . Officials also originally also banned him from flying regular aircraft.

After completing additional training, Gagarin was eventually allowed to continue flying. But on March 27, 1968, the plane he was test-piloting crashed, killing him and flying instructor Vladimir Seryogin, according to ESA.

It is unclear exactly what caused the crash. An investigation by the KGB , the former Soviet security and intelligence agency, found that the aircraft went into a spin, possibly maneuvering sharply to avoid a weather balloon. According to the report, the two pilots couldn't regain control; they believed they were at a higher altitude than they actually were because of the inaccurate weather information they'd been given. The report is difficult to confirm, and there are many theories about the crash, including conspiracy theories that Gagarin's death was orchestrated by Soviet officials.

You can learn more about the first man in space with these pieces from Scientific American and Astronomy.com . Space Center Houston's on this day in history details Gagarin's historic flight to space. 

Bibliography

 BBC News. (2011, April 8). Yuri Gagarin: 'I was never nervous during the space flight.' [video]. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-12983333

Dowling, S. (2021, April 12). Yuri Gagarin: the spaceman who came in from the cold . BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210409-yuri-gagarin-the-spaceman-who-came-in-from-the-cold  

European Space Agency. (2007, February 4). Yuri Gagarin . www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_in_space/Yuri_Gagarin

European Space Agency. (2007, February 4). The flight of Vostok 1. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_in_space/The_flight_of_Vostok_1

Lapenkova, M. (2018, March 27). Fifty years on, Yuri Gagarin's death still shrouded in mystery . Phys.org. http://www.phys.org/news/2018-03-fifty-years-yuri-gagarin-death.html

McKeever, A. (2022, April 12). How the space race launched an era of exploration beyond Earth . National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-race-early-human-spaceflight-history-missions?loggedin=true&rnd=1699322304385 .

Orange, R. (2011, April 12). Yuri Gagarin: 50th anniversary of the first man in space . The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/8443777/Yuri-Gagarin-50th-anniversary-of-the-first-man-in-space.html  

Star Walk. (2021, April 11). 60th anniversary of the first human space flight . https://starwalk.space/en/news/60th-anniversary-of-the-first-human-space-flight

Swopes, Brian. “Pilot-Cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union.” This Day in Aviation. 14 Apr. 2023, https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/yuri-alekseyevich-gagarin/ . Accessed November 7, Nov. 2023.

The Planetary Society. (n.d.). Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight . Retrieved November 7, 2023, from https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/vostok-1

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Rebecca Sohn is a freelance science writer. She writes about a variety of science, health and environmental topics, and is particularly interested in how science impacts people's lives. She has been an intern at CalMatters and STAT, as well as a science fellow at Mashable. Rebecca, a native of the Boston area, studied English literature and minored in music at Skidmore College in Upstate New York and later studied science journalism at New York University. 

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What is Gagarin’s legacy?

Space is an inspirational subject and human spaceflight in particular has motivated many young people to follow careers in science and engineering. Space now affects our everyday lives and makes an important contribution to the economies of the world.

This is the legacy of the early days of spaceflight, but it is often also associated with Yuri Gagarin and the astronauts who followed him.

Yes, it is true that space now touches many aspects of our daily lives – from the vital role it plays in monitoring our planet and protecting the environment, to the technical advances that space exploration has brought to materials science, computing, engineering, communications, biomedicine and many other fields.

Satellites are now able to show us our home planet in extraordinary detail and tell us about the way that we are changing it on local and global scales. Spaceprobes have made landings on distant planets, moons and asteroids and are even now journeying to the very edge of our Solar System. Orbiting astronomical telescopes have given Earth-based scientists insights into the creation of life and of the Universe itself.

But the fact is the Space Age was already well under way in 1961. Scientists and engineers were already making discoveries and inventing new technologies for spaceflight. By the time of Gagarin’s flight, the Soviet Union and the USA had made over 100 launch attempts, and both had succeeded in putting satellites in orbit and sending probes out into interplanetary space.

Since the launch of the first artificial satellite Sputnik in October 1957, the Soviet Union had notched up a set of ‘firsts’. They placed the first living creature, the dog Laika, into space in November 1957 and sent Luna 1 to pass close to the Moon in January 1959. Luna 2 would be the first probe to impact the Moon in September 1959 and Luna 3 the first to photograph its far side in October the same year. In February 1961, Venera-1, the first truly planetary probe, was launched toward Venus – an important milestone in spacecraft design.

On the American side, progress was equally impressive. Explorer 1 was launched in January 1958, and besides being the first US satellite, it is known for discovering the Van Allen radiation belts. This success was quickly followed by other satellites, notably the first communications satellite SCORE, also launched in 1958, and Pioneer 5, the first scientific probe around the Sun, launched in March 1960. TIROS-1, the first weather satellite, and Transit, the first operational navigation satellite, were both launched a month later.

In Europe, scientists from 10 countries, the ‘Groupe d’etudes europeen pour la Collaboration dans le domaine des recherches spatiales’ (GEERS), had already set up a commission at which governments would decide on possibilities for European cooperation in space. By 1961, the ‘Commission preparatoire europeenne de recherches spatiales’ (COPERS) was defining a structure for the envisaged European Space Research Organisation.

So what, then, could be Gagarin’s legacy? Until pictures of Gagarin appeared in the news, there were no real ‘space heroes’ for the public to identify with. The scientists and engineers working behind the scenes rarely appeared in the media. In the west, youngsters had comic book characters, science fiction and could aspire to be jet pilots. The US Mercury astronauts, although appearing in magazines such as Life since their selection in 1959, had yet to prove themselves.

With Gagarin came the first human face for space exploration. The photographs of this brave, helmeted space explorer became iconic of the 20th century and defined the image of the cosmonaut, much like the picture of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. The thing that most people remember about Gagarin is his smile. The images of his smiling face would humanise space for the public, and they would also give a human quality to the Soviet society at that time.

The Soviet authorities chose their first man well. It would appear that they were also looking beyond the spaceflight, namely to make Gagarin an ambassador for the Soviet Union. Certainly the pictures of the first human space explorer transcended political differences and caught the imagination of people around the world.

Gagarin projected the image of confidence, professionalism, team spirit, modesty, bravery, leadership and concern for others, like that of his American counterparts (all had the same background as military jet pilots, so this was not surprising). These qualities became forever associated with cosmonauts and astronauts and still inspire today.

But more importantly, during the flight of Vostok 1, Gagarin was the first human being to see Earth from space. With so many images of Earth from space now available, it is hard to imagine how it felt to be the first person to view Earth from that perspective. This one aspect of his flight was so significant, transforming it from an impressive technical achievement to a milestone in human history. Could this be his legacy?

More than 500 people have travelled into space since, representing over 30 countries. Like Gagarin, most of them came back from space with a changed viewpoint and reverence for planet Earth. They describe seeing a world with no political boundaries, no borders between countries.

For a few months, Gagarin was the only person on Earth to have had such a unique view of our planet. He was struck by its beauty and fragility, and realised it was humankind’s duty to protect it. For a flight that lasted only one hour and 48 minutes, one orbit of Earth, it provoked important political, social, cultural and technical changes, and forever altered our perspective of our place on Earth.

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Who Was Yuri Gagarin?

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Every April, people around the world celebrate the life and works of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He was the first person to travel into outer space and the first to orbit our planet. He accomplished all this in an 108-minute flight on April 12, 1961. During his mission, he commented on the feeling of weightlessness that everyone who ever goes into space experiences. In many ways, he was a pioneer of spaceflight, putting his life on the line not just for his country, but for the human exploration of outer space. 

For Americans who remember his flight, Yuri Gagarin's space feat was something they watched with mixed feelings: yes, it was great that he was the first man to go to space, which was exciting. His was a much-sought-after achievement by the Soviet space agency at a time when his country and the United States were very much at odds with each other. However, they also had bittersweet feelings about it because NASA hadn't done it first for the U.S.A. Many felt the agency had somehow failed or was being left behind in the race for space.

The flight of Vostok 1 was a milestone in human spaceflight, and Yuri Gagarin put a face on the exploration of stars. 

The Life and Times of Yuri Gagarin

Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934. As a young adult, he took flight training at a local aviation club, and his flying career continued in the military. He was selected for the Soviet space program in 1960, part of a group of 20 cosmonauts who were in training for a series of missions that were planned to take them to the Moon and beyond.

On April 12, 1961, Gagarin climbed into his Vostok capsule and launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome—which remains today as Russia's premier launch site. The pad he launched from is now called "Gagarin's Start". It's also the same pad that the Soviet space agency launched the famous Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957.

A month after Yuri Gagarin's flight to space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shephard, Jr., made HIS first flight to and the "race to space" went into high gear. Yuri was named "Hero of the Soviet Union", traveled the world talking of his accomplishments, and rose quickly through the ranks of Soviet Air Forces. He was never allowed to fly to space again, and became the deputy training director for the Star City cosmonaut training base. He continued flying as a fighter pilot while working on his aerospace engineering studies and writing his thesis about future space planes.

Yuri Gagarin died on a routine training flight on March 27, 1968, one of many astronauts to die in space flight accidents ranging from the Apollo 1 disaster to the Challenger and Columbia shuttle mishaps. There has been much speculation (never proven) that some nefarious activities led to his crash. It's far more likely that erroneous weather reports or an air vent failure led to the deaths of Gagarin and his flight instructor, Vladimir Seryogin. 

Yuri's Night

Since 1962, there has always been a celebration in Russia (Former Soviet Union) called "Cosmonautics Day", to commemorate Gagarin's flight to space. "Yuri's Night" began in 2001 as a way to celebrate his achievements and those of other astronauts in space. Many planetariums and science centers hold events, and there are celebrations at bars, restaurants, universities, Discovery Centers, observatories (such as Griffith Observatory), private homes and many other venues where space enthusiasts gather. To find more about Yuri's Night, simply "Google" the term for activities. 

Today, astronauts on the International Space Station are the latest to follow him into space and live in Earth orbit. In the future of space exploration , people may well start living and working on the Moon, studying its geology and mining its resources, and preparing for trips to an asteroid or to Mars. Perhaps they, too, will celebrate Yuri's Night and tip their helmets in memory of the first man to head to space.

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What Really Happened to Yuri Gagarin, the First Man in Space?

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: May 16, 2023 | Original: April 12, 2016

Becoming the First Man in Space

The son of a carpenter, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino in Smolensk, Russia in 1934. At 16, he moved to Moscow to apprentice as a foundryman in a metal works but soon transferred to a technical school in Saratov. There, Gagarin joined a flying club and took to the skies for the first time. He graduated from the Soviet Air Force cadet school in 1957 and began serving as a fighter pilot. He married his wife, Valentina, that same year; they went on to have two daughters.

In 1960, Gagarin was selected along with 19 other candidates for the Soviet space program. The program winnowed the cosmonauts down to two—Gagarin and fellow test pilot Gherman Titov—as finalists to make the program’s first flight into space. Some thought Gagarin made the cut due to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s preference for his more modest background (Titov was the son of a schoolteacher).

At 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961, when Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spacecraft lifted off  from Baikonur cosmodrome, he uttered the surprisingly informal, immediately iconic exclamation “Poyekhali!” (Translation: “Let’s go!”) His flight, a single orbit around the Earth, was uneventful, but the landing ended in near-disaster when the cables joining the Vostok’s descent module and service module failed to separate properly, causing massive shaking as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Gagarin ejected before landing, parachuting down safely near the Volga River.

Hero of the Soviet Union

Gagarin became an international celebrity, toured the world and was showered with honors by his country. Krushchev’s government awarded him the Order of Lenin and named him a Hero of the Soviet Union. Gagarin’s triumph was a painful blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961. What’s more, a U.S. astronaut wouldn’t match Gagarin’s feat of orbiting the Earth until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in Friendship 7. (By that time, Titov had already become the second Soviet to make it to space, making 17 orbits of Earth over 25 hours in Vostok 2 in August 1961.)

Gagarin struggled with drinking on the heels of his fame, but by the late 1960s had returned to his training. He was chosen as backup pilot for the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission (in which two Soviet spacecraft were supposed to rendezvous in space), and watched in horror as his friend Vladimir Komarov died when his parachutes failed to open on re-entry in April 1967.

A Hero’s Tragic End

Less than a year later, on March 27, 1968, Gagarin himself was killed when a two-seater MiG-15 fighter jet he was flying with Vladimir Seryogin, crashed outside a small town near Moscow during a routine training flight. Gagarin’s ashes were placed in a niche in the Kremlin wall, while his hometown of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in his honor.

An official investigation into the accident concluded that Gagarin swerved to avoid a foreign object—such as a bird or weather balloon—sending the plane into a tailspin that ended with its crash into the ground. But many aviation professionals viewed this conclusion as implausible, and rumors continued to swirl around the crash. Some thought Gagarin might have been drinking, or that he and Seryogin might have been distracted by taking photographs from the plane’s window. Others suggested a cabin pressurization valve could have failed, causing both pilots to suffer hypoxia. More outlandish theories included sabotage for political motives, suicide or even collision with a UFO.

The Truth, Declassified

Gagarin’s friend and fellow Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, was in the area on the day of the crash and served (along with Gherman Titov) on the board that investigated the accident. In 2013, Leonov announced on the Russia Today TV network that another report on the crash, recently declassified, confirmed the real story: A second plane being tested that day, a Su-15 jet, mistakenly flew far lower than its planned altitude of 33,000 feet, instead passing close to where Gagarin’s plane had been flying, around 2,000 feet. Such a large aircraft would be able to roll over a smaller one (like the MiG-15) in its wake if the two planes came too close to each other.

After running various computer simulations, the report concluded that the only viable explanation for the crash was that the Su-15 flew too close to Gagarin’s plane that day, flipping it and forcing it into an unrecoverable spiral dive toward the ground. When asked why the report remained classified for so long, Leonov replied “My guess would be that one of the reasons for covering up the truth was to hide the fact that there was such a lapse so close to Moscow.” Leonov agreed not to identify the test pilot of the Su-15, who was 80 years old at the time, as a condition of being able to go public with the truth nearly five decades after the history-making cosmonaut’s fatal crash.

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Yuri Gagarin: First Human Space Flight in Pictures

On the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first orbit, see pictures of the man, his spacecraft, and the global impact of his flight.

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Who Was The First Astronaut? Yuri Gagarin Facts and Biography.

What names come to your mind when you think of famous astronauts? Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin or Jim Lovell might come to mind. But none of these brave men was the first person to travel to outer space to become the first official astronaut in the planet. In fact, the one to get that honor was a Russian cosmonaut.

Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut when he journeyed into outer space aboard the Vostok 1 capsule on April 12th, 1961. The ship completed one lap around our planet, also making him the first human to orbit Earth.

What is an astronaut?

To make sure our answer to the question of the first astronaut is correct, let’s take a look at the official definition of an astronaut.

The Fédération aéronautique internationale (Aeronautic International Federation) defines an astronaut as the person trained for human spaceflight who have participated in flights above 100 kilometers (62 miles).

The United States agencies have a similar line. They award the Astronaut Wings medal for flights above 50 miles (80 km).

Is a cosmonaut the same as an astronaut?

Sometimes you will hear Yuri Gagarin referred to as a cosmonaut. The term comes from the Russian kosmonavt , meaning “a space traveler”.

A cosmonaut is, in essence, the same thing as an astronaut. The only difference is a cosmonaut is only employed by the Russian Space Agency or by the now extinct Soviet space program. So when you hear the word cosmonaut, it simply means a Russian astronaut.

Quick Facts

Yuri gagarin biography.

“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!” Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was born in the Soviet Union (now Russia) in a small village named Klushino , near what is now Russia’s border with Belarus.

His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina worked as a carpenter and dairy farmer on a communal farm. He had one older brother, Valentin, and one older sister, Zoya, as well as a younger brother named Boris.

The Gagarin family went through many hardships during the Nazi occupation of Russia in the second World War. His siblings, Valentin and Zoya were deported for slave labor and the rest of them had to spent almost two years living in a mud hut. After the war, the family moved to the town of Gzhatsk .

In 1951, at the age of 17, Yuri was selected to go to the city of Saratov to enroll at the Industrial Technical School. It was during his time there he began training as a pilot on the weekends at a local flying club.

Thanks to this training, he was later accepted at the 1st Chkalovsky Higher Air Force Pilots School where after a couple more years of training he was finally named lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force in 1957.

It was during this time Yuri met his future wife, Valentina Goryacheva who worked as a medical technician. They married only a few months later in November 1957. The couple had two daughters, Yelena (1959) and Galina (1961).

In 1959. The Soviets launched the Luna 3, an unmanned spacecraft with the mission to photograph the dark side of the moon. This woke up an interest in Yuri for space exploration and he asked to be recommended for the Soviet space program where he was accepted just a few months later along with other 19 candidates.

After some more training, Gagarin became one of the best candidates in the program and was selected for a filter group of six people from which the final crew for the Volstok I mission would be chosen.

The whole project evolved really fast as there was a race between the Vostok program and the U.S. Project Mercury to become the first nation to put a man into space.

After multiple tests, training, and competition between the six candidates, the lieutenant-general Nikolai Kamanin selected Yuri Gagarin as the primary pilot for the mission with German Titov as his backup.

On April 12th, 1961, the Vostok 1 finally launched from Kazakhstan, where to this day the missions to the International Space Station are launched thanks to the country’s favorable conditions. Yuri Gagarin was aboard the spacecraft and with the words “Off we go! Goodbye, until we meet soon, dear friends” he became the first man to achieve the dream mankind has had from ancient times of going to outer space.

The whole mission lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes. After his return to Earth, Yuri became a national hero for the Soviet Union and a celebrity around the world. Parades were thrown for him in Moscow, Warsaw, and other big cities. Gagarin went to more than 30 countries during this little world tour, but due to the tensions between both nations, he never visited the United States.

In 1963 he was awarded the rank of Colonel and became Deputy Training Director of the Star City Cosmonaut Training base , now renamed to Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center .

Despite objections from Nikolai Kamanin, the man who originally selected him for the program and overseer for the space program, Gagarin continued to train as a pilot and became the backup pilot for the Soyuz program. Kamanin was worried about losing a national hero to a training accident and the Soyuz program being rushed due to the race with the United States. He was proven right when unfortunately the Soyuz crashed and its pilot, Vladimir Komarov died in the accident.

Due to this accident, Yuri was banned from training for any further space mission, but he decided to keep on flying planes. Unfortunately, that also turned to have its dangers as only a year later, on March 27th, 1968, Yuri died during a training flight when his MiG-15UTI crashed. His co-pilot, Vladimir Sergoyin also lost his life in the accident. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old at the time.

In 1968, the town of Gzhatsk was renamed to Gagarin after him.

Achievements and Awards

• On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut to travel to outer space.
• On April 14, 1961, he received the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union awards.
• On April 15, 1961, the Soviet Academy of Sciences gave him the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal
• The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded him the De la Vaulx Medal
• He received the Gold Medal by the British Interplanetary Society
• On 1963, he and Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space) were awarded the Order of Karl Marx by the German Democratic Republic
• Yuri was awarded multiple other medals and awards in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Indonesia.
• As part of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a memorial satchel on the Moon’s surface as a tribute to Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov.
• To this day, in Russia and the other countries of the former USSR, the 12th of April is celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in honor of the Vostok 1 flight.
• On the 20th and 30th anniversaries of the launch, the Soviet Union issued commemorative coins with his face on them.
• A 140 feet high monument was built in Leninsky Avenue, in the middle of Moscow.
• Many other statues, monuments and streets remembering him have been built or named after him in countries such as the UK, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Cyprus, and the U.S.

Yuri Gagarin had a way with words. He really managed to convey emotions and feelings when he talked about what it meant to him to travel beyond Earth. He left us some great quotes originally spoken in Russian, so the ones below are hopefully close translations.

“Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the Nicholas Roerich”

“The main force in man is the power of the spirit.”

“When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!”

“What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth. The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots. When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.”

A quote that is often attributed to Yuri is “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God” talking about his time up in space. However, there is no evidence he ever actually said this. It is possible the quote was misattributed after a speech by a different person who said “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.”

• The town of Gzhatsk, where Yuri’s family moved after WWII was renamed to Gagarin after his death in 1968
• The phrase Gagarin used when his spacecraft launched, “Poyehali!”, meaning something along the lines of “Let’s go!” became so popular, people in the USSR started using it as a greeting.
• He was only 27 years old when the mission took place. To this day, this still makes him the fourth youngest person to travel to space. The three people younger than him are also Russian cosmonauts and only by one or two years.
• Vostok, the name of the capsule that Gagarin orbited Earth on, is Russian for “East”.
• The Vostok spacecraft was controlled from Earth using radio transmissions and the astronaut had no control over it while he orbited Earth. However, he was given a sealed envelope with a key he could use to switch to manual controls in case of an emergency.
• At the time of the spaceflight, there was a bit of a controversy about whether or not the Vostok 1 mission counted as the first manned flight to space. The rules of the Aeronautic International Federation stated that the astronaut had to land back on Earth aboard the ship, but in the Vostok mission, Yuri parachuted out of the capsule and landed alone.
• According to some sources, one of the reasons why he never visited the U.S. was because President John F. Kennedy banned him from entering the country. I’m sure the Soviets didn’t want him visiting either due to the tensions during the Cold War.
• One of the reasons that might have helped him be picked for the mission was his height. He was only 5’2” (1.57m) which helped him not only fit in the capsule better but weight less than other candidates. When it comes to space travel, every pound saved matters.
• Gagarin only beat the U.S. to space by 3 weeks. Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American man to travel to outer space on May 5, 1961, aboard the Freedom 7.

The Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy. Was Yuri Gagarin really the first man in space?

A popular conspiracy theory alleges the Soviets tried and succeeded in sending at least two other cosmonauts into space before Yuri Gagarin. According to this conspiracy, the flights occurred as soon as 1959 and would have ended up in accidents during the trip back to Earth that resulted in the pilot’s death. The Soviets would have seen this as a failure and therefore covered the existence of these flights.

The supposed evidence for this conspiracy is based on the recording of intercepted radio transmission by two Italian radio operators, an alleged leak by a Czech official and an article by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein who said he was in the USSR at the time and was told by a cadet they had launched a man into orbit that day.

Some of the names of these supposed lost cosmonauts are Vladimir Ilyushin, Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, and Maria Gromova.

The theory has never been confirmed even though after the fall of the Soviet Union a lot of documents from that time were de-classified and made publicly available.

Where to learn more

There are multiple resources where you can delve deeper into the life and work of Yuri Gagarin. Here are a few of our favorite ones.

The book Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin ( Amazon ) is a biography written by Piers Bizony and famous documentary maker end Emmy award winner Jamie Doran. It narrates the story of Yuri’s life intertwined with the motivations of the U.S. And Soviet space programs. Interesting read of medium length.

Gagarin himself wrote an autobiography titled Road To The Stars ( Amazon ). I don’t personally know any Russian, but those who do criticize the English versions because they say it changes the tone of many phrases, specifically those making reference to communism and the USSR.

Elena is a Canadian journalist and researcher. She has been looking at the sky for years and hopes to introduce more people to the wonderful hobby that is astronomy.

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Yuri Gagarin

First human to journey into outer space

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful."

Date of birth: March 9, 1934 Date of death: March 27, 1968 Place of birth: Western Region, USSR Career: hero, cosmonaut

Yuri Gagarin is a Soviet pilot-cosmonaut, whose biography everyone knows since high school. Gagarin is the man who made the first flight into space. He became a model and a legend not only for the inhabitants of the USSR – the cosmonaut was an honorary citizen of foreign cities and an international public figure. Yuri Alekseyevich opened a new page in the exploration of space and became a symbol of the development of Soviet science and aviation.

Childhood and Youth

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the village of Klushino in the Western Region of the USSR (now Smolensk Oblast) into a family of well-to-do peasants. The boy was the third of four children. Yury’s childhood was peaceful and joyful, his father and mother paid a lot of attention to him. Alexei Ivanovich, the head of the family, was a wood craftsman and enjoyed introducing his children to it.

At six years of age Yura went to school, but managed to finish only the first grade, before the Great Patriotic War began. German troops invaded part of the USSR, they reached Klushino, so that the work of many state institutions, including the school, was discontinued. Having become a famous person, Yuri Alekseevich preferred never to recall the gloomy times of the occupation. It is known that the German soldiers drove the Gagarins family out of the house and, retreating, took the youth with them as prisoners of war. This is how his brother and sister were taken away.

In 1943 Klushino was liberated, and soon after the war ended, the Gagarins moved to Gzhatsk, where Yuri continued his studies. He was a very capable and inquisitive young man, engaged in various activities ranging from music to photography.

After graduating from 6th grade, Gagarin decided to move to Moscow, as he felt too cramped in a small town. His parents tried to dissuade the ambitious young man, but failed to do so. So in 1949, 15-year-old Yuri Gagarin moved to the capital.

The young man lived with relatives, studied at a trade school while simultaneously completing his seventh grade program at the Working Youth School. At the same time, he became interested in basketball and soon became captain of the team. In 1951, Gagarin moved to Saratov, where he began training at an industrial technical school. During his studies, his first acquaintance with the sky occurred.

In 1954, Yuri got into the club of amateur aviators, where the reports of the founding fathers of astronautics were read. Having listened to the lectures of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the young man simply fell in love with the idea of flying beyond the Earth, though he could hardly imagine how his hobby would turn out. The following year Gagarin graduated from technical school, but continued to attend the flying club and managed to make a few independent flights on a small training aircraft.

A few months after the future cosmonaut graduated, he was called up for military service at a military aviation school in Chkalov (now Orenburg). There Gagarin had a serious conflict that almost cost him his life.

Yuri Alekseyevich, appointed assistant platoon commander, was extremely strict in terms of discipline, which did not suit his fellow students. One night he was caught and severely beaten, after which the young man spent a month in hospital before he could return to duty. It is noteworthy that this incident did not break his fighting spirit at all – he did not change his attitude toward his charges.

Cadet Gagarin easily coped with any tasks, except landing an airplane. The apparatus was constantly nipping at his nose, and due to the fact that the requirements to trainees were extremely strict, it was decided to expel Gagarin.

The young man, who could not imagine his life without the sky, was about to give up on his career, but at that moment the head of the school, who was troubled by the mysterious failures of the best student, paid attention to the low height of the guy (165 cm, and according to some sources even 157) and suggested that this is the reason why he has problems with the view angle during boarding. Gagarin was given another chance, and before the flight he was given a padding that increased the height of the seat. The assumption turned out to be correct. In 1957 Yuri Gagarin graduated from the college and started serving in Murmansk region.

Cosmonautics

In 1959 Gagarin served to the rank of senior lieutenant, earning the title of military pilot 3rd class. At the same time, a decree on the search and selection of candidates for a flight beyond Earth was enshrined at the state level. Having heard about this, the pilot wrote a report to his leadership, asking to be enlisted as a candidate.

The selection was not based on skills or merit. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who headed the inspections, primarily looked at the physical data of applicants. The first rockets were limited in size and payload capacity. The figure that almost cost Gagarin his career, this time became a lucky ticket. If Gagarin were bigger, he would have been unable to fit into the rocket.

Despite the fierce competition Gagarin managed to win the sympathy even of his rivals. Reliable, strong and friendly, he envied no one, considered no one better or worse than himself, and this was evident in his behavior and manner of speech. Yuri Alekseyevich easily took the initiative, worked hard and with pleasure.

Gagarin adored the sky and gave himself wholly to his studies, for the rest he simply had no time. As a result, according to an anonymous survey conducted among the candidates for astronauts, most of them named Gagarin as the man most suitable for the first flight into space. Despite the fact that the pilot was not a leader in any area of training, he was found to be ideally suited for the journey into space based on a combination of skills, character traits and psychological stability.

After numerous checks the pilot was approved as one of the 20 would-be cosmonauts. In March 1960 he started training.

The choice of the candidate

In 1961, in view of the rivalry between the USSR and the United States there was a need as soon as possible to finally decide on the candidate and to make a flight in the beginning of the second decade of April. Then came the information that on April 20, it was planned to launch an American rocket with a man on board. Among the three proposed leaders, Gagarin was chosen as the first cosmonaut – this happened at the very last moment, less than a month before the flight. German Titov was confirmed as the backup.

The question of why the first man in space was Gagarin and not Titov worries history buffs to this day. There is a note in Korolev’s notes that Titov was more prepared than Gagarin, but at the decisive moment the latter was chosen. One version says that the political factor interfered with the choice. The first cosmonaut was to become a kind of symbol, and Yuri Alekseyevich, who had exemplary Slavic appearance and a “clean” biography of the whole family, seemed to the authorities more suitable for the role of a representative of Soviet cosmonautics.

Another theory claims that Titov was more important to the project, so they did not want to risk him in the first flight. Already at this time he was approved for the second. At the same time, work was being done on a long stay in space. Herman Titov seemed to Korolev suitable for spending a full day outside the Earth.

Another theory states that Gagarin was chosen personally by Korolev. The media claim that Yuri Alekseyevich became a favorite of his superiors after he was the only one of the preparatory group who responded to the offer to sit in the Vostok satellite ship when the group was first shown the ship.

According to the cosmonaut’s mother, Yuri passed a kind of unofficial exam arranged by Korolev.

The designer could not choose one pilot out of five similar ones. The men had almost the same height and weight, military rank. All except Captain Komarov served as senior lieutenants. Korolev conducted personal interviews with the candidates, asking a tricky question about the centrifuge.

Gagarin honestly stated that he felt bad about the test and even hated the centrifuge. The other candidates reported that their training was excellent. So Yuri passed the honesty test. It was of paramount importance to Korolev and the base command that the cosmonaut be able to talk frankly about all the problems and mistakes in the flight, rather than improvise and keep a face.

Journalists and researchers also admit that the very question of why Gagarin was the first man in space is incorrect, since Yuri Alekseyevich was not. In 1993, M. Rudenko and N. Varvarov published the names of the three pilots in the newspaper “Air Transport”. According to journalists, in 1957 during the suborbital flight pilot Alexei Ledovskikh died, in 1958 – Sergei Shaborin, and in 1959 – Andrei Mitkov.

The experiments remained classified, and in 1960, pilots were selected for the program of cosmonaut training. The article in the specialized newspaper was not challenged by any member of the space industry.

The first flight into space

The Vostok 1 space flight was fraught with enormous risks to Gagarin’s life. Due to the rush, some important systems were not duplicated, the ship was not equipped with a soft landing system, there was not even an emergency rescue system in case of malfunction during the launch. The chance that the first astronaut would die before taking off was very high.

On April 12, 1961, the spaceship “Vostok 1” took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Because there were equipment malfunctions, Gagarin took off 100 kilometers higher than originally planned. If there were problems with the braking system, the astronaut would have had to return to Earth for more than a month, with a supply of water and food for only 10 days.

Despite the many problems, Yuri Alekseyevich descended safely to Earth. His apparatus did not land where it was supposed to. The cosmonaut was taken to a nearby village, and from there Gagarin called his superiors to report a successful landing and the absence of injuries. Since the flight was secret, even the Soviet media did not learn about the technological breakthrough of the home country until the next day.

As soon as the information became available, Gagarin became a global star. Khrushchev had a hand in this, insisting on a worthy reception for the hero. On April 14, 1961 there was a grand celebration in honor of the cosmonaut, during which Yuri Alekseyevich was given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

A month later, Gagarin was sent abroad on a “peace mission” where he was to visit more than 20 countries, working also in a diplomatic capacity. On all these trips, Gagarin proved himself to be a tactful and charming man. The personal charisma of Yuri Alekseyevich did much to enhance the positive image of the USSR.

The next few years Yuri Gagarin was mostly engaged in public activities. The famous cosmonaut put a lot of effort into popularizing the cosmonautics, he himself was preparing to become a member of the lunar space crew. Also Major Gagarin entered the Military Air Engineering Academy, from which he graduated with the rank of colonel a month before his death.

Personal life

The pilot’s personal life also developed under the influence of his profession. In 1957, Yuri Gagarin married Valentina Goryacheva, an employee of the medical department at the Mission Control Center.

In this marriage they had two daughters: Lena was born in 1959 and Galia was born a month before her father’s legendary flight in March of 1961. Yuri always had time for their children. The cosmonaut and his daughters adored animals, so there were ducks, chickens, squirrels and a fallow deer in the Gagarins’ house. The pilot’s wife resisted fascination with the zoo, but later put up with it.

After the death of her husband, Valentina Goryacheva never married again.

Gagarin’s eldest daughter Elena chose the profession of art historian, for many years she has been the director of the Moscow Kremlin Museum, and Galina became an economist. After the cosmonaut’s death, the Gagarins had grandchildren: Yelena had a daughter, Yekaterina, and Galina had a son, Yuri. The granddaughter of the cosmonaut decided to become an art critic, and his grandson – to tie his life with the state administration.

On March 27, 1968, Gagarin was performing a training flight and for unknown reasons, he performed a maneuver from which he was unable to exit. The plane crashed into the ground, and Gagarin and his instructor Vladimir Seregin died. The bodies of the pilots were cremated and the urns with ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall.

One of the possible causes of the tragedy is named as approaching another plane and abrupt deviation from it, as a result of which the MiG-15UTI of Gagarin went into a spin. Because of incorrect data on weather conditions and instrument readings pilots simply did not have time to bring the plane out of the fall. For many years the truth has remained unknown.

The lack of a coherent official explanation gave rise to numerous speculations on the cause of death of the first astronaut. The conspiracy theories gained popularity. There were rumors that Gagarin himself staged his own death and escaped. Another version claimed that the pilot died while testing a new rocket, and the training flight covered the traces of a failed experiment in the space program.

In 2013, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov shared with the press declassified information about Gagarin’s last flight. The first version was fully confirmed. Unclearly, an SU-15 fighter jet happened to be next to Gagarin’s and Seregin’s plane, which drove the MiG-15UTI into a spiral with its flow. The pilots died before they could get the plane out of the fall.

Remembrance

Seven years later, a memorial was erected at the crash site to commemorate the pilots who died. It was not the only reminder of Gagarin – various institutions, vehicles and territorial units were named after the first cosmonaut.

Gagarin’s name was given to a ridge in Antarctica and many streets, for example, in the city of Ufa in the Sipailovo Microdistrict, Gagarin Avenue is in the Moscow District of St. Petersburg. Monuments dedicated to the cosmonaut have been erected in different cities of Russia and the world.

Yuri Alekseyevich was personally acquainted with Alexandra Pakhmutova and Nikol Dobronravov.In memory of the cosmonaut, the creative family couple created the cycle “Gagarin’s Constellation”, of which the song “You Know What a Boy He Was” was especially popular. It included the famous phrase “Let’s go!”.

The research vessel (NSR), built in 1971 to control the flight of spacecraft, was named after Yuri Alexeyevich. Together with Gagarin’s profile, it was inscribed on a postage stamp.

The original spacesuit in which the cosmonaut made his famous flight became an exhibit in the museum of OAO NPP Zvezda, located in the village of Tomilino, Moscow Region. Fifty-two years after the flight Pavel Parkhomenko’s biographical feature film “Gagarin. The first in space”, on the creation of which the family of the cosmonaut gave permission. Yaroslav Zhalnin was lucky to bring the famous pilot to the screen.

• 1961 – Hero of the Soviet Union
• 1961 – Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR.
• 1961 – Hero of Socialist Labor
• 1961 Honored Master of Sports of the USSR
• 1961 – Order of Lenin
• 1961 – Medal of the Gold Star
• 1961 – Hero of Labor
• 1966 – Medal for Distinguished Service, 3rd Class

Interesting Facts

1. Before Gagarin flew into space, TASS prepared three messages: in case of a successful flight, unsuccessful and a landing outside the territory of the USSR.

2. The call sign of the first man in space – Kedr – was known to all Soviet schoolchildren.

3. In Britain, Elizabeth II invited Yuri Alekseyevich for tea and then took a picture with him as a memento, which violated protocol. The Queen explained her action by saying that the astronaut is no longer an earthly man, but a heavenly one, so there is nothing offensive for the monarch to do in taking a photo with him.