The first human in space

The story

A country boy

Yuri Gagarin was born in 1934 in a farming village, Klushino, near Smolensk, in Russia. His father was a carpenter, his mother worked on the farm. As a child he saw his village occupied by German soldiers during the war: the family was thrown out of their house and lived for years in a hut. After school he worked in a foundry, then went to study at a technical school and an aeroclub, where he learned to fly small planes. In 1957 he became an air force pilot.

Meanwhile, in his country, a secret programme had begun to send a man into space. They needed pilots who were tough, clever and small, because the capsule was cramped: Gagarin, 1.57 metres tall, was perfect. He was chosen along with nineteen other candidates and trained for months: long tests in the centrifuge, which simulates the forces of launch, isolated and silent rooms, parachute jumps. At the end of the selection the doctors and the heads of the programme chose him. Everybody liked him: he was always smiling, modest and friendly.

The 108-minute flight

On the morning of 12 April 1961 Gagarin, wearing his orange suit, climbed aboard the rocket at the Baikonur base, in Kazakhstan. The capsule was called Vostok, “East”. As the engine was starting up, he said a phrase that was destined to last: “Poyekhali!”, meaning “Let's go!”. The rocket carried him more than 300 kilometres from the Earth, at a speed of about 27,000 kilometres an hour.

The flight was almost completely automatic: nobody yet knew how the human body would react without weight, and the engineers feared that the astronaut might lose control. For safety, the manual controls were locked with a code, written in an envelope, which Gagarin would open only if he needed to. During the flight he ate and drank, wrote with a pencil and noted that objects were floating. Looking out of the window he said that the Earth was beautiful and blue.

After just one orbit of the planet, in 108 minutes, the capsule re-entered the atmosphere, surrounded by fire. At a height of about seven kilometres Gagarin ejected from the capsule on an ejection seat and came down by parachute. He landed near the village of Smelovka, in the Saratov region, where a farm woman and her little granddaughter saw him arrive: frightened by his orange suit, they asked him if he came from space. He answered that they should not be afraid: he was one of them, but he did come from space and needed to find a telephone to call Moscow.

The first hero of the space age

Within a few hours Gagarin became famous all over the world. Moscow held a huge celebration, and for months Gagarin travelled to many countries, welcomed by joyful crowds. At just 27 he had become the symbol of scientific progress, the first of a new breed of explorers. The United States, surprised once again after Sputnik, answered quickly: on 5 May 1961 Alan Shepard made a short flight into space and, a few weeks later, President Kennedy announced that before the end of the decade America would put a man on the Moon.

Gagarin never flew in space again: his government did not want to risk the life of a national hero. He became an instructor of the new cosmonauts and went back to flying planes too. He died on 27 March 1968, aged 34, in an accident during a training flight in a fighter jet, near Moscow. Today 12 April is remembered all over the world as the “International Day of Human Space Flight”, by a United Nations resolution of 2011.