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.

a man wearing a space helmet with the visor open. He is smiling and looking off to his right.

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

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Rebecca Sohn

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. 

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket put a satellite in the wrong orbit in December. Now we know why.

SpaceX launches Indonesian satellite on 300th successful Falcon 9 mission (video)

Scientists say 2 solar system dwarf planets may harbor underground oceans

Most Popular

By Fran Ruiz December 19, 2023

By Fran Ruiz December 18, 2023

By Tantse Walter December 18, 2023

By Robert Lea December 05, 2023

By Robert Lea December 04, 2023

By Robert Lea December 01, 2023

By Rebecca Sohn November 27, 2023

By Fran Ruiz November 21, 2023

By Daisy Dobrijevic November 15, 2023

By Stefanie Waldek November 06, 2023

By Mina Frost November 03, 2023

  • 2 Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket put a satellite in the wrong orbit in December. Now we know why.
  • 3 Sian Proctor on her legacy of being the 1st Black woman to pilot a spacecraft
  • 4 Everything we know about '3 Body Problem'
  • 5 Former Disney TV star Bridgit Mendler co-founds satellite 'data highway' startup

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia).

His parents, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked.

After starting an apprenticeship in a metalworks as a foundryman, Gagarin was selected for further training at a technical high school in Saratov. While there, he joined the 'AeroClub', and learned to fly light aircraft, a hobby that would take up an increasing part of his time. In 1955, after completing his technical schooling, he entered flight training at the Orenburg Military Pilot's School.

While there he met Valentina Goryacheva, whom he married in 1957, after gaining his pilot's wings in a MiG-15. After graduation, he was assigned to Luostari airbase in Murmansk Oblast. He became a lieutenant in the Soviet air force on 5 November 1957, and was promoted to senior lieutenant on 6 November 1959.

The first cosmonaut group of 1960

After Soviet Union decided to launch a human being to space, a secret nationwide selection process was started in 1960 and Gagarin was chosen with 19 other pilots. Gagarin was further selected for an elite training group known as the 'Sochi Six', who would make up the the first cosmonauts of the Vostok programme.

Gagarin and the other prospective cosmonauts were subjected to experiments designed to test physical and psychological endurance; he also underwent training for the upcoming flight. Out of the 20 selected, the eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov, because of their performance in training, as well as their physical characteristics — space was at a premium in the small Vostok cockpit and both men were rather short. Gagarin was 1.57 metres tall.

In August 1960, when Gagarin was one of 20 possible candidates, an air force doctor evaluated his personality as: "Modest; embarrasses when his humour gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends."

The first cosmonauts

Gagarin was also a favoured candidate by his peers. When the 20 candidates were asked to anonymously vote for which other candidate they would like to see as the first to fly, all but three chose Gagarin. One of his colleagues, cosmonaut Yevgeni Khrunov, believed that Gagarin was very focused, and was demanding of himself and others when necessary.

Gagarin kept physically fit throughout his life, and was a keen sportsman. Cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky wrote: "Service in the air force made us strong, both physically and morally. All of us cosmonauts took up sports and PT seriously when we served in the air force. I know that Yuri Gagarin was fond of ice hockey. He liked to play goal keeper... I don't think I am wrong when I say that sports became a fixture in the life of the cosmonauts."

Flight to space

biography yuri gagarin

In April 1961, Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, launching to orbit aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1). After the flight, he became a global celebrity, touring widely to promote the Soviet achievement.

In 1962, he began serving as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He later returned to the Star City training facility, where he spent some years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in June 1962, and then to colonel in November 1963. Soviet officials tried to keep him away from flying aircraft, being worried of losing their hero in an accident.

Gagarin had served as back-up pilot for Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1. When Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was ultimately banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

Death in crash

On 27 March 1968, Gagarin took off with MiG-15UTI fighter with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin for a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, but the flight ended tragically: their plane crashed near the town of Kirzhach. Gagarin was laid to rest in the wall of the Kremlin on Red Square.

Thank you for liking

You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!

Related Links

biography yuri gagarin

50 years of humans in space

ESA astronaut patch in space

Mission patch gallery

Logos for all crewed European spacefiights

biography yuri gagarin

History of Europe in space

biography yuri gagarin

Space history on the web

Yuri's night, yurigagarin50.org, roscosmos tribute to yuri gagarin, "first orbit", 50 years of humans in space (video), euronews:first man in space.

Who Was Yuri Gagarin?

  • Space Exploration
  • An Introduction to Astronomy
  • Important Astronomers
  • Solar System
  • Stars, Planets, and Galaxies
  • Weather & Climate

biography yuri gagarin

  • M.S., Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Colorado - Boulder
  • B.S., Education, University of Colorado

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.

  • Biography of Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space
  • Space First: From Space Dogs to a Tesla
  • Valentina Tereshkova: The First Woman in Space
  • History of the Apollo 11 Mission, "One Giant Leap for Mankind"
  • Biography of Neil Armstrong
  • The Future of Human Space Exploration
  • The History and Legacy of Project Mercury
  • The Space Race of the 1960s
  • The History of Early Fireworks and Fire Arrows
  • Remembering NASA Astronaut Gus Grissom
  • Did Politics Fuel the Space Race?
  • Laika, the First Animal in Outer Space
  • A Historical Timeline of Rockets
  • The History of Transportation
  • Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.
  • The Evolution of the Space Suit

It's been 60 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in outer space

  • By Daniel Ofman

Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin is shown in a black and white portrait photograph wearing a space helmet with the visor open.

Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, first man to orbit the earth, is shown in his space suit. Photo undated.

AP/File photo

Sixty years ago on Monday, the Earth sent its first human into outer space — Russia's Yuri Gagarin. 

On this day in 1961, Gagarin's space capsule completed one orbit around Earth and returned home, marking a major milestone in the space race. As he took off, you could hear Gagarin's muffled yet iconic " Poehali, " which means "Let's go" in Russian.

Gagarin's pioneering, single-orbit flight made him a hero in the Soviet Union and an international celebrity. After putting the world's first satellite into orbit with the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the Soviet space program rushed to secure its dominance over the United States by putting a man into space. Gagarin’s steely self-control was a key factor behind the success of his pioneering, 108-minute flight.

The World's Marco Werman spoke to Stephen Walker, who has just published a book about Yuri Gagarin called "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space."

Cover of Stephen Walker's book "Beyond" with picture of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Cover of Stephen Walker's biography on Yuri Gagarin, "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space."

Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers LLC

Marco Werman: Stephen, tell us a little more about Yuri Gagarin. Before he became known as the first man in space, who was he?

Stephen Walker: Well, it's a really interesting question. He was actually brought up in a little village just to the west of Moscow. And in 1941, Nazis invade Russia, and they swallow Gagarin's village. And something very seminal happens to Gagarin, which I think determines, in some respects, the course of his life. At the age of 7, he is horrified to see that his little brother, Boris, age 5, is being hanged from an apple tree by an SS officer, and he tries to cut his brother down from this branch. But he's very small. He can't do it. So, he races back, yells at his mother, Anna, who comes racing out, rushes across and cuts down little Boris from this tree just in time. And that experience seared Gagarin for life. It gave him kind of an inner toughness and inner resilience, which is why he was able to sit effectively on top of the world's biggest nuclear missile, waiting to be blasted into space.

Right. And as we know, the Americans were stunned when the space capsule orbited the Earth. So, I casually told the story of this day in 1961, earlier, basically the rocket launch; Gagarin went up, did an orbit and then came back down alive. But that doesn't quite capture the intense drama of the day, does it?

Not at all. This rocket — it's called an R-7 — is unbelievably dangerous. The chances of Yuri Gagarin getting back alive were less than 50-50. Almost everything you can think of goes wrong. No one knows what happens to a human being in space. And then, of course, the rocket itself is so dangerous because many of them have blown up. The Russians were desperate to get ahead of America, which means they took risks. So, it's an incredibly dramatic tale of this 106 minutes that sort of changed the world.

What was the mission of the Soviet rocket and what did Gagarin himself think at the time about it?

Well, the mission was basically to see if a human being could survive in space and fly in orbit around the Earth. And there is this secret briefing given by Yuri Gagarin the day after his flight, and he tells the story of what happened 11 minutes after launch. Gagarin separated from the rest of his rocket, and he started very gently to spin. And then, he turned to the little porthole on his right and he saw the Earth. He had escaped the biosphere.

Incredible perspective. How was Gagarin received once he touched down some 90 minutes later?

Well, he actually landed hundreds of kilometers, of course. So, he ejects from this capsule at about 20,000 feet and the capsule lands separately. And Gagarin by parachute lands in a potato field. And there's no one there except an old lady and her granddaughter who were picking potatoes. So, he goes up to them and they run away. They're absolutely terrified. They see this, kind of, orange spacesuit. He manages to convince them he's a comrade, he's Soviet, he's safe, and he says, "I need to get to a phone. Have you got any way of my getting to a phone?" So, they offer him the use of a horse. This guy's been around the world at 18,000 miles an hour. And they're talking about putting him on a horse to get to a telephone. It's just crazy. Just before the horse arrives, some tractor drivers turn up, very curious. They've heard about him on the radio, on the kind of state radio, because it's now being broadcast. And then within minutes, this jeep arrives with soldiers and they all start taking photographs. And there is a photograph of him, which is in my book, and it's just wonderful. He's just been around the whole planet and he's landed in this potato field. And there's this photograph. It's quite extraordinary. 

I mean, it speaks of the high ambition and also the low reality of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The USSR, as you said, Stephen, was determined to beat the US in getting a human into space. What was the reaction in the West when Yuri Gagarin went up and came home, and specifically in the United States?

Absolute shock. I mean, there is a press conference which President Kennedy, remember new in the job, gave that afternoon, and he looks completely and utterly shell shocked. He says he extends his congratulations to Khrushchev, who was the premier of the USSR at the time and also to the man who was involved. He can't even say his name, but it is a real bad moment for him and for the American space program. You're looking at somebody who is on the back foot. And we know this because two days later, Gagarin was celebrated in a, basically, parade that was millions of people, the biggest party really in Moscow's history.

And at the very time that Gagarin was being celebrated and having the hero of the Soviet Union gold star medal pinned to his chest, we know that Kennedy was in the Cabinet Room at the White House with his advisers, and Kennedy is tapping his teeth with his pencil, which is always a sign of nervousness with him. And he says, "What can we do? What can we do to catch up? How do we leapfrog them?" And he comes up with a wonderful line. He says, "Even if the janitor in the White House has an answer, I want to hear that answer." And this is when the moon idea really starts to take hold. And what I hope I have managed to do is to put readers right in the center, in the epicenter, of events, the little fly on the wall, that gives us an often very jaundiced view, but really fascinating inside story of what was really happening and how different that was from the presentation to the world of what was happening.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Sign up for The Top of the World, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

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

biography yuri gagarin

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

Getty Images

Science, Quickly

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.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

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.

biography yuri gagarin

biography yuri gagarin

  • History Classics
  • Your Profile
  • Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
  • Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
  • Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
  • Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
  • Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
  • This Day In History
  • History Podcasts
  • History Vault

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

By: Sarah Pruitt

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

Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, taken during his visit to Admiralty House where he met Harold Macmillan. (Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

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.

Yuri Gagarin, portrait. (Credit: rps/ullstein bild/Getty Images)

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.

biography yuri gagarin

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

biography yuri gagarin

Go Back To Home

  • Women's Fashion
  • Men's Fashion

First Man Up

biography yuri gagarin

He was a Soviet hero, a space pioneer (and a bit of a boozehound) who risked it all to save a doomed comrade. An excerpt from “Starman,” a new biography on the rise and fall of Yuri Gagarin, featured in the pages of our upcoming Spring Men’s issue.

April 12, 1961: 108 minutes

An hour before the launch, the chief Soviet spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev came on the link. ‘‘Yuri Alexeyevich, how are you hearing me? I need to tell you something.’’

‘‘Receiving you loud and clear.’’

‘‘I just want to remind you that after the one-minute readiness is announced, there’ll be about six minutes before you actually take off, so don’t worry about it.’’

DESCRIPTION

‘‘I read you. I’m absolutely not worried.’’

‘‘There’ll be six minutes for all sorts of things, you know.’’ He meant that a minor instrument problem had created a six-minute delay in the launch sequence.

Then the cosmonaut Pavel Popovich came on the line. ‘‘Hey, can you guess who’s this talking to you?’’

‘‘Sure, it’s ‘Lily of the Valley!’’’

‘‘Yuri, are you getting bored in there?’’

‘‘If there was some music, I could stand it a little better.’’

Concerned for every last detail of the flight, Korolev took care of this personally, ordering his technicians to find some tapes or records and set something up straight away.

‘‘Haven’t they given you some music yet?’’ he asked a few minutes later.

‘‘Nothing so far.’’

‘‘Damned musicians. They dither about and the whole thing is sooner said than done.’’

‘‘Oh, now they’ve done it. They’ve put on a love song.’’

‘‘Good choice, I’d say.’’

8:41 a.m. Gagarin felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut, the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. ‘‘Yuri, we’re going down to the control bunker now.’’

8:51 a.m. The music stopped. Korolev’s deep, stern voice on the link, all seriousness now. ‘‘Yuri, the 15-minute mark.’’ This was the signal for Gagarin to seal his gloves and swing down the transparent visor on his helmet. In these last minutes before liftoff there was no NASA-style 5-4-3-2-1 ‘‘countdown’’ on the public-address system (and no public-address system). The rocket would be fired at the appointed instant: 9:06 a.m., Moscow time.

‘‘Launch key to ‘go’ position.’’

‘‘Air purging.’’

‘‘Idle run.’’

‘‘Ignition.’’

All kinds of vibrations now, high whinings and low rumbles. At some point Gagarin knew he must have lifted off, but the exact moment was elusive, identified with precision only by the electrical relays of the gantry’s hold-down arms as they moved aside, the four clamps disconnecting from the rocket’s flanks within a single hundredth of a second of each other. Gagarin lay rigid in his seat and tensed his muscles. At any moment something could go wrong with the booster, the hatch above his head might fly away, and his ejection charges would punch him out into the morning sky like a bullet. This ‘‘life-saving’’ jolt might kill him — crunch his spine; snap his neck like a chicken’s; the hatchway’s rim might snag his knees and tear them right off. He had to be prepared. The G-load climbing. No emergency ejection yet. …He didn’t remember it later, but they told him he shouted out, ‘‘Poyekhali!’’

‘‘Let’s go!’’

‘‘T-plus 70.’’

‘‘I read you, 70. I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing. All is well.’’

‘‘T-plus 100. How do you feel?’’

‘‘I feel fine. How about you?’’

Two minutes into the flight Gagarin was finding it a little hard to speak into his radio microphone. The G-forces were pulling at his face muscles. There was a strange moment when all the weight lifted and he was thrown violently forward against his straps. A shudder told him that the rocket’s four side-slung boosters were falling away. It paused in its acceleration, as if taking a big breath before the final spurt. Then the central core picked up the pace and the sensation of great weight returned.

Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of rubles’ worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground.

Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never traveled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘‘the eerie silence of outer space.’’ The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system.

Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upward out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball before drifting downward out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again — the horizon not straight but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.

Traveling eastward, ever eastward, flying at eight kilometers per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.

‘‘How are you feeling?’’

‘‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!’’

DESCRIPTION

September 1961: A Bad Landing

Crimea is almost an island. It juts out into the Black Sea, connected to Ukraine by two peninsulas as delicate as veins. The northernmost territories of the island are pleasant but dull. The south is a different matter. There are beautiful mountains, sun-dappled forests, sheltered beaches speckled with palms. The weather is still fine in October, and the almond trees are back in bloom by February.

In its 1960s heyday, the Tesseli dacha at Foros was a luxury sanitarium complex designed to accommodate only the most privileged group bookings. Warm seas, fresh meat and fruit, fine wines, perhaps a certain freedom from everyday restraints: all of these pleasures were available, and more.

Call her “Anna”; perhaps there were two Annas. Anna Rumanseyeva, a young nurse, was on duty at Tesseli on Sept. 14, 1961, when Gagarin and his cosmonaut comrades came to stay. She speaks with intimate knowledge of another nurse called Anna, also working at Foros when Gagarin came to stay. Maybe the two Annas are one and the same person? It is not important.

“There are some people in life, especially men, who are constantly looking for adventure,” she says. “I would say Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was this kind of person.”

Yuri and his wife, Valentina, arrived at the sanitarium with their second daughter, Galya, 6 months old and still in need of her mother’s constant attention.

Gagarin seemed desperate for distraction. In the second week, he took some of his companions out to sea in a small motorboat. The Foros staff pleaded with him: it was against the rules, he did not know the local conditions, the wind was offshore, the weather could be difficult, he should not go. But he went anyway, taking the boat far from shore and driving it recklessly, making tight turns to splash his passengers with spray.

The swell picked up, just as he had been warned. The boat was carried over the horizon and out of sight of the shore, and a larger motorboat had to be sent out to make a rescue. When they hauled him back ashore, Gagarin went to the medical station for assistance.

In the rough conditions he had turned the boat’s steering wheel so hard that his hands were bloodied and cracked. But the pain, and the unpleasantness of his foolish adventure, did not entirely divert his attention from the pretty blond-haired nurse who attended to his blisters.

Anna Rumanseyeva recalls a party held the next day, in which Gagarin, his wife and the other “Anna” were present: “ ‘Anna’ said she went into a room and sat on a sofa. Yuri Alexeyevich — I don’t know what was on his mind. He was drunk. Perhaps he wanted to talk? I don’t think he had any other thoughts. Anyway, he went into the room. He closed the door but didn’t lock it with a key. Valentina Ivanovna went into the room immediately after him.”_

“You know, his wife Valentina was quite a complicated woman,” says the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov. “She protected Yuri from every kind of temptation which came as a result of his position. . . . Anyway, Valentina discovered that the First Cosmonaut had disappeared, and she decided to find out where he was, and he showed the true colors of goodness and of a gentleman. He showed genuine nobility and jumped out of a window on the second floor.”

Both women leaned over the balcony’s edge to take a look and saw Gagarin sprawled on the ground, motionless. “At that time, there were wild grapes growing on the balconies,” Anna Rumanseyeva explains. “They may have caught him as he jumped. He hit a curbstone with his forehead. It was not a good landing. On his return from space he landed successfully. Here, unsuccessfully.”

Then they took him inside, where the doctors applied local anesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip. The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment, and she remembers him asking her just one question. “Will I fly again?”

DESCRIPTION

April 1967: Falling to Earth

By the spring of 1967, development of the Soyuz spacecraft, which was intended to eventually put a Soviet man on the moon, was moving toward that crucial first flight. On April 22, the Soviet propaganda departments felt confident enough to let slip some rumors to the international press agency UPI. “The upcoming mission will include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history — an attempted in-flight hookup between two ships and a transfer of crews.”

The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov says, “The first manned test of the Soyuz was assigned to Vladimir Komarov, with Yuri Gagarin as the backup, and another Soyuz spacecraft was being prepared for Yuri to fly at a later date.”

Komarov’s launch was supposed to be followed a day later by another Soyuz with three more crewmen aboard. It seems likely that the Brezhnev administration wanted the docking to take place on or around May Day. The year 1967 had a special significance in the Communist calendar; it was the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution. The concept of making a “union” between two spaceships collaborating in orbit was highly symbolic, especially for a ruling government obsessed with symbols.

But as the deadline for the mission drew near, technicians knew of 203 separate faults in the spacecraft that still required attention. Yuri Gagarin was closely involved in this assessment. By March 9, 1967, he and his closest cosmonaut colleagues had produced a formal 10-page document, with the help of the engineers, in which all the problems were outlined in detail. The trouble was, no one knew what to do with it. Within Soviet society, bad news always reflected badly on the messenger.

As many as 50 senior engineers knew about the report, but none of them felt sufficiently confident to go into the Kremlin and do what had to be done: request that Leonid Brezhnev play down the symbolism of the pending launch, so as to allow a decent delay for technical improvements.

The cosmonauts and bureaucrats eventually adopted an age-old technique. They recruited a nonpartisan messenger from outside the Soyuz program to deliver the document for them: Yuri Gagarin’s K.G.B. friend Venyamin Russayev.

“Komarov invited me and my wife to visit his family,” says Russayev. “Afterward, as he was seeing us off, ‘Komarov said straight out, ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight.’ As I knew the state of affairs, I asked him, ‘If you’re so convinced you’re going to die, then why don’t you refuse the mission?’ He answered, ‘If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’ . . . Komarov said he knew what he was talking about, and he burst into such bitter tears.”

Russayev could not be of much help on his own. Back at his desk in the Lubyanka the next morning, after a sleepless night, he decided to ask advice from one of his K.G.B. seniors, Major-General Konstantin Makharov, a man he respected.

“I went to Makharov’s office and told him there was a serious problem with the rocket. He listened to me very carefully, and then he said, ‘I’m going to do something. In the meantime don’t leave your desk today. Not even for one second.’ I kept my promise, and I’d only been back at my desk for a short while when he sent for me again. He gave me a letter, prepared by a team mobilized by Yuri Gagarin. Most of the cosmonauts took part in the research. Makharov told me to take the letter upstairs and see Ivan Fadyekin, head of Department Three.”

This “letter” consisted of a 10-page document describing all 203 problems in the Soyuz hardware. As soon as he saw it, Fadyekin dodged the responsibility straight away. “I don’t have the expertise for this.”

He redirected Russayev to a much more dangerous man in the Lubyanka: Georgi Tsinev. Tsinev was a close personal friend of Leonid Brezhnev; in fact, he was related by marriage, and they had fought alongside each other in the war. If anyone could deliver an important message straight into the hands of the First Secretary, Tsinev could.

Unfortunately for Russayev, things were not quite that simple. Tsinev was rising fast within the K.G.B., helped along by his powerful patron in the Kremlin. He was not going to allow any irritations to disturb that cozy relationship. “While reading the letter, Tsinev looked at me, gauging my reactions to see if I’d read it or not,” Russayev explains. “He was glaring at me very intently, watching me like a hawk, and suddenly he asked, ‘How would you like a promotion up to my department?’ He even offered me a better office.”

Tsinev kept hold of the document, and it was never seen again. Within weeks, Fadyekin was transferred to a junior consular office in Iran, merely for the crime of glancing through it. Makharov was fired immediately, without a pension, and Tsinev took over as chief of an entire counterintelligence department. Russayev was stripped of any responsibility for space affairs and transferred to an insignificant staff training department outside Moscow, well away from the Lubyanka. “I kept my head down like a hermit for the next 10 years,” he says.

April 23, 1967: Crash and Burn

Early on the morning of April 23, 1967, the Soyuz was propped up against the gantry at the Soviet launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, according to the original schedule. The journalist Golovanov noticed Gagarin behaving very strangely. “He demanded to be put into the protective spacesuit. It was already clear that Komarov was perfectly fit to fly, and there were only three or four hours remaining until liftoff time, but he suddenly burst out and started demanding this and that. It was a sudden caprice.”

Russayev and others insist that Gagarin was trying to elbow his way onto the flight in order to save Komarov from almost certain death. Rumors about the dialogue between Komarov and ground control have circulated for many years, based on reports from the National Security Agency staff monitoring the radio signals from an Air Force facility near Istanbul.

In August 1972 a former NSA analyst, interviewed under the name Winslow Peck (real name Perry Fellwock), gave a very moving account of the interception: “[The Soviet premier Alexei] Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a videophone conversation, and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero. . . . The guy’s wife got on too. He told her how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids.”

As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey picked up his cries of rage as he plunged to his death, cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.

The parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay. A backup parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue.

Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.

Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut “requiring urgent medical attention.”

Russayev says a heel bone was found among the ashes.

biography yuri gagarin

Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells.

The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, “I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally.” He was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov’s launch.

Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. “I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.” Russayev goes on, “I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’ ” Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. “I told him, ‘Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.’ ”

One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.

Adapted from “Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin,” to be published in April by Walker & Company.

  • Previous Post March 8, 2011 March 8, 2011 Photos of the Moment | Yves Saint Laurent
  • Next Post March 8, 2011 March 8, 2011 Photos of the Moment | Chloé

biography yuri gagarin

  • Previous Post Photos of the Moment | Yves Saint Laurent
  • Next Post Photos of the Moment | Chloé

biography yuri gagarin

  • NYTIMES.COM
  • PRIVACY POLICY
  • California Notice
  • THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

Biographics

Yuri Gagarin: the First Man in Space

On 12 April, 1961, Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan picked up a transmission that changed human history. “I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!” Spoken in a youthful Russian voice, those words came from a place no human had ever gone before. Sat 327 km above the surface of the Earth, Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man to ever visit space. Outside his window, our planet hung brilliant blue against the cold darkness of the universe. Thanks to this one Russian pilot, mankind would now have a whole new frontier to explore; a frontier we’re still trying to tame six decades later.

Today, the name Yuri Gagarin remains world famous, up there right beside Neil Armstrong in terms of amazing firsts. But who really was this Soviet spaceman, and how did he come to be sitting in that capsule? Born into a poor peasant family on the eve of WWII, Gagarin could’ve easily never amounted to much. But thanks to the sheer force of his talent, he wound up changing history. In the video today, Biographics is strapping into its Soyuz and aiming for the stars, as we uncover the life of the very first spaceman.

biography yuri gagarin

If you were picking a time and place in which to be born, 1934 and Klushino would probably be far down your list. That’s because Klushino is a poor village in western Russia. The sort of place where hens roam the streets and living in a weathered wooden shack is practically a luxury.

But it’s also because Klushino at this particular point in time was undergoing a painful decade. 

In 1934, the Soviet countryside was already in the throes of a Stalinist agricultural shakeup that resulted in a whole ton of poverty and famine. In just a few years, it would be shaken up even harder, when Nazi Germany invaded.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

For now, just know that when Yuri Gagarin was born in Klushino on March 9, 1934, it wasn’t into circumstances that screamed “hey, isn’t this great!”

The third of four children, Gagarin was the son of a carpenter and a milkmaid, both of whom worked on the nearby collective farm. This being Soviet Russia, that meant doing backbreaking work for a pittance while wallowing in poverty. It’s been suggested the reason Gagarin never grew beyond 157 cm – or 5ft 2 in old money – was down to childhood malnutrition.

Yet, despite this unpromising start, the boy Yuri seems to have been relatively content.

One feature everyone who encountered him seems to remember is that he was always smiling. A big, open smile that would one day win him friends across the globe. But first the boy would have to survive a period in which there was very little to smile about.

biography yuri gagarin

On June 22, 1941, when Gagarin was only 7, Nazi Germany launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union.

For the first couple of years of WWII, Hitler and Stalin had been allies. But now, as Panzer tanks rolled across the flat grasslands of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, all the hatred between the two came bubbling out.

When the German frontlines reached Klushino, the Nazis threw the Gagarin family out their home, forcing them to build a mud hut a mere 3 meters square to live in.

Gagarin’s two older siblings were arrested and sent as slave labor to camps in Poland.

When Gagarin and his younger brother Boris were caught trying to sabotage German vehicles by sticking potatoes up their tailpipes, an enraged soldier tried to hang Boris from an apple tree. It was only when Gagarin’s parents begged on their knees for their five year old son’s life that the Nazis relented.

Yet even amid the apocalyptic horrors of life on the eastern front, Gagarin still managed to find inspiration. One clear day, a pair of German Messerschmitts were engaged by two Soviet Yaks in a dogfight high above Klushino.

One Nazi plane was destroyed in the fight, while one of the Yaks was shot down.

Like the rest of the villagers, 7-year old Gagarin rushed to help the downed Soviet airman. But when he reached him, the boy couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything but stare at this impossible man who’d fallen out the sky.

It’s said that this was the moment Yuri Gagarin first decided to become a pilot.

Finally, in 1945, Germany was defeated and peace declared in Europe.

In the aftermath of the Nazi occupation, Gagarin’s dad decided to move the entire household to the town of Gzhatsk. Like, literally. Mr. Gagarin sawed up the family’s wooden shack, transported it bit by bit to Gzhatsk, and rebuilt it by hand for them to live in.

It would be from this humble, reconstructed shack on the fringes of this anonymous town that Yuri Gagarin would truly begin his journey to the stars.

The Sky’s the Limit

Compared to the deprivation of Klushino, Gzhatsk was practically a paradise.

There was work for Gagarin’s parents. A sizeable school where Yuri could make friends and meet girls. There was also an aviation club the teenager joined, where he learned all about aircraft despite being too young to fly.

Not that he yet seemed pilot material.

When Gagarin left school at 16, it wasn’t to enroll in the Air Forces.

It was to train to be a foundryman, a decent enough job in the USSR, but not one that usually leads to a YouTube channel in the far future doing videos on you. Gagarin, too, must’ve sensed this was a dead end. After a single year, in 1951, he transferred away from his studies, away from his family, all the way down the the brand-new technical school in Saratov.

Supposedly, he was there to study tractors. But were you to ask the teenage Gagarin anything about them, he’d have probably just given you one of his trademark shy smiles.

That’s because Gagarin was really in Saratov for one reason. The school’s shiny new flight club. Unlike the aviation club in Gzhatsk, the bigger one down in Saratov really did allow its students to fly planes.

For the first time in his life, Yuri Gagarin took to the skies onboard a Yak-18. Looking back later, he would say:

“That flight filled me with pride and gave meaning to my whole life.”

When Gagarin finally graduated, no-one harbored any illusions that he was gonna be a tractor repairman. In 1955, aged 21, Gagarin enrolled in the Pilots School in Orenberg. 

The mid-50s were a time of great change in the USSR. 

Two years before, Stalin had died. In just one more year, Nikita Khrushchev would make his Secret Speech, beginning a thaw that would see long-lost freedoms regained. Maybe it was the mood in the entire nation, but Gagarin seems to have blossomed in Orenberg.

biography yuri gagarin

It was while at pilot school that he met Valentina Goryacheva, and so turned her head that she fell for him without ever really knowing why.

It was there, too, that Gagarin took his first solo flight in a MiG-15 jet, an experience that made even his virgin flight in the Yak-18 appear trivial. By 1957, Gagarin was lucky in love, and cruising through his studies. He was recognized as a brilliant pilot, despite his short stature meaning he had to sit atop a cushion to see out the cockpit.

And this was perfect timing. Because 1957 was when mankind finally began looking upward.

On August 21, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile was launched in the USSR. Designed by the ultra-secretive rocket genius Sergei Korolev, the R-7 “Semyorka” was a breakthrough in weapons technology that left the USA eating Soviet dust.

But while Moscow loved the R-7 for its offensive capabilities, Korolev wanted to use it to expand mankind’s horizons. That October, another Korolev rocket blasted off from the Baikonur launchpad in what is now Kazakhstan. 

But rather than carrying a warhead, it was carrying a small metal orb the size of a beachball.

That day, Sputnik 1 became the first manmade satellite in orbit. It was a moment that changed everything, marking the dawn of the Space Age. But Korolev wasn’t done yet. He had another goal, one so secret, so preposterous, that only a handful of people knew about it.

Korolev wanted to send a man into space.

It was this impossible dream that would soon transform Yuri Gagarin’s life.

Searching for Starman  

Two years after Sputnik’s launch, in October of 1959, groups of mysterious recruiters began fanning out across the USSR, looking for pilots. By now, Yuri Gagarin was a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces, based in chilly Murmansk in the Arctic Circle.

He and Valentina had married three weeks after Sputnik’s launch, and their lives were now as good as they’d ever dreamed. Then these mysterious recruiters came knocking at Gagarin’s base, and everything was turned upside down.

Alongside his comrades, Gagarin was subjected to a battery of tests, physical and mental, that were so strenuous few could pass them.

biography yuri gagarin

When those were done, the successful pilots were sent to Burdenko military hospital in Moscow, where Gagarin later recalled:

“They tapped our bodies with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the vestibular organs in our ears… They tested us from head to toe.”

By the time the tests were over, only 20 pilots remained. 20 pilots from across the USSR, the creme-de-la-creme of Soviet airmanship. It was now clear to the remaining pilots what all this was about. 

They were in the running to be the first-ever cosmonaut.

Shortly after passing his medical, Gagarin and Valentina left behind their cold, comfortable lives in Murmansk, and transferred to one of the most-secretive towns in Russia: Star City. A closed town, Star City was a place of luxury unparalleled even in Moscow; with well-stocked shops and vast apartments. 

But while life in Star City may have been luxurious, it was also tough.

As the first astronaut training program in the world – America was still dicking about with chimpanzees at this stage – Star City’s trials pushed the 20 pilots to their limits. They endured G-forces even seasoned pilots had never experienced. Underwent physical tests so rigorous that most dropped out.

Eventually, only six remained, all of them short men. Apparently Korlov had gone and built a capsule so small no average-sized man could dream of fitting inside.

At last, those six short men became two: Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov.

Gagarin was convinced that Titov would be the one chosen. Possibly the best pilot in the USSR, he was intense, athletic, and educated. In another time, in another place, he likely would’ve gotten the job.

But this was the Soviet Union, the workers’ paradise. 

When word got to Nikita Khrushchev – himself the son of peasants – that the choice had come down to a poor boy from the sticks, and a middle class intellectual, he supposedly told Korolev to forget Titov.

The first man in space would be Yuri Gagarin.

By the time word reached the two pilots, they’d decamped to Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the vast plains of the Kazakh Steppe, to prepare for the launch.

How exactly Titov took the news is a matter of some debate. 

Although all accounts say he was outraged at the time, some claim he found peace with the snub in later life, while others say he died still bitter at being robbed of his place in the history books. Either way, on April 12, 1961, it was Gagarin who got out of bed knowing he had a date with destiny.

The Spaceman

If your idea of rocket launches comes via Hollywood, you might be picturing Yuri Gagarin sat in his capsule, listening to a countdown before liftoff. But that image would be entirely wrong, as Korolev thought the idea of a countdown absurd American nonsense. 

Instead, Gagarin sat there listening to Russian love songs, waiting for the final checks to finish.

That morning, he’d awoken at 05:30 am to get to the launchpad. There, he’d made time for a quick pee against the back of his bus, a bit of necessary business that every future cosmonaut would repeat in the hopes of getting some of Gagarin’s good luck.

Now Gagarin was sat atop a gigantic missile pointed at the stars, not knowing whether death or destiny awaited him.

biography yuri gagarin

At exactly 09:06 am, Korolev punched the ignition key. There was no warning. Just the sudden jolt of the rocket, a roar of noise that seemed to fill the universe… 

…and then Yuri Gagarin was blasting upwards, leaving Earth behind in a way no human had ever done before.

Although he later claimed to have no memory of it, he was heard screaming “Poyekhali!” – an informal Russian word that roughly translates as “Let’s roll!”

A little over ten minutes later, the story of humanity had begun its newest chapter.

Outside the window, a giant swathe of bright blue impressed itself on the cosmonaut’s retinas. It was the Earth, seen for the very first time by human eyes as it really is. An orb in space, surrounded by endless darkness.

The radio crackled, and Korolev’s voice came on: “How are you feeling?”

And so Yuri Gagarin replied with the first words ever said in space:

‘‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything.”

And then, most poignantly:

“It’s beautiful!’’   

What it lacked in the poetry of “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” it more than made up for in honesty. As Gagarin circled the Earth, he looked down on our world as no-one had seen it before. Today, we’re used to images of our planet taken from space; blasé about the idea that we can pull up 1,000 photos of the Earth just by googling.

But try to imagine how Yuri Gagarin, the peasant boy from the poor Russian village, must’ve felt. Try to grasp even the tiniest fragment of how the world must’ve appeared to him.

To say it was likely awe inspiring is almost trite. You’d probably need to invent whole new words to describe how Gagarin felt.

108 minutes after launch, Vostok 1 began its return to Earth.

It was here that Gagarin’s story almost ended. His capsule had been meant to separate, but a cable refused to break, and now he plunged back to Earth not as a streamlined dart, but as a tumbling, spinning, burning ball of metal.

In this out of control descent, Gagarin almost lost consciousness. But, through sheer luck, the high temperatures melted the cable, allowing him to regain control and then eject at the appointed moment. At 10:55 am, a Russian peasant woman living on the endless grasslands outside Gagarin’s old student city of Saratov looked up in astonishment as a short man in an orange suit floated down toward the Earth.

As this stranger landed right by her and removed his helmet, Anna Takhtarova managed to stammer: “Have you come from outer space?”

Beaming his great, wide smile, Yuri Gagarin nodded triumphantly.

“Yes,” he replied. “Would you believe it? I certainly have!”

Making a Star

The Americans were informed first. They had to be. Nobody wanted Gagarin to be mistaken for a missile and his successful flight to accidentally trigger WWIII.

But the Soviets made sure it wasn’t just Washington that got the news. 

Even as Gagarin was watching the Earth from far up in Vostok 1, his astounded relatives back home were staring at the sky, praying for his safe return.

When it was confirmed the spaceman had survived his landing, the world went nuts. In Moscow, crowds poured into the streets, abandoning factories, offices, schools. Across the other cities of the Soviet Union, across the Warsaw Pact nations, then across the non-aligned states, and even in the west, people came together to celebrate this historic event.

Perhaps the only country where news of Gagarin’s flight was received coldly was the USA.

When NASA’s press office was phoned at 04:30am by journalists, a surly spokesman yelled into the phone “what is this! We’re all asleep down here!”

The headline the next day? “Soviets put man in space. Spokesman says US asleep.”

Within days, Yuri Gagarin was thrown a lavish parade in Moscow, where he was personally greeted by Nikita Khrushchev. After that, it was on to a world tour, and life as a living icon. Moscow sent Gagarin all over. He visited Soviet allies like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Cuba, and Hungary, but also capitalist states like Canada, Iceland, and Great Britain.

But he never made it to America. Although Gagarin expressed a desire to visit, JFK banned him from entering the country. 

Nothing like a sore loser, huh?

The Politburo’s plan was to turn Gagarin into a piece of propaganda; a demonstration of Soviet superiority. But their plan quickly hit a fatal bump.

Gagarin was just too damn nice.

Although he was a supporter of the system he lived in, Gagarin was mostly apolitical. He wasn’t the kind of guy to make speeches extolling the value of Soviet tractors, or what have you. Nah, he was far more likely to just give that wide, boyish smile of his, crack a few jokes, and win the hearts of everyone around him.

In this man who’d seen the stars, humankind came to see a universal symbol. Someone who brought them together even in the depths of the Cold War.

For Gagarin, though, life as an icon was hard.

Faced with a parade of celebrations honoring him across the planet he’d orbited, he turned to drink. Before his flight, Gagarin had been borderline teetotal, not wanting to mess with his flying.

After landing, he spent half a year more or less permanently drunk.

It was a mental state that would cause him to make a dangerous mistake. In September, 1961, Gagarin was in Crimea for yet more celebratory parties. Sozzled out his mind, he followed a gorgeous young blonde named Anna back to her hotel room on the second floor.

When Valentina burst in, the spaceman tried to escape by leaping out the nearest window, only for his foot to catch and send him plunging headlong to Earth. The cracked concrete impacted sickeningly against Gagarin’s forehead, leaving him permanently scarred. When he came to in the hospital, his brain was so scrambled he initially thought he’d never fly again.

But, no. The gods were, for now, still smiling down on the former farm boy.

Not long after this, Gagarin abandoned his new life as a global celebrity, and returned to working on the Soviet space program.

This world of parties wasn’t for him. He was still less than 30. He had infinitely more missions left to fly, infinitely more rockets to pilot. 

Beyond the Infinite

If Yuri Gagarin’s early life was the good side of the Soviet dream, plucking a talented peasant boy from obscurity and taking him to the stars; the last years of his life showed its nightmarish side. In early 1967, the new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, made it known that he wanted something spectacular to mark 50 years of Communism.

The idea was to send up two Soyuz rockets a couple of days apart, symbolizing Soviet supremacy.

At first, Gagarin was excited. He pulled some strings and got himself selected as backup pilot, just in case his fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov fell ill.

But, as the date approached, that excitement turned to fear.

A technical team identified 203 faults that needed urgent attention. Gagarin helped them prepare a ten page report for the leadership at Baikonur to send to Moscow. But when the report was finished, he discovered something truly terrifying.

Everyone was too scared to send it. With Brezhnev in charge, the Soviet system had returned to its cruelest ways. Shooting the messenger was now practically a sport, and no-one wanted to be the bearer of bad news.

biography yuri gagarin

As the launch date approached, Gagarin seems to have realized that getting in the rocket would be a death sentence. 

He begged a KGB friend of his to take the negative report to his superiors. The friend at last agreed, went to upper command… 

…and disappeared. He, and everyone who’d seen the report, were all summarily fired or sent to work in humiliating postings in the arse-end of Siberia.

With Brezhnev in charge, rocking the boat simply meant you drowned.

On the day of the launch, Gagarin accompanied Komarov to the rocket pad. There, Gagarin had a moment of heroism. He kicked up a massive stink, demanding he be put in that rocket, shouting that it was his right as as Komarov’s superior… 

But, no. Komarov didn’t fall for it. Instead, he said goodbye to Gagarin, and clambered into his execution chamber.

Komarov’s wife was in the control room, and they spent the minutes before launch saying goodbye over the radio, aware the cosmonaut wasn’t coming back, but unable to do anything to stop this horrific chain of events.

And so, on April 27, 1967, Yuri Gagarin was forced to stand helpless on the ground as the Soyuz carrying his friend failed in mid-air, reducing Vladimir Komarov to ash.

The cosmonaut never got over what had happened that day. The wide smile faded, replaced by a morose expression. Openness gave way to depression. Maybe it wouldn’t have lasted. Maybe Gagarin’s sunny side would have returned eventually.

But we’ll never know.

On March 27, 1968 – 11 months exactly after Komarov’s crash – Gagarin jumped in a MiG-15 for a routine flight. 96km northeast of Moscow, he crashed at high speed.

The impact killed Gagarin instantly. Aged just 34, the first spaceman was no more.

At the time, there were endless conspiracy theories surrounding Gagarin’s death. But, in 2013, formerly classified files were released showing that it was just another case of Brezhnev-era mismanagement.

That same day, an SU-15 jet had accidentally flown too low, passing incredibly close to Gagarin’s MiG. The huge aircraft had rolled Gagarin’s jet, causing it to spin out of control, sealing his fate. 

Yuri Gagarin’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow on March 30, 1967, following a huge memorial parade. Shortly after, his teenage hometown changed its name from Gzhatsk to Gagarin in his honor.

Today, over half a century since Gagarin’s untimely death, it can still be hard to fully wrap your head round his achievement. While Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk first is probably more famous in the west, Gagarin’s flight was arguably far more impressive.

Prior to that spring day in 1961, no human had ever done anything beyond the confines of our Earth.

Every technological revolution, every great explorer, every brilliant scientist, all had been limited to this one pale speck in the cosmos.

And then came Yuri Gagarin.

The moment the cosmonaut reached orbit, a new horizon opened for humanity. The first man on the Moon, the space shuttle, the ISS; Nasa and SpaceX’s plans to land a human on Mars; China’s goal of a moonbase… all stem from one journey undertaken by this one peasant boy from Russia.

The story of humanity’s expansion into space may only just be beginning. But when the history books are finally written in one hundred, one thousand, even a million years, they will all agree on one thing.

It all started with Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

ThoughtCo: https://www.thoughtco.com/yuri-gagarin-first-man-in-space-1779362  

Independent’s biography, good details: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/yuri-gagarin-the-man-who-fell-to-earth-2257505.html  

Geographics on the Soviet Space program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJoMsrLiuCo  

Sergei Korolev: the rocket genius behind Yuri Gagarin: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/13/yuri-gagarin-first-space-korolev  

More on Yuri and Korolev: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-man-in-space  

BBC Profile: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12460720  

How Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight was nearly grounded: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/apr/06/yuri-gagarin-orbital-flight-1961  

Detailed look at take-off and Yuri’s death: https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/first-man-up/  

Watching the flight as one of Gagarin’s relatives: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12875848  

Gagarin’s mysterious death: https://www.history.com/news/what-really-happened-to-yuri-gagarin-the-first-man-in-space  

Gagarin’s funeral (with photos): https://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-cosmonaut-gagarin-funeral-update/24940379.html

Star City: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/star-city  

Related Biographies

biography yuri gagarin

Ernest Hemingway was a man’s man. He was a war hero, a big game hunter, an adventurer and – above all else - a story teller. Yet, his was a life filled with contrasts. During his…

Bob Ross at ease in front of his easel.

For eleven years he hosted one of the most popular art shows on television -- transforming a blank canvas to a finished painting in a remarkably short, 30 minutes. He captivated audiences with his mesmerizing voice…

biography yuri gagarin

By Arnaldo Teodorani  A peaceful, unnamed town is taken over by an unnamed Army. The invaders arrive by surprise, aided by the treason of an insider: the scheming shop keeper Corell. The traitor seeks recognition from…

Comments are closed.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Little Astronomy

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.

biography yuri gagarin

“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

biography yuri gagarin

  • 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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

' src=

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.

Related Posts

biography yuri gagarin

What Happened to the Mars Helicopter? (Ingenuity)

biography yuri gagarin

What is the Purpose of the International Space Station?

biography yuri gagarin

Who Owns The International Space Station?

biography yuri gagarin

Is There Gold On The Moon? Yes! And Here’s Why It Matters.

biography yuri gagarin

Is There Gold On Mars? Yes! And The Discovery Was Very Curious…

biography yuri gagarin

Have We Landed On Venus?

  • Buying Guides
  • Telescope Accessories
  • Magnification Calculator
  • Field of View Calculator
  • Constellations
  • Solar System
  • Space Exploration

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Not logged in

  • Create account

Biography:Yuri Gagarin

Page actions.

  • View source

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin [lower-alpha 1] (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful crewed spaceflight , became the first human to journey into outer space . Travelling on Vostok 1 , Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961, with his flight taking 108 minutes. By achieving this major milestone for the Soviet Union amidst the Space Race , he became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including the nation's highest distinction: Hero of the Soviet Union.

Hailing from the village of Klushino in the Russian SFSR , Gagarin was a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy in his youth. He later joined the Soviet Air Forces as a pilot and was stationed at the Luostari Air Base, near the Norway–Soviet Union border, before his selection for the Soviet space programme alongside five other cosmonauts. Following his spaceflight, Gagarin became the deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre , which was later named after him. He was also elected as a deputy of the Soviet of the Union in 1962 and then to the Soviet of Nationalities, respectively the lower and upper chambers of the Supreme Soviet.

Vostok 1 was Gagarin's only spaceflight, but he served as the backup crew to Soyuz 1 , which ended in a fatal crash, killing his friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov . Fearful that a high-level national hero might be killed, Soviet officials banned Gagarin from participating in further spaceflights. After completing training at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in February 1968, he was again allowed to fly regular aircraft. However, Gagarin died five weeks later, when the MiG-15 that he was piloting with flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near the town of Kirzhach.

  • 1 Early life
  • 2 Education and early career
  • 3 Soviet Air Force service
  • 4.1 Selection and training
  • 4.2 Vostok 1
  • 5 After the Vostok 1 flight
  • 6 Personal life
  • 8.1 Medals and orders of merit
  • 8.2 Tributes
  • 8.3 Statues, monuments and murals
  • 8.4 50th anniversary
  • 10.1 Sources
  • 11 Further reading
  • 12 External links

biography yuri gagarin

Gagarin was born 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, [1] in the Smolensk Oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , near Gzhatsk (renamed Gagarin in 1968 after his death). [2] His parents worked on a sovkhoz [3] —Aleksey Ivanovich Gagarin as a carpenter and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina as a dairy farmer. [4] [lower-alpha 2] Yuri was the third of four children. His older brother Valentin was born in 1924, and by the time Yuri was born he was already helping with the cattle on the farm. His sister Zoya, born in 1927, helped take care of "Yura" and their youngest brother Boris, born in 1936. [6] [7]

Like millions of Soviet citizens, his family suffered during the German occupation during World War II . [8] During the German advance on Moscow, retreating Red Army soldiers seized the collective farm's livestock. [9] The Nazis captured Klushino on 18 October 1941. On their first day in the village, they burned down the school, ending Yuri's first year of education. [10] The Germans also burned down 27 houses in the village and forced the residents including the Gagarins to work the farms to feed the occupying soldiers. Those who refused were beaten or sent to the concentration camp set up at Gzhatsk. [10]

A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin residence. On the land behind their house, the family was allowed to build a mud hut measuring approximately 3 by 3 metres (10 by 10 ft), where they spent 21 months until the end of the occupation. [8] During this period, Yuri became a saboteur, especially after one of the German soldiers, called "the Devil" by the children, tried to hang his younger brother Boris on an apple tree using the boy's scarf. In retaliation, Yuri sabotaged the soldier's work; he poured soil into the tank batteries gathered to be recharged and randomly mixed the different chemical supplies intended for the task. [11] In early 1943, his two older siblings were deported by the Germans to Poland for slave labour. They escaped and were found by Soviet soldiers who conscripted them into helping with the war effort. They did not return home until after the war, in 1945. [12] [13]

The rest of the Gagarin family believed the two older children were dead, and Yuri became ill with "grief and hunger"; [14] he was also beaten for refusing to work for the German forces and spent the remainder of the war at a hospital as a patient and later as an orderly. His mother was hospitalized during the same period, after a German soldier gashed her leg with a scythe. When the Germans were routed out of Klushino on 9 March 1944, Yuri helped the Red Army find mines buried in the roads by the fleeing German army. [14]

Education and early career

In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk, where Gagarin continued his education. [8] Yuri and Boris were enrolled at a crude school built in the town and run by a young woman who volunteered to be the teacher. They learned to read using a discarded Soviet military manual. A former Soviet airman later joined the school to teach maths and science, [15] Yuri's favourite subjects. Yuri was also part of a group of children that built model aeroplanes. He was fascinated with aircraft from a young age and his interest in aeroplanes was energized after a Yakovlev fighter plane crash landed in Klushino during the war. [16]

biography yuri gagarin

In 1950, aged 16, Gagarin began an apprenticeship as a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy, near Moscow, [12] [13] and enrolled at a local "young workers" school for seventh-grade evening classes. After graduating in 1951 from both the seventh grade and the vocational school with honours in mouldmaking and foundry work, [17] he was selected for further training at the Industrial Technical School in Saratov, where he studied tractors. [12] [13] [18] While in Saratov, Gagarin volunteered at a local flying club for weekend training as a Soviet air cadet, where he trained to fly a biplane , and later a Yakovlev Yak-18 . [13] [18] He earned extra money as a part-time dock labourer on the Volga River. [8]

Soviet Air Force service

In 1955, Gagarin was accepted to the First Chkalov Higher Air Force Pilots School in Orenburg. [19] [20] He initially began training on the Yak-18 already familiar to him and later graduated to training on the MiG-15 in February 1956. [19] Gagarin twice struggled to land the two-seater trainer aircraft, and risked dismissal from pilot training. However, the commander of the regiment decided to give him another chance at landing. Gagarin's flight instructor gave him a cushion to sit on, which improved his view from the cockpit, and he landed successfully. Having completed his evaluation in a trainer aircraft, [21] Gagarin began flying solo in 1957. [12]

On 5 November 1957, Gagarin was commissioned a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces , having accumulated 166 hours and 47 minutes of flight time. He graduated from flight school the next day and was posted to the Luostari Air Base, close to the Norwegian border in Murmansk Oblast, for a two-year assignment with the Northern Fleet. [22] He was assigned to the 769th Fighter Aviation Regiment of the 122nd Fighter Aviation Division flying Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15bis aircraft. [23] By October 1959, had flown a total of 265 hours. [24]

On 7 July 1959, he was rated Military Pilot 3rd Class. [24] After expressing interest in space exploration following the launch of Luna 3 on 6 October 1959, his recommendation to the Soviet space programme was endorsed and forward by Lieutenant Colonel Babushkin. [22] [25] By this point, he had accumulated 265 hours of flight time. [22] Gagarin was promoted to the rank of senior lieutenant on 6 November 1959, [24] three weeks after he was interviewed by a medical commission for qualification to the space programme. [22]

After the Vostok 1 flight

biography yuri gagarin

Gagarin's flight was a triumph for the Soviet space programme and he became a national hero of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, as well as a worldwide celebrity. Newspapers around the globe published his biography and details of his flight. He was escorted in a long motorcade of high-ranking officials through the streets of Moscow to the Kremlin where, in a lavish ceremony, Nikita Khrushchev awarded him the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Other cities in the Soviet Union also held mass demonstrations, the scale of which were second only to the World War II Victory Parades. [58]

biography yuri gagarin

Gagarin gained a reputation as an adept public figure and was noted for his charismatic smile. [59] [60] [61] On 15 April 1961, accompanied by officials from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he answered questions at a press conference in Moscow reportedly attended by 1,000 reporters. [62] Gagarin visited the United Kingdom three months after the Vostok 1 mission, going to London and Manchester. [59] [63] While in Manchester, despite heavy rain, he refused an umbrella, insisted that the roof of the convertible car he was riding in remain open, and stood so the cheering crowds could see him. [59] [64] Gagarin toured widely abroad, accepting the invitation of about 30 countries in the years following his flight. [65] In just the first four months, he also went to Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, and Iceland. [66] Because of his popularity, US president John F. Kennedy barred Gagarin from visiting the United States. [46]

In 1962, Gagarin began serving as a deputy to the Soviet of the Union, [67] and was elected to the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. He later returned to Star City , the cosmonaut facility, where he spent several years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft. He became a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Forces on 12 June 1962, and received the rank of colonel on 6 November 1963. [24] On 20 December, Gagarin became Deputy Training Director of the cosmonaut training facility. [68] Soviet officials, including Kamanin, tried to keep Gagarin away from any flights, being worried about losing their hero in an accident noting that he was "too dear to mankind to risk his life for the sake of an ordinary space flight". [69] Kamanin was also concerned by Gagarin's drinking and believed the sudden rise to fame had taken its toll on the cosmonaut. While acquaintances say Gagarin had been a "sensible drinker", his touring schedule placed him in social situations in which he was increasingly expected to drink alcohol. [12] [18]

biography yuri gagarin

Two years later, he was re-elected as a deputy of the Soviet Union but this time to the Soviet of Nationalities, the upper chamber of legislature. [67] The following year, he began to re-qualify as a fighter pilot [70] and was backup pilot for his friend Vladimir Komarov on the Soyuz 1 flight after five years without piloting duty. Kamanin had opposed Gagarin's reassignment to cosmonaut training; he had gained weight and his flying skills had deteriorated. Despite this, he remained a strong contender for Soyuz 1 until he was replaced by Komarov in April 1966 and reassigned to Soyuz 3 . [71]

The Soyuz 1 launch was rushed due to implicit political pressures [72] and despite Gagarin's protests that additional safety precautions were necessary. [73] Gagarin accompanied Komarov to the rocket before launch and relayed instructions to Komarov from ground control following multiple system failures aboard the spacecraft. [74] Despite their best efforts, Soyuz 1 crash landed after its parachutes failed to open, killing Komarov instantly. [75] After the Soyuz 1 crash, Gagarin was permanently banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights. [76] He was also grounded from flying aircraft solo, a demotion he worked hard to lift. He was temporarily relieved of duties to focus on academics with the promise that he would be able to resume flight training. [77] On 17 February 1968, Gagarin successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on the subject of spaceplane aerodynamic configuration and graduated cum laude from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. [38] [77] [78]

Statues, monuments and murals

biography yuri gagarin

There are statues of Gagarin and monuments to him located in the town named after him as well as in Orenburg, Cheboksary, Irkutsk, Izhevsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and Yoshkar-Ola in Russia, as well as in Nicosia , Cyprus, Druzhkivka, Ukraine, Karaganda , Kazakhstan, and Tiraspol, Moldova. On 4 June 1980, Monument to Yuri Gagarin in Gagarin Square, Leninsky Avenue, Moscow, was opened. [142] The monument is mounted to a 38 m (125 ft) tall pedestal and is constructed of titanium. Beside the column is a replica of the descent module used during his spaceflight. [143]

In 2011, a statue of Gagarin was unveiled at Admiralty Arch in The Mall in London, opposite the permanent sculpture of James Cook. It is a copy of the statue outside Gagarin's former school in Lyubertsy. [144] In 2013, the statue was moved to a permanent location outside the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. [145]

In 2012, a statue was unveiled at the site of NASA's original spaceflight headquarters on South Wayside Drive in Houston. The sculpture was completed in 2011 by Leonov, who is also an artist, and was a gift to Houston commissioned by various Russian organisations. Houston Mayor Annise Parker, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were present for the dedication. [146] [147] The Russian Federation presented a bust of Gagarin to several cities in India including one that was unveiled at the Birla Planetarium in Kolkata in February 2012. [148]

In April 2018, a bust of Gagarin erected on the street in Belgrade , Serbia, that bears his name was removed, after less than a week. A new work was commissioned following the outcry over the disproportionately small size of its head which locals said was an "insult" to Gagarin. [149] [150] Belgrade City Manager Goran Vesic stated that neither the city, the Serbian Ministry of Culture, nor the foundation that financed it had prior knowledge of the design. [151]

In August 2019, the Italian artist Jorit painted Gagarin's face on the facade of a twenty-story building in the district of Odintsovo, Russia. [152] [153] The mural is the largest portrait of Gagarin in the world. [154]

In March 2021, a statue of Gagarin was unveiled at Mataram Park ( Taman Mataram ) in Jakarta , Indonesia in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Indonesia–Russia diplomatic relations as well as the 60th anniversary of the first human space flight. The statue, sculpted by Russian artist A.D. Leonov and presented by Russian embassy in Jakarta, is considered as "a sign of strengthening relations" between Moscow and Jakarta, which have been sister cities since 2006. [155] [156]

Further reading

  • Cole, Michael D. (1995). Vostok 1: First Human in Space . Springfield, NJ: Enslow. ISBN   0-89490-541-4 . https://archive.org/details/vostok1firsthuma0000cole .  
  • Jenks, A. L. (2019). The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

External links

  • Obituary by Associated Press, published on The New York Times , 28 March 1968
  • "Gagarin, Yuri Alekseyevich" . Astronautix.com . http://www.astronautix.com/g/gagarin.html .  
  • Caterina, Gianfranco (9 March 2020). "Gagarin in Brazil: reassessing the terms of the Cold War domestic political debate in 1961". Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 63 (1): 16. doi : 10.1590/0034-7329202000104 .  
  • Newsreel footage of Yuri Gagarin at Net-Film Newsreels and Documentary Films Archive
  • First Orbit , 2011 feature film on YouTube by First Orbit
  • First Man in Space: Yuri Gagarin , short film on YouTube by Roscosmos
  • Soviet Man in Space (1961) is available for free download at the Internet Archive
  • Soviets Hail Space Hero (1961) is available for free download at the Internet Archive
  • Photo gallery by KP.ru
  • Soviet cosmonauts
  • Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates

biography yuri gagarin

  • Add a new article
  • Search in all topics
  • Search in namespaces
  • Search in categories
  • Search using prefix
  • About HandWiki
  • How to edit
  • Citation manager
  • Formatting articles
  • List of categories
  • Recent pages
  • Recent changes
  • Random page
  • Support & Donate
  • Special pages
  • Cite this page

User page tools

  • What links here
  • Related changes
  • Printable version
  • Permanent link
  • Page information

Other projects

In other languages, hidden category.

Powered by MediaWiki

  • This page was last edited on 7 February 2024, at 07:10.
  • Privacy policy
  • Disclaimers
  • Yuri Gagarin

Gagarin_in_Sweden

Yuri Gagarin, the famous Soviet cosmonaut and pilot was the first human to explore outer space. His military rank was Polkovnik, corresponding to a colonel in the Soviet Air Forces. The memorable day April 12th, 1961 when his spacecraft called Vostok completed an orbit of the planet Earth remains a crucial moment in the history of mankind. Yuri Gagarin was also renowned for his charismatic and irresistible smile. He was recognized by Queen Elizabeth II, Fidel Castro and the leaders of both the US and France for his outstanding accomplishments.

Early Years

The third of four children, he was born on March 9th, 1934 in the small village of Klushino, which lies around 125 miles from Moscow, Soviet Union. During the Nazi occupation in World War II, his parents were forced to hide with their children in a small mud hut for 1 year and nine months. In early 1946 they moved to Gzhatsk, a nearby city which is nowadays renamed Gagarin. In 1971, a replica of the house in Klushino where the Gagarin family used to live from 1933 up until 1945 was constructed and now it functions as a museum cared for by devoted friends and family of the famous cosmonaut. Gagarin’s botany teacher, Yelena Kozlova, said that Yuri enjoyed pranks and he was fun-loving yet very serious about his studies. His favorite subjects in school were mathematics and physics. When he was in the sixth grade, Yuri Gagarin joined the aviation club of the school, driven by an innate passion for the stars and space. He earned his first money working as a foundry man, but because he wanted to pursue a career in aviation, he enrolled in the Technical College in the city of Saratov. As a student, he also worked part-time as a dock laborer on the Volga River. With the money he earned he bought presents for his family. In 1955, he was drafted by the Soviet Army after graduating from the Saratov Technical College. In 1959, Gagarin became Senior Lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces.

First Human Spaceflight

On April 12th, 1961, aboard Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to journey into space, a trip which lasted 108 minutes but transformed him into a legend. Recalling his experience of spaceflight, he stated that he felt as if he were being “suspended.” He allegedly commented “I don’t see any God up here.” The Vostok 1 mission successfully made a single orbit around Earth in only 1 hour and 48 minutes. He managed to land safely near Smelovka village in the Saratov Region’s Ternovsky District. Yuri Gagarin became an internationally acclaimed and highly-respected celebrity and he began touring the world. He received many awards and honors. In 2011, the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight was marked by homages around the globe.

Mysterious Death

Yuri Gagarin passed away at the age of 34, on March 27th, 1968 during a routine training flight. His jet fighter MiG-15 UTI crashed near Kirzhach, Russia. His body was cremated and the ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on the main city square in Moscow, Red Square. Over the years, different investigations of this plane crash have been conducted, as various conspiracy theories considered his death not entirely an accident. To this day, Gagarin s premature death is a mystery.

Famous Explorers

  • Amerigo Vespucci
  • Bartolomeu Dias
  • Captain James Cook
  • Christopher Columbus
  • Daniel Boone
  • Edmund Hillary
  • Ferdinand Magellan
  • Francisco Pizarro
  • Francis Drake
  • Hernando de Soto
  • Hernán Cortés
  • Henry Hudson
  • Ibn Battuta
  • Jacques Cartier
  • Jacques Cousteau
  • Juan Ponce de León
  • Leif Ericson
  • Lewis and Clark
  • Neil Armstrong
  • Reinhold Messner
  • Roald Amundsen
  • Samuel de Champlain
  • Vasco da Gama

Copyright © 2018 · Famous Explorers · All Rights Reserved. | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy

Yuri Gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

biography yuri gagarin

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!”.

biography yuri gagarin

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.

IMAGES

  1. Yuri Gagarin Biography

    biography yuri gagarin

  2. Yuri Gagarin

    biography yuri gagarin

  3. Yuri Gagarin Biography

    biography yuri gagarin

  4. Yuri Gagarin Biography

    biography yuri gagarin

  5. In Defense of Communism: Yuri Gagarin: 10 facts about the legendary

    biography yuri gagarin

  6. Yuri Gagarin Biography

    biography yuri gagarin

VIDEO

  1. Yuri Gagarin flight

  2. Gagarin

COMMENTS

  1. Yuri Gagarin

    Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin [a] (9 March 1934 - 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful crewed spaceflight, became the first human to journey into outer space. Travelling on Vostok 1, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961, with his flight taking 108 minutes.

  2. Yuri Gagarin

    Yuri Gagarin (born March 9, 1934, near Gzhatsk, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now Gagarin, Russia]—died March 27, 1968, near Moscow) Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man to travel into space. The son of a carpenter on a collective farm, Gagarin graduated as a molder from a trade school near Moscow in 1951.

  3. Biography of Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space

    Yuri Gagarin (March 9, 1934-March 27, 1968) made history on April 12, 1961, when he became both the first person in the world to enter space and the first person to orbit the Earth. Although he never again went to space, his achievement was one of the most significant events of the "space race" which eventually saw men land on the moon.

  4. Yuri Gagarin: Facts about the first human in space

    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...

  5. ESA

    Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia). His parents, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked.

  6. Yuri Gagarin: the spaceman who came in from the cold

    Sergei Bobylev/TASS/Getty Images Gagarin mural in Moscow (Credit: Sergei Bobylev/TASS/Getty Images) Yuri Gagarin belied the West's austere impression of the Soviet Union - a charming,...

  7. Yuri Gagarin

    Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin ( Russian: Юрий Алексеевич Гагарин; March 9, 1934 - March 27, 1968) [1] was a Soviet and Russian cosmonaut ( astronaut ). He was the first person to travel into space. Early life Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia ), on 9 March 1934.

  8. Yuri Gagarin: Who was the first person in space?

    On April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 lifted Yuri Gagarin into space, making him the first human being to travel there. His orbit lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes in what was a very dangerous mission.

  9. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin

    Yuri Alexeivich Gagarin. The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Alexeivich Gagarin (1934-1968) was the first man to orbit the earth in an artificial satellite and thus ushered in the age of manned spaceflight. Yuri Gagarin the third child of Alexei Ivanovich, a carpenter on a collective farm, and Anna Timofeyevna, was born on March 9, 1934, in the village ...

  10. Profile: Yuri Gagarin

    The first space flight was a triumph for the Soviet Union and a political and diplomatic setback for the US. But Yuri Gagarin was an instant history-maker whose achievement transcended the ...

  11. Who Was Yuri Gagarin?

    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 ...

  12. It's been 60 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in outer

    Sixty years ago on Monday, the Earth sent its first human into outer space — Russia's Yuri Gagarin. On this day in 1961, Gagarin's space capsule completed one orbit around Earth and returned home, marking a major milestone in the space race. As he took off, you could hear Gagarin's muffled yet iconic " Poehali, " which means "Let's go" in ...

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

    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...

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

    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 ...

  15. Yury Gagarin

    NASA Yury Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut. In 1961 he became the first human to travel into space. Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, near Gzhatsk, Russia. He was raised on a collective farm, which is a farm that is owned by the government and worked on by many people.

  16. Yuri Gagarin Biography

    Quick Facts Also Known As: Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin Died At Age: 34 Family: Spouse/Ex-: Valentina Goryacheva (m. 1957-1968) father: Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin mother: Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina siblings: Boris, Valentin, Zoya Born Country: Russia Astronauts Russian Men Height: 1.57 m Died on: March 27, 1968 place of death: Novoselovo, Russia

  17. An Excerpt from a new Yuri Gagarin biography

    Correction: March 27, 2011. A book excerpt on March 13 about the life of Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut, misspelled the name of a luxury resort where he and other cosmonauts stayed in 1961. It is Tesseli, not Kissely. An excerpt from a new Yuri Gagarin biography, from the pages of our upcoming Spring Men's issue.

  18. Yuri Gagarin: the First Man in Space

    If Yuri Gagarin's early life was the good side of the Soviet dream, plucking a talented peasant boy from obscurity and taking him to the stars; the last years of his life showed its nightmarish side. In early 1967, the new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, made it known that he wanted something spectacular to mark 50 years of Communism. ...

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

    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 ...

  20. Death of Yuri Gagarin

    On March 27, 1968, Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space, died together with pilot Vladimir Seryogin during a routine training flight, after the MiG-15 jet fighter they were flying crashed near Novosyolovo in the Soviet Union . After his death, the Soviet government declared a period of national mourning in the memory of Gagarin.

  21. Biography:Yuri Gagarin

    Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin [lower-alpha 1] (9 March 1934 - 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who, aboard the first successful crewed spaceflight, became the first human to journey into outer space.Travelling on Vostok 1, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. By achieving this major milestone for the Soviet Union amidst the Space Race, he became an international ...

  22. Yuri Gagarin Facts & Biography

    Yuri Gagarin passed away at the age of 34, on March 27th, 1968 during a routine training flight. His jet fighter MiG-15 UTI crashed near Kirzhach, Russia. His body was cremated and the ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on the main city square in Moscow, Red Square. Over the years, different investigations of this plane crash have ...

  23. Biography

    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.

  24. Juri Alexejewitsch Gagarin

    Juri Gagarin Юрий Гагарин Juri Gagarin, der erste Mensch im Weltraum: ... Juri Gagarin, ist die Swatch Gent YURI aus dem Jahr 1992. Auf der farbenfrohen Uhr ist im Comic-Stil die Mission zum Mars dargestellt, mit dem Raumfahrer Yuri in der Mitte des Zifferblattes und des Kunststoffarmbandes. In dem grün-transparenten Gehäuse ist ...

  25. Walter Villadei

    Walter Villadei (born April 29, 1974) is an Italian military officer. He graduated from the Academy of the Italian Air Force in Pozzuoli and holds a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Naples Federico II and a specialization in astronautical engineering from the University of Rome. He was trained as a cosmonaut in Russia. He first flew to space in June 2023 on the ...