- Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in a small village a
hundred miles from Moscow. - On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft, ‘Vostok 1’, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri
Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space. - During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also
became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space
capsule in 89 minutes. Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187
miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. - After his historic feat was announced, the unassuming Gagarin became an
instant worldwide celebrity. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the
title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest honour of the Soviet Union.
Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets were
renamed in his honor. The town he was born in was later renamed with his
name. - The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was
a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for
May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S.
space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three
orbits in Friendship 7. By that time, the Soviet Union had already made another
leap ahead in the “space race” with the August 1961 flight of cosmonaut
Gherman Titov in Vostok 2. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more than 25 hours
in space. - After completing training at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy on
17 February 1968, he was allowed to fly regular aircraft. Gagarin died five
weeks later in a routine jet-aircraft test flight in 1968, when the MiG-15,
training jet crashed near the town of Kirzhach, that he was piloting with his
flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin. His ashes were also placed in the Kremlin
wall.
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