Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in Klushino, a small village in the Smolensk Oblast of the Soviet Union. His parents were collective farm workers. During the Second World War, German forces occupied his village and his family was displaced. After the war, Gagarin attended a vocational school in Moscow and developed an interest in aviation through a local flying club.

He enrolled in the Orenburg Higher Air Force Pilot School and graduated in 1957. He was assigned to a fighter regiment in the Soviet Arctic. In 1959, following the launch of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, Soviet authorities began selecting candidates for a crewed spaceflight program. Gagarin was among twenty candidates chosen from the Soviet Air Force.

On 12 April 1961, Gagarin launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. The flight lasted 108 minutes. He completed a single orbit of Earth at a maximum altitude of approximately 327 kilometers before re-entering the atmosphere. In accordance with the Vostok design, he ejected from the capsule and parachuted separately to the ground, landing in the Saratov Oblast. The Soviet space program initially did not disclose this detail publicly, as international aviation records at the time required the pilot to land with the spacecraft.

After the flight, Gagarin became an internationally recognized figure and undertook official visits to numerous countries. He was appointed deputy director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre. He flew on Soviet Air Force training aircraft and worked toward qualification to pilot the Soyuz spacecraft.

On 27 March 1968, Gagarin and a flight instructor died when their MiG-15UTI training aircraft crashed near Kirzhach during a routine training flight. He was thirty-four years old. The precise causes of the crash were investigated by Soviet authorities, and the findings remained classified for decades. He was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union and is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow.