Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet air force pilot who on 12 April 1961 became the first human being to travel into space, completing a single orbit of the Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft in 108 minutes. The flight was a propaganda triumph for the Soviet Union during the Cold War and made Gagarin one of the most famous people in the world. He never flew in space again, and he died in a jet crash in 1968 at the age of 34.

Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, west of Moscow, the third of four children of a carpenter and a dairy worker on a collective farm. During the Second World War, German troops of Nazi Germany occupied the village from October 1941 to March 1943. They burned the school and many houses, and a German officer took over the family home, forcing the Gagarins to live in a small dugout behind it. In 1943 the occupiers deported Yuri's elder brother and sister to work as forced labourers; both survived and returned after the war.

The family moved to the nearby town of Gzhatsk in 1946. At 16 Gagarin began an apprenticeship as a foundryman at a steel works in Lyubertsy, near Moscow, studying at evening school, and then went to an industrial technical college in Saratov on the Volga. There he joined a local flying club and learned to fly light aircraft, which set the course of his life.

In 1955 Gagarin entered a military pilots' school in Orenburg. He struggled at first to land the MiG-15 jet trainer and nearly failed the course, until an instructor realised that his short stature limited his view and gave him a cushion to sit on. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in November 1957, weeks after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, and in the same month married Valentina Goryacheva, a medical technician. The couple later had two daughters. Gagarin was posted to a fighter regiment of the Northern Fleet at Luostari, near the Norwegian border, where he flew MiG-15s in harsh Arctic conditions.

In 1959 he volunteered for the secret programme to choose the first cosmonauts. Candidates had to be fighter pilots aged 25 to 30 and small enough to fit the cramped Vostok capsule; Gagarin was about 1.57 metres tall. In 1960 he was one of 20 men chosen, and he was soon placed in an elite group of six training for the first flights. The training included centrifuge runs, parachute jumps, isolation chambers and low-oxygen tests. When the candidates were asked to vote anonymously for whom they would like to see fly first, other than themselves, most picked Gagarin. In January 1961 an examining commission ranked him first, and on 8 April the state commission confirmed him as pilot, with Gherman Titov as his backup. Physicians and officials liked his calm temperament, quick mind and modest background, which also suited the Soviet image of the new socialist man.

Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur launch site in Soviet Kazakhstan at 9:07 Moscow time on 12 April 1961. As the rocket lifted off he called out "Poyekhali!", meaning "Off we go!", a phrase that became famous across the Soviet bloc. The spacecraft was controlled automatically from the ground, as no one yet knew how a person would cope with weightlessness, though he could take manual control with a code if necessary. He completed one orbit and reported his impressions of the view and of being weightless. During descent the service module failed to separate cleanly, causing the capsule to tumble for a few minutes before the link broke.

As planned, Gagarin ejected at about 7,000 metres and came down by parachute in a field near Engels, in the Saratov region, where the first people he met were a farm worker and her granddaughter. At the time, the international body that certified aviation records, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, required a pilot to land with his craft, and Soviet officials concealed the fact that he had not. The truth emerged later, but the federation accepted that the essential parts of the flight, launch, orbit and safe return, had been achieved, and his records stood. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, made a 15-minute suborbital flight on 5 May 1961.

Gagarin returned to a hero's welcome in Moscow, where Nikita Khrushchev awarded him the title Hero of the Soviet Union before huge crowds in Red Square. He became a figurehead of the Soviet state, touring around 30 countries; in July 1961 he visited London and Manchester, where he insisted on riding in an open car through the rain. The Soviet lead in space helped push the United States under John F. Kennedy to commit, in May 1961, to landing a man on the Moon. Gagarin was elected to the Supreme Soviet and became deputy director of cosmonaut training at Star City.

Fame was hard on him. The programme's overseer, Nikolai Kamanin, recorded in his diaries concerns about Gagarin's drinking and behaviour on tour, and in 1961 Gagarin was injured above the eye after jumping from a window, reportedly to avoid being caught in a woman's room. Officials were reluctant to risk losing a national hero in a new mission. He was nonetheless named backup pilot for Soyuz 1, and he reportedly raised concerns about the spacecraft's readiness before the flight in April 1967, in which his friend Vladimir Komarov was killed when the parachutes failed. Afterwards Gagarin was barred from further spaceflight. He completed an engineering degree in February 1968 and began working to regain his flying status.

On 27 March 1968 Gagarin and his instructor, Vladimir Seryogin, died when their two-seat MiG-15UTI crashed near the town of Kirzhach, north-east of Moscow, during a training flight in poor weather. Their ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall. The cause has never been settled. A Soviet commission concluded that the pilots made a sharp manoeuvre, possibly to avoid a weather balloon or cloud, and lost control. Other explanations include outdated weather information, an open cabin vent, and the theory of the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov that a supersonic jet passed dangerously close. There is no reliable evidence for the conspiracy theories that later circulated.

His home town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin, and 12 April is celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in Russia and, since 2011, as the United Nations' International Day of Human Space Flight. The crew of Apollo 11, including Neil Armstrong, left medals honouring Gagarin and Komarov on the Moon in 1969. In Russia and beyond, Gagarin remains a widely admired figure, his reputation largely untouched by the later collapse of the Soviet system that sent him into space.