Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934-1968) was a Soviet air force pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human being in space. On April 12, 1961, he completed a single orbit of Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft in a flight lasting 108 minutes, a milestone of the Space Race that made the 27-year-old farm worker's son one of the most famous people on the planet.[1][2]
Gagarin never flew in space again. The Soviet leadership, protective of its most valuable propaganda asset, kept him grounded for most of the decade while he toured the world and helped train other cosmonauts. He died in 1968, at age 34, when the MiG-15 trainer he was flying crashed during a routine sortie.[1][3]
The anniversary of his flight is observed in Russia as Cosmonautics Day and, since a 2011 United Nations resolution, worldwide as the International Day of Human Space Flight. The Baikonur launch pad from which he departed is still known as Gagarin's Start.[4][5]
From foundry to fighter cockpit
Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the village of Klushino, west of Moscow, the third of four children of a carpenter and a dairy farmer on a collective farm. The family lived under German occupation for almost two years during the Second World War, part of it in a mud hut after soldiers seized their house, and two of his siblings were deported for forced labor.[1]
In 1950, aged 16, he began an apprenticeship as a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy, near Moscow, and in 1951 moved to an industrial technical school in Saratov to train as a foundry worker. There he joined the local aeroclub, flying a Yak-18 trainer on weekends, and discovered that he wanted to fly more than he wanted to cast metal. In 1955 he entered the First Chkalov Air Force Pilot's School at Orenburg, graduating as a fighter pilot in 1957 and serving two years flying MiG-15s from Luostari airbase in the Arctic, near the Norwegian border.[1][2]
Vostok 1
In 1960 Gagarin was one of 20 fighter pilots chosen for the Soviet Union's first cosmonaut group. Screening favored small, fit pilots (the Vostok cabin was cramped, and Gagarin stood about 1.57 meters tall), and he impressed instructors and physicians alike; a peer vote reportedly placed him first among the candidates. Days before the flight, he and Gherman Titov were named prime and backup pilots.[1]
At 9:07 a.m. Moscow time on April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 lifted off from Site No. 1 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a modified R-7 missile. As the engines lit, Gagarin called out "Poyekhali!" ("Let's go!"). The spacecraft entered an orbit with an apogee of about 327 kilometers. The flight was almost fully automatic; controllers, unsure how a human would function in weightlessness, gave the pilot manual controls only for emergencies, locked behind a coded envelope. Gagarin ate, drank, and reported his observations, later describing the Earth's blue halo. After one orbit the retrorocket fired over Africa, and the descent module endured several minutes of wild spinning when the service module failed to separate cleanly before burning off in the atmosphere.[1][2][3]
As the Vostok design required (the capsule's landing was too hard for a person to ride out), Gagarin ejected at about 7 kilometers altitude and descended under his own parachute, landing in a field near the village of Smelovka in the Saratov region, not far from where he had first flown. A farmworker and her granddaughter, startled by the orange-suited figure, were the first to greet him. Total elapsed time from launch to landing was 108 minutes. He had been promoted from senior lieutenant to major while in flight.[1][2]
Flight summary
| Mission | Date | Spacecraft | Duration | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vostok 1 | April 12, 1961 | Vostok 3KA No. 3 | 108 minutes, 1 orbit | First human spaceflight |
Global celebrity
Moscow received Gagarin with the largest public celebration since the end of the Second World War, and Nikita Khrushchev made him Hero of the Soviet Union. Over the following years he visited roughly 30 countries on goodwill tours, drawing enormous crowds in cities from Prague to London, where he met Queen Elizabeth II, and in Brazil, Japan, Egypt, and Cuba. His open smile became a Soviet emblem as recognizable as any flag, and the tours doubled as Cold War diplomacy for a country eager to advertise the achievement over the United States, whose first orbital flight by John Glenn came ten months later.[1][2]
At home Gagarin was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and appointed to senior roles at the cosmonaut training center outside Moscow (today the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City), where he became deputy director of training. He fought to return to flight status and served as backup pilot for Soyuz 1 in April 1967; when that mission killed his friend Vladimir Komarov in a parachute failure, the leadership barred Gagarin from further spaceflight assignments. He completed an engineering degree at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in February 1968.[1]
Death
On March 27, 1968, Gagarin took off on a routine training flight in a two-seat MiG-15UTI with instructor Vladimir Seryogin, part of his requalification for solo fighter flying. The aircraft crashed near the town of Kirzhach in Vladimir Oblast, killing both men. Gagarin was 34. He received a state funeral, and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.[1][3]
The official commission attributed the crash to a sharp maneuver, possibly to avoid a weather balloon or another aircraft, that sent the jet into a spin in poor weather. The finding never quieted speculation, and in 2013 cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, citing a declassified report, said an Su-15 interceptor flying far below its assigned altitude had passed close to Gagarin's MiG, and its wake likely threw the trainer out of control. Russian authorities have not formally reopened the case.[3]
Commemoration
April 12 has been celebrated in the Soviet Union and Russia as Cosmonautics Day since 1962; in 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the flight, the United Nations General Assembly declared it the International Day of Human Space Flight, and enthusiasts worldwide mark it with "Yuri's Night" events.[1][4]
His hometown region's city of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968, a far-side lunar crater bears his name, and the Apollo 11 crew left a memorial on the Moon in 1969 that included a medal honoring him. Launch Site No. 1 at Baikonur, used from Sputnik through 2019 and known as Gagarin's Start, hosted its final Soyuz launch on September 25, 2019; Kazakhstan and Roscosmos have since agreed to convert the pad into a museum complex.[4][5] Statues of Gagarin stand in dozens of cities, and every crew launching to the International Space Station from Baikonur still observes preflight rituals traced to him.
References
- Yuri Gagarin - Wikipedia.
- Yuri A. Gagarin - New Mexico Museum of Space History.
- Details of Yuri Gagarin's tragic death revealed - Phys.org.
- Gagarin's Start - Wikipedia.
- Kazakhstan to regain legendary Soviet space launch site, 'Gagarin's start' - Euronews.
