#FIRST MAN TO ORBIT THE EARTH FREE#

He died on March 27, 1968, after the MiG-15 jet fighter he was flying crashed near the town of Novosyolovo. But then, the service module failed to separate from the spacecraft. The rocket made it into space, the launch vehicle broke away, and Gagarin rode through one orbit of the Earth. (NASA archives) The actual launch on April 12, 1961, went well. On April 14, the cosmonaut was flown to Moscow, where he was greeted by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and driven into town on a highway lined with cheering Russians. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and first man to orbit this beautiful blue orb. In 1961, he travelled on the USSRs Vostok 1 rocket. Gagarin bailed out as planned and parachuted onto a field near the Volga River about 720km (450 miles) southeast of Moscow. The Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go to space. The 27-year-old cosmonaut’s mission was fraught with drama: a break in data transmission, glitches involving antennae, a retrograde rocket, and the separation of modules.īut the flight went off safely, and Gagarin became a poster boy for the communist world and is still a national idol 53 years after his death in a jet training accident. “Poyekhali!” (Off we go!), the cosmonaut shouted as he took off at 9:07am Moscow time on April 12, 1961.

#FIRST MAN TO ORBIT THE EARTH FREE#

In a letter to his wife, Valentina, Gagarin asked her to raise their daughters “not as little princesses, but as real people”, and to feel free to remarry if his mission proved fatal. The flight was limited to a single orbit because of questions about weightlessness, Gagarin was supposed to parachute out of the capsule on return because a soft-landing system was not ready yet. Travelling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. Gagarin’s mission on April 12, 1961, marked a historic achievement for the Soviet Union, which beat the United States in a tight race to launch the first human into space. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin a (9 March 1934 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space. Russia on Monday celebrated the 60th anniversary of the legendary flight that made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space, a major source of national pride for millions of his countrymen.

First man to orbit the earth