Yuri Gagarin

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew once around the Earth in Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961. The whole flight lasted 108 minutes.

Context

Gagarin launched from the Baikonur site in what is now Kazakhstan on 12 April 1961. His Vostok 1 capsule made one orbit at an altitude of roughly 300 kilometres before the descent module reentered the atmosphere. The total flight time is usually given as 108 minutes.

The spacecraft was controlled automatically, because designers were unsure how a person would react to weightlessness. Gagarin did not land in the capsule: he ejected at a height of several kilometres and descended by parachute near the Volga region. That detail was initially kept out of official accounts, because the international aviation body's rules for records required the pilot to land with the craft.

Less than a month later, on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a short suborbital flight of about 15 minutes. Gagarin's flight was a major milestone in the early space race, and he was killed in a training jet accident in 1968.The mission took place only about three and a half years after the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, and it showed that a human could survive the launch, weightlessness and return. Soviet and later Russian sources describe the flight in detail, but some figures, such as the exact altitude of the orbit, vary a little between accounts.