Born March 9, 1934,
Klushino, Russia
Died March 27, 1968,
Near Moscow, Russia
Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin’s successful orbit of Earth was a technical triumph for the Soviet Union that came at the height of the Soviet-American rivalry for dominance in space exploration. His flight is also considered to have inaugurated modern space exploration. Although Gagarin never participated in another space venture, he became a goodwill ambassador and a leader in Russia’s cosmonaut training program. His career was cut short when he died in a training mission in 1968.
Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the village of Klushino near the town of Gzhatsk, where his mother and father worked on a collective farm. Gagarin was forced to quit school in 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. For a while the Gagarins lived in a dugout shelter because their home was occupied by Germans. When the Germans retreated, they took two of Gagarin’s sisters with them as forced laborers. The sisters were able to return after the war.
When he finished school in Gzhatsk, Gagarin moved to a suburb of Moscow where he worked in a steel factory and apprenticed as a foundryman. After a year, however, he was accepted into a technical college in the Russian town of Saratov on the Volga River. During his fourth year in college Gagarin enrolled in aviation courses at a nearby flying school, taking his first ride in an airplane and making a parachute jump. In 1955 he graduated from college with honors and also earned his ground school diploma from the flying school. During the summer of that year, he went to an aviation camp where he learned how to fly.
Gagarin was then accepted for training at the Orenburg Pilot Training School and graduated two years later. He met his future wife, Valentina, in Orenburg. He joined the Soviet Air Force and volunteered for a difficult assignment in the Russian Arctic while Valentina finished her nurse’s training in Moscow. They were married in 1957 and had their first child, a daughter, in 1958.
After passing a series of tests, Gagarin was secretly accepted into the cosmonaut training school. He had joined the Communist Party in the summer of 1958. Around the time when the Gagarins’s second daughter was born, in March 1961, Gagarin revealed to his wife that he had not only been training to go into space, but he had also been selected to become the first man in space.
The Soviets had been preparing for the first manned spaceflight since May 1960, when they launched a series of Vostok test rockets. The tests were initially unsuccessful: the first rocket had not been able to return to Earth and the second exploded in midair. The third rocket successfully launched and retrieved two dogs in space; in December 1960, however, two rockets crashed with dogs on board. The program was then shut down for three months while the rockets were redesigned. Sputnik 9 was launched on March 9, 1961, and Sputnik 10 on March 25. Since both launches were successful the decision was made to go ahead with the manned flight.
The final assembly of the Vostok (East), the rocket to be used in the manned flight, took place at the Soviet space center of Tyuratam in the Republic of Kazakhstan. As part of a plan to keep the preparations secret, the Soviets always referred to it as the Baikonur Space Center; Tyuratam is actually located 200 miles southwest of Baikonur on a spur of the main railroad line between Moscow and Tashkent. Gagarin was scheduled to be the first cosmonaut to enter space on April 8; Gherman Titov was to be his backup. On April 10 at 4 p.m. the Soviet State Commission on Space approved the final plans for launch. At 5 a.m. on April 11 the rocket was towed to the launch pad.
At 1 p.m. on April 11, 1961, Gagarin was driven to the launch pad, accompanied by Sergei Korolov, the chief architect of the Soviet space program. Gagarin was presented to the assembly workers, and he and Korolov spent an hour going through the final checks and procedures. The next morning, Gagarin and Titov were awakened at 5:30 a.m.; sensors were attached to their bodies to monitor pulse, blood pressure, and other functions. Before boarding the Vostok, at 7:30 a.m., Gagarin made a brief speech: “Am I happy, setting out on this space flight? Of course I am. In all times and epochs the greatest happiness for man has been to take part in new discoveries.”
After Gagarin had entered the Vostok, he had to wait an hour and a half for the final countdown. He would have no control over the spacecraft himself; all procedures would be performed by the ground control crew. If there was a malfunction, a secret code would allow him to operate the controls manually. Gagarin took off at 9:07 a.m. on April 12, 1961. His first recorded word was “Poyekhali!”—“Let’s go!” Nine minutes into the flight, the Vostok reached maximum pressure at 6 g’s, which is six times the weight of gravity. The flight was officially announced on Radio Moscow at 10:00 a.m.
During the flight Gagarin went in an orbit that took him across Siberia and over Japan, then southeast to the tip of South America and northeast across West Africa. As the Vostok passed over various countries, he radioed greetings from the Soviet people. Gagarin described his flight: “I saw for the first time the spherical shape of the Earth. You can see its curvature when looking into the horizon. It is unique and beautiful.” He was the first human to see the roundness of Earth. The age of space exploration had been launched.
Gagarin made one complete orbit of Earth during a flight that lasted 108 minutes and reached an altitude of 327 kilometers. While in orbit, he experienced weightlessness; he also ate and drank in order to test man’s ability to perform these acts in space. At 10:25 a.m., the Vostok passed over West Africa; retrorockets fired Gagarin back into Earth’s atmosphere. He lost radio contact with Earth for a while and his body was subjected to 8 to 10 g’s of force. At an altitude of 8,000 meters, the hatch on the Vostok blew off and Gagarin fired from his ejector seat. As the parachutes unfolded he drifted down into a potato field near the village of Smelovka not far from the city of Saratov. The first person Gagarin saw as he landed was a woman planting potatoes with her six-year-old daughter. “I must report my return to earth!” he yelled to her.
After the safe landing Gagarin was taken to the nearest airstrip where Titov arrived in a plane to greet him. He was then flown to a villa on the Volga to rest and celebrate. On April 14 he was summoned to Moscow where he was greeted by Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, and an enormous crowd. Gagarin was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the Order of Lenin; he was also made Pilot Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union. His arrival was broadcast live throughout the world, another engineering first. Gagarin’s parents came from their village to greet him, his mother wearing her best shawl and he father a carpenter’s cap. Throughout the republic monuments were raised and streets and towns were renamed in his honor.
Although Gagarin never had an opportunity to go into space again, he traveled triumphantly all over the world representing the Soviet Union. After his travels he was named commander of the cosmonaut training team in 1963 and elected to the Supreme Soviet. He trained as a backup for Soyuz I, which was launched on April 23, 1967. When the cosmonaut who actually flew in Soyuz I was killed during reentry, there were rumors that Gagarin had been chosen for the first Soviet landing on the Moon.
The truth of the rumors was never to be tested. On March 17, 1968, Gagarin and another pilot were killed on a routine jet training flight about 30 miles east of Moscow. Shocked at Gagarin’s sudden and unexpected death, the Soviet Union gave him a state funeral. The town of Gzhatsk, where he went to school as a child, was renamed Gagarin. The cosmonaut training center was also renamed in his honor, and his office at the center remains exactly as he left it.
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