Yuri Gagarin
1934 – 1968 · Russia
Known for: The first human being to travel into space, aboard Vostok 1 in 1961
“Poyekhali. Let us go.”
Biography
Yuri Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in Klushino, a village west of Moscow, the third of four children of a carpenter and a dairy worker on a state farm. German troops occupied the village in October 1941, burned down the school and took over the family house; the Gagarins spent twenty one months in a mud hut behind it, and the two eldest children were deported to Poland for forced labour and did not come home until 1945. After the war the family moved to Gzhatsk, where a former airman taught the boys mathematics and science. At sixteen Gagarin was apprenticed as a foundryman at a steel plant near Moscow, then sent on to a technical school in Saratov to study tractors, and there he joined the local flying club, learning first on a biplane and then on a Yak-18.
Accepted in 1955 to the air force pilots' school at Orenburg, he nearly failed the course over his landings, until an instructor gave him a cushion to sit on that improved his view from the cockpit. He was commissioned in November 1957 with fewer than 170 hours in the air and posted to Luostari, an airfield in the far north near the Norwegian border, flying MiG-15s. In 1960 he was one of six pilots taken from the first cosmonaut intake and prepared for the earliest flights, small enough for the Vostok capsule and steady under the medical tests. On the morning of 12 April 1961 he was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe, made a single orbit of the Earth and was back on the ground 108 minutes later, the first human being to leave the planet and return. He was twenty seven years old.
The years that followed were spent being famous. Made a Hero of the Soviet Union, he toured the world as the human face of Soviet science, was elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1962 and appointed deputy director of training at the cosmonaut centre that now bears his name. He served on the backup crew for Soyuz 1 and lost his friend Vladimir Komarov when that flight ended in a fatal crash, after which the authorities, unwilling to risk a national hero, kept him out of space for good. He returned to flying ordinary aircraft in February 1968, having completed a course at the Zhukovsky engineering academy, and five weeks later, on 27 March, the MiG-15 he was piloting with the instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near Kirzhach and killed them both. He was thirty four. The town of his schooldays was renamed after him, and 12 April is still marked as the anniversary of the first human flight into space.