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Baikonur Cosmodrome, Soviet Union
64 years ago

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel to outer space. Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:07 a.m. Moscow time, his Vostok 1 spacecraft completed one orbit of the Earth in 108 minutes before re-entering the atmosphere. Gagarin ejected at an altitude of 7 kilometres and parachuted to the ground in a field near Saratov, landing near a startled farmer and her daughter.

He was 27 years old. The son of a carpenter and a dairy farm worker, he had grown up in a village occupied by German forces during the Second World War, graduated from a factory vocational school, joined the Soviet Air Force, and been selected from a group of twenty cosmonauts for the historic flight. The selection was partly based on psychological stability and physical fitness; it was also based on his appearance and charisma — he would need to represent the Soviet Union to the world.

The mission involved risks that would be considered extraordinary today. Soviet engineers assigned the probability of Gagarin's survival at approximately 50%. The ejection system had not been fully tested. The life support systems were of uncertain reliability. No one knew with certainty that a human being could function in zero gravity for 108 minutes. Gagarin had been told that if the automatic systems failed, he could override them manually — but that the code to unlock the manual controls had been written on a piece of paper in a sealed envelope, on the grounds that a sane person could look up a three-digit number.

The official Soviet announcement was carefully managed. The timing of the flight and its success were classified until moments before launch — in case it failed. The word 'Poyekhali!' (Let's go!) that Gagarin reportedly said at launch became one of the most celebrated utterances in Soviet history. The global reaction was extraordinary: the United States, whose own astronaut Alan Shepard would not fly until three weeks later, was stunned by its defeat in the most symbolic race of the Cold War.

Gagarin never flew in space again. The Soviet state declared him too valuable to risk on another mission and assigned him to ceremonial and public diplomacy roles. He died in a training aircraft crash on March 27, 1968, at the age of 34 — seven years after his single orbital flight. The circumstances of the crash have never been fully explained. April 12 is now observed internationally as Yuri's Night.

On April 12, 1961, a young man from a collective farm was launched into the void on a mission that had roughly even odds of killing him. He orbited the Earth once, re-entered the atmosphere in a fireball, ejected at 7,000 metres, and landed in a field. He was smiling in every photograph taken afterward. Yuri Gagarin gave humanity its first proof that it could leave its own planet — and survived long enough to tell the story.

How much do you know about Yuri Gagarin, the Vostok program, the Space Race, and the extraordinary engineering and courage that put the first human being into orbit?

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