Yuri Gagarin

First human space flight celebrated

Yuri Gagarin (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the 1st human to the journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.

It will be marked by ceremonies and a 50-gun salute at the Kremlin in Moscow.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said it was a "revolutionary" event that changed the world.

Gagarin's achievement earned him instant global stardom, and dispelled fears humans could not survive beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Since his flight in 1961, more than 500 men and women have followed in his footsteps.

Before Gagarin, no-one knew for sure if a human could withstand the conditions in space, says the BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Moscow; some believed weightlessness would induce madness, that the G-forces on take off and re-entry would crush the body, and there was concern over the effects of radiation.

But when Gagarin's face and voice were beamed down from space, the world saw that the cosmos was not to be feared - it was to be explored, our correspondent says.

Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia), on 9 March 1934. The adjacent town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 in his honour. His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. While manual labourers are described in official reports as "peasants", this may be an oversimplification if applied to his parents — his mother was reportedly a voracious reader, and his father a skilled carpenter. 

Yuri was the third of 4 children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked. Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. After a German officer took over their house, the family constructed a small mud hut where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation. His 2 older siblings were deported to Nazi Germany for slave labour in 1943, and did not return until after the war. In 1946, the family moved to Gzahtsk.