Who was the first person in space?

A carpenter’s son on top of a missile

Gagarin grew up in Klushino, west of Moscow in the Smolensk region, where his father worked as a carpenter on a collective farm. Born in 1934, he trained as a foundry worker, took flying lessons at a local aero club and joined the air force. In 1960 he was one of twenty young pilots chosen to train in secret as cosmonauts. The capsule was cramped, so small men had an edge, and Gagarin was short. His backup on launch day was Gherman Titov.

Vostok 1 lifted off at 9:07 Moscow time on April 12, 1961, from the launch site on the steppe of Kazakhstan that the world would come to know as Baikonur. On the radio, counting off the stages, was Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer whose name the public learned only from his obituary in 1966. As the engines lit, Gagarin answered with one word.

Poyekhali! (Let’s go!)

Why “Poyekhali!”?

It was not a slogan. Soviet test pilots used the word as an everyday “off we go,” instead of the formal command for takeoff, and their instructor, Mark Gallai, used it on simulator runs. Gagarin said afterward that he picked it to keep his voice ordinary and to calm the people on the ground, who knew that some test dogs before him had never come back.

108 minutes

The flight was one orbit, and Gagarin did not steer it. The controls were locked; a code to unlock them sat in a sealed envelope, in case of emergency. During the flight he was promoted from senior lieutenant to major. Over Africa the braking rocket fired. About seven kilometers above the ground he ejected, as planned, and came down under his own parachute while the capsule landed nearby. The Soviet Union kept that detail quiet for years, because the rules for aviation records expected a pilot to land with his craft.

He came down near the city of Engels, in the Saratov region, on the banks of the Volga. A woman and a girl watched a stranger in an orange suit walk across the field. He told them he was a Soviet like them, back from space, and asked for a telephone. Two days later Khrushchev met him at a Moscow airport, and a crowd filled Red Square.

Why an American was not first

Washington was about three weeks behind. NASA’s Alan Shepard was ready in March 1961, but after a glitch on the previous test, Wernher von Braun’s team insisted on one more unmanned flight of the Redstone rocket. It flew on March 24 and went well. Gagarin orbited on April 12. On May 5 Shepard rode Freedom 7 straight up and back down: fifteen minutes, no orbit, because the Redstone was not powerful enough to reach one. The first American to orbit, John Glenn, followed on February 20, 1962. Gagarin’s flight also pushed President Kennedy toward a goal no one had yet reached: the Moon.

What came after

Gagarin never flew in space again. He became the most famous man alive, toured the world, and died on March 27, 1968, at 34, when his training jet crashed. Russia marks every April 12 as Cosmonautics Day, and since 2011 the United Nations has kept the date as the International Day of Human Space Flight. In July 1969 Apollo 11’s crew placed a Soviet medal honoring him on the lunar surface. The flight that opened the door for him was Laika’s, four years earlier.