Yuri Gagarin

• 1. Introduction

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  Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on the 12th of April 1961, and did it in 108 minutes. The spacecraft was called Vostok 1. The call sign Gagarin chose for himself was Kedr, the Russian word for Siberian pine. At the moment of liftoff, when mission designer Sergei Korolev announced the ignition sequence and wished him a good flight, Gagarin replied with a single word: Poyekhali. It means, roughly, "Off we go." That word became shorthand across the Eastern Bloc for the beginning of the Space Age itself. How did a carpenter's son from a small village, a young man who once sabotaged Nazi soldiers as a child, become the first human being to leave Earth? And what happened to him after he returned?

• 2. The Village of Klushino

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  Gagarin was born on the 9th of March 1934 in Klushino, a village in the Western Oblast of the Russian SFSR. His father Aleksey was a carpenter on a collective farm; his mother Anna worked as a dairy farmer. Yuri was the third of four children, sandwiched between an older brother Valentin born in 1924, an older sister Zoya born in 1927, and a younger brother Boris born in 1936. The family's world collapsed on the 18th of October 1941, when Nazi forces captured Klushino. On their first day in the village, the Germans burned down the school. They burned another 27 houses and compelled the remaining residents to work the farms feeding the occupying soldiers. Those who refused were beaten or sent to a concentration camp at Gzhatsk. A Nazi officer seized the Gagarin home. The family was permitted to build a mud hut behind the house, roughly 3 by 3 metres, and they lived in it for 21 months. Gagarin's father was beaten for refusing to cooperate with the occupiers and eventually spent the rest of the war in a hospital, first as a patient and then as an orderly. His mother was hospitalised after a soldier gashed her leg with a scythe. In early 1943, Yuri's elder siblings Valentin and Zoya were deported to Poland for slave labour. The rest of the family believed them dead. Yuri, still a child, became a saboteur. After a German soldier, known to the children only as "the Devil", tried to hang his younger brother Boris on an apple tree using the boy's scarf, Yuri poured soil into the soldier's battery tanks and mixed up the chemical supplies the soldier needed for his work. The two elder siblings eventually escaped from Poland, were found by Soviet soldiers, and did not return home until 1945. After the occupation ended, Gagarin's father Aleksey helped the Red Army locate mines buried in the roads by the retreating Germans.

• 3. From Foundry to Flight School

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  In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk, and Gagarin continued his schooling in what he later described as a crude building run by a young woman who had volunteered to teach. The students learned to read from a discarded Soviet military manual. A former airman later joined the school to teach maths and science, Gagarin's favourite subjects. Gagarin also built model aeroplanes as a boy, a fascination sparked when a Yakovlev fighter plane crash-landed in Klushino during the war. At sixteen, in 1950, he began an apprenticeship as a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy near Moscow. He completed the seventh grade and a vocational course in mouldmaking and foundry work simultaneously, graduating with honours from both in 1951. Selected for further training in Saratov, he studied tractors, but simultaneously volunteered at a local flying club as a cadet. He trained first on a biplane and then on a Yakovlev Yak-18, earning extra money on weekends as a dock labourer on the River Volga. In 1955, he was accepted to the First Chkalov Higher Air Force Pilots School in Orenburg, where he later graduated to flying the MiG-15. He nearly lost his place in the programme when he struggled twice to land a two-seat trainer aircraft. His regiment commander gave him one more chance. His flight instructor placed a cushion under him to raise his sightline from the cockpit, and he landed successfully. On the 5th of November 1957, Gagarin was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces, having logged 166 hours and 47 minutes of flight time. He was posted to the Luostari Air Base in Murmansk Oblast, close to the Norwegian border, where he flew MiG-15bis aircraft with the 769th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

• 4. Chosen from 154

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  Gagarin expressed interest in space exploration after the launch of Luna 3 on the 6th of October 1959, and his endorsement for the Soviet space programme came from Lieutenant Colonel Babushkin. The selection process was rigorous. A Central Flight Medical Commission led by Major General Konstantin Fyodorovich Borodin reviewed a pool of 154 qualified pilots short-listed by their Air Force units. Military physicians narrowed the field to 29 candidates, of whom 20 were approved by a government Credential Committee. The first twelve, Gagarin among them, were approved on the 7th of March 1960. The programme's chief engineer Sergei Korolev had set physical limits to fit the constraints of the Vostok capsule: candidates had to weigh under 72 kilograms and stand no taller than 1.70 metres. Gagarin was 1.57 metres tall. Training began at Khodynka Airfield in central Moscow on the 15th of March 1960. Fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov later described the physical regimen as comparable to training for the Olympic Games. In April 1960, parachute training in Saratov Oblast required each man to complete roughly 40 to 50 jumps from varying altitudes, over both land and water. Psychological endurance tests included an isolation chamber where the air was slowly pumped out, simulating oxygen starvation, and sessions in an anechoic chamber in complete darkness. Gagarin spent ten days in that chamber, from the 26th of July to the 5th of August. A Soviet Air Force doctor's evaluation of him in August 1960 described his "fantastic memory", his "sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings", and noted that he "does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right." When the cosmonaut candidates were asked anonymously to name, besides themselves, who they would most want as the first to fly, all but three chose Gagarin. On the 30th of May 1960, he was selected for an accelerated group of six known as the Vanguard Six, from which the first Vostok pilot would be chosen. At the State Commission meeting on the 8th of April 1961, Lieutenant-General Nikolai Kamanin formally nominated Gagarin as the primary pilot, with Gherman Titov as his backup.

• 5. 108 Minutes Above Earth

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  At 6:07 am UTC on the 12th of April 1961, Vostok 3KA-3 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The five first-stage engines fired until the four side boosters fell away. The core stage then separated in a suborbital trajectory, and the upper stage carried Gagarin to orbit. In his post-flight report, Gagarin described the experience of weightlessness as feeling "as if you were hanging in a horizontal position in straps." In his autobiography, released the same year, he wrote that he sang a Soviet patriotic song, "The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows," during re-entry. During the flight itself, he was promoted to the rank of major and recognised as a qualified Military Pilot 1st Class by a special order issued while he was still in orbit. At approximately 23,000 feet, Gagarin ejected from the descending capsule as planned and landed by parachute. The Fedération Aéronautique Internationale initially posed a challenge: its rules at the time required a pilot to land with the craft. Gagarin and Soviet officials at first declined to acknowledge that he had not done so, an omission that became apparent only after Titov's flight on Vostok 2 four months later. The FAI nonetheless certified and reaffirmed all of Gagarin's records and revised its own rules. Among the technical gear he wore during the flight, he kept personal time using a Sturmanskie watch.

• 6. Hero, Celebrity, and Constraint

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  On the 14th of April 1961, a parade estimated at 12 miles long drew millions of people to Moscow, concluding at Red Square. Nikita Khrushchev personally awarded Gagarin the title Hero of the Soviet Union in a ceremony at the Kremlin. Other cities staged mass demonstrations described as second in scale only to the World War II Victory Parades. On the 15th of April, Gagarin faced a press conference in Moscow attended by roughly 1,000 reporters. Three months after the flight, he visited the United Kingdom, going to London and Manchester. In Manchester, despite heavy rain, he refused an umbrella, kept the roof of his convertible car open, and stood so the crowds could see him. Over the following years, he accepted invitations from about 30 countries. US President John F. Kennedy barred Gagarin from visiting the United States. Fame brought complications. Kamanin, his supervisor, documented concerns about Gagarin's drinking, believing that the sudden rise to celebrity had placed him repeatedly in social situations where alcohol was expected. Acquaintances described him as a "sensible drinker" before his rise to fame. Soviet officials, including Kamanin, worked to keep him away from further flights, noting he was "too dear to mankind to risk his life for the sake of an ordinary space flight." In 1962, he was elected as a deputy of the Soviet of the Union and joined the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. He became a lieutenant colonel on the 12th of June 1962 and received the rank of colonel on the 6th of November 1963. He spent several years at Star City working on designs for a reusable spacecraft, and on the 20th of December that year was named Deputy Training Director of the cosmonaut facility.

• 7. Soyuz 1 and the Grounding

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  By the mid-1960s, Gagarin was working to re-qualify as a fighter pilot after five years without flying duty. He served as backup pilot to his friend Vladimir Komarov on the Soyuz 1 mission, having been replaced by Komarov in April 1966 and reassigned to Soyuz 3. Kamanin had opposed Gagarin's return to cosmonaut training, noting he had gained weight and that his flying skills had deteriorated. Gagarin himself protested that additional safety precautions were needed before Soyuz 1 launched, a launch he described as rushed due to political pressure. On the day of the Soyuz 1 flight, Gagarin accompanied Komarov to the rocket and later relayed instructions from ground control as multiple system failures developed aboard the spacecraft. Soyuz 1 crash-landed when its parachutes failed to open, killing Komarov instantly. After the crash, Soviet authorities permanently banned Gagarin from spaceflight and initially also grounded him from flying aircraft solo. He was temporarily relieved of duties to complete his academic studies, having been enrolled in a correspondence programme at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy since September 1960. On the 17th of February 1968, he successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on spaceplane aerodynamic configuration and graduated cum laude.

• 8. The Crash Near Kirzhach

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  Five weeks after graduating from the Zhukovsky Academy, on the 27th of March 1968, Gagarin and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin took off on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky air base. Their MiG-15UTI crashed near the town of Kirzhach. The bodies of both men were cremated and their ashes interred in the walls of the Kremlin. The cause of the crash has never been definitively established. At least three separate investigations were conducted, by the Air Force, by official government commissions, and by the KGB. The KGB report, declassified in March 2003, concluded that an air-traffic controller gave Gagarin outdated weather information, and that conditions had deteriorated significantly by the time of his flight. The ground crew also left external fuel tanks attached to the aircraft, which Gagarin's planned activities required to be absent. The investigation concluded the MiG-15 entered a spin, possibly after a bird strike or a sudden evasive manoeuvre. Because the crew believed they were at a higher altitude than they actually were, they could not recover in time. A theory advanced in 2005 by the original crash investigator suggests a cabin air vent was accidentally left open, causing oxygen deprivation. A related theory holds that the crew detected the open vent and executed a rapid dive to reach lower altitude, losing consciousness in the process and crashing. Alexei Leonov, who was conducting parachute training nearby that day and heard two loud booms, believes a Sukhoi Su-15 passed within 10 to 20 metres of their plane at below its minimum altitude while breaking the sound barrier, sending the MiG-15UTI into an uncontrolled spin. On the 12th of April 2007, the Kremlin vetoed a proposed new investigation. Documents declassified in April 2011 from a 1968 Central Committee commission concluded the aircraft entered a "super-critical flight regime" after a sharp manoeuvre to avoid either a weather balloon or the upper boundary of a cloud layer. The crater on the far side of the Moon bearing Gagarin's name, measured at 262 kilometres wide and named in 1970, endures as one of the few memorials that no political decision can revoke.