Yuri Gagarin
The Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first human in space, orbiting Earth once and turning into an instant global icon.
On the morning of April 12, 1961, a 27-year-old Soviet air force lieutenant became the first human being to leave the planet. Yuri Gagarin's flight lasted 108 minutes, circled the Earth exactly once, and made him almost instantly the most famous person alive. Coming four years after Sputnik and only days before the Bay of Pigs disaster, it deepened a growing dread in Washington that the Soviets were simply winning the future.
One hundred and eight minutes
Vostok 1 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and Gagarin marked the moment with a single word that became legendary: Poyekhali, let's go. His capsule reached a peak altitude of about 327 kilometers and made one full orbit. Gagarin himself was largely a passenger. Soviet engineers were unsure how a human mind and body would cope with weightlessness, so the spacecraft was flown automatically from the ground, with the manual controls locked behind a code sealed in an envelope in case of emergency. As the capsule descended, Gagarin ejected at roughly seven kilometers up and parachuted to the ground separately from his craft, landing in a field near the Volga River, where a startled farmer and her granddaughter watched an orange-suited stranger drift down from the sky. The Soviets concealed that separate landing for years, because the international rules for an official record required the pilot to come down inside his vehicle.
A carefully chosen hero
Gagarin was almost engineered for the role. He was the son of a carpenter from the village of Klushino, which had been occupied by German troops during the war, giving him an unimpeachably humble and patriotic backstory. Trained as a fighter pilot, he was picked from the first group of twenty cosmonauts partly because he was small, just 1.57 meters tall, which suited the cramped Vostok cabin, and partly because of an easy, disarming smile that photographed beautifully. After the flight the Soviet state sent him around the world as living proof of socialist achievement, and the smile did as much diplomatic work as the mission itself.
The price of the icon
Fame turned out to be its own kind of cage. The state was reluctant to risk its greatest symbol on another spaceflight and steered him toward ceremonial duties, though he pushed hard to keep flying. On March 27, 1968, Gagarin was killed when the MiG-15 trainer jet he was flying crashed near the town of Kirzhach. He was 34. The exact cause has been argued over ever since. The carpenter's son who had ridden a rocket past the edge of the atmosphere and grinned his way across the globe was gone within seven years of the flight that made him immortal, but the image endured: the first human face ever sent above the sky.