yuri gagarin biography book

April 12, 2021

First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut

It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind— Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond.

Walker discusses his new book  Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space , out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy—happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively.

Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event; how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission; and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.

By Pakinam Amer

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space.

Getty Images

Pakinam Amer: It was at 09.07 am Moscow time on April 12, 1961 that a new chapter of history was written. On that day, without much fanfare, Russia sent the first human to space and it happened in secrecy, with very few hints in advance.

Yuri Gagarin, 27-year-old Russian ex-fighter pilot and cosmonaut, was launched into space inside a tiny capsule on top of a ballistic missile, originally designed to carry a warhead. 

The spherical capsule was blasted into orbit, circling the Earth at a speed of about 300 miles per minute, 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

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Accounts vary on exactly how long Gagarin spent circling our blue planet before he re-entered the atmosphere, hurtling towards Earth, gravity rapidly pulling him in.

Some say it was 108 [ one hundred and eight ] minutes. Stephen Walker, my guest today and the author of a new book on Gagarin’s historic feat and the world it happened in, puts at 106 [ one hundred and six ].

Give or take a few minutes, that space venture aboard Vostok 1 — orbiting the earth at a maximum altitude of roughly 200 miles and putting the first man in space — still set the record for space achievement.

It sparked a space race between the US and Russia that, 8 eight years later, put other men on the moon for that small step hailed as a giant leap.

It is said that Gagarin whistled a love song as his capsule prepared for launch

One man, five feet five, in an orange space suit, strapped into a seat inside a capsule attached to a modified R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. … 

… 106 minutes or 108, man’s first pilgrimage around the planet we call home

... a solitary journey that is still celebrated as monumental and game-changing 60 years on.

This is Pakinam Amer, and you’re listening to Science Talk, a Scientific American podcast. And today, my guest Stephen Walker and I will talk about a legendary astronaut and a super secret space mission that changed everything.

Stephen Walker: [I] came across a book that was written by a guy called [Vladimir] Suvorov who had kept a diary, a secret diary of the secret Soviet space program which he was filming from about 1959 right the way through into the 60s and it was fascinating because it was so secret that he wasn't even able to tell his wife what he was doing but he was away filming all this stuff and he says in his diary this felt like science fiction.

It was just so incredible what was happening in secret and I thought myself I want to find the footage because if I can find that footage which is apparently shot in color and on 35 millimeter I can appraise that footage and turn it into a theatrical feature film which gives you the inside image, the inside sight into this incredible first step to space to the beyond.”

That was Stephen Walker, British director and New York Times bestselling author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima. And this was his attempt to dust off decades-old footage showing months of preparing Vostok 1 to put a Soviet citizen into orbit before the Americans.

Stephen traveled to Russia, tracked down eye witnesses who worked at the top secret rocket site in the USSR, shot the interviews in high-definition and gathered some raw, never-before-seen insider material shot between 1959 and 61, that he describes as pristine.

But he couldn’t get access to the rest of the footage. What he had was great but wasn’t enough for a full feature film.

So instead, he wrote a book.

It’s called Beyond and it’s published by HarperCollins.

Pakinam Amer: So Stephen, you’re one of those people who actually wrote a book in lockdown.

Stephen Walker: It was incredibly exciting in a way but it was weird, because all this other stuff was going on outside. And I didn't see it. Really. Of course, I did see it. But when people talk about Corona for me at that point, I wasn't thinking about the Coronavirus, I was thinking about the corona spy satellite system that the Americans had in 1961, which I talk about in my book where they were spying on secret Soviet missile complexes. I mean, I was in a different world. I was literally in 1961. And I was also in 2020. It was a really weird experience>

Pakinam Amer: But you began weaving the yarn in 2012?

Stephen Walker: Yeah, I mean, I've done lots of other things since then. I did three trips to Russia. One in 2012. One in 2013. I think I actually had another in 2014 or 2015. The last one was actually a short trip to St. Petersburg, where I met this incredible couple and one of things is wonderful about the Soviet space program at that time, was that actually very unlike NASA, which seemed to have a real major problem about women being anywhere near NASA.

I mean, actually women were not even allowed in the launch blockhouses at Cape Canaveral in 1961. They were forbidden to get in them … There was one woman, a wonderful woman, I interviewed called Joanne Morgan, who was the only woman engineer of all of them [who was allowed] in the launch Center at Kennedy Space Center in 1969. For the moon landing, she's the only one woman and everybody else is a guy. And back in 61, she was telling me over crab cocktails in Cape Canaveral. She told me that you know, she was actually not even allowed to go into the launch of the launch blockhouse, she was forbidden to go in.

Whereas actually in the USSR, oddly enough, it wasn't like that. And I interviewed this couple called Vladimir and Khionia Kraskin, and they're in my book. And they were this wonderful husband and wife in their 80s. And they entertained me in this wonderful little Soviet-style flat in Saint Petersburg, and told me glorious stories about how they were both engineers, telemetry engineers, that have moved there with their child to this weird place in the middle of the Kazakh Steppe, you know, where this new rocket cosmodrome was being built.

And they actually were working right at the epicenter of the Soviet space program, and for that matter, the Soviet missile program, and these were their glory days. It was quite an incredible thing to sort of talk to them both about and they were there when Gagarin launched and with all of that stuff, they were there all the way through it. It was wonderful; it was so Russian, we ended up sitting and drinking vodka until four o'clock in the morning.

I interviewed them on camera, and we had this wonderful, it was quite glorious. This guy had actually out of chocolate wrappers from Ferrero Roche chocolates had constructed a two-meter-high replica of the R-7 rocket that took Yuri Gagarin into space and it was in his sitting room. It was Incredible. It was all made out of chocolate, you know, gold wrappers, it was beautiful.

And, and so I kind of fell in love with these people. And I also sort of felt, you know, I want to tell their stories because they just aren't being heard by anybody. It's all moon, moon, moon, lunar, lunar, lunar. And that's great. Don't get me wrong, it's really important. It's a landmark. It's all of that I get it. But this is an amazing story. And these are amazing stories that people don't know about, and they are really exciting, and really dramatic and really touching and really moving and really, you know, epoch changing, in my opinion.”

Pakinam Amer: Stephen, when I read your book, it almost felt like a novelization of that era. It's a very intricate and intimate account of the people who were involved in that space mission. A very rich account, not just of the orbit itself, but of the tensions reminiscent of the cold war between the US and the Sovient Union, then the space race. But yours is primarily a human story. What inspired you to write it, decades down the line?

Stephen Walker: It is a major philosophical leap for humankind, this is not just advanced Soviet v. America, it really isn't. And to think of it in those terms, is to miss the essential point. Because what I believe

is that the first human being in space is one of the most epoch call moments in all human history.

For essentially three and a half billion years since, or any life began on this planet, anything, okay? This man is the first to leave, he is the first human eye to look down on the biosphere from outside, he is the first--to use the words of Plato--he is the first to escape the cave that we are all in. He steps into the beyond; it is that very first step outside. Nobody had seen this before.

It is one of the things that when you actually put yourself back into that world at that time, and Gagarin very quickly became the most famous man on the planet. You understand why? Because what this is all pre-moon, none of that had happened is this guy was seeing something that no one else in all history whether a human or anything had ever seen. When he looked out in that porthole window, he saw the stars, he saw the earth. And he saw a sunrise in fast motion, and a sunset in fast motion. He saw the incredible fragility of the earth. He saw what we're all destroying, frankly, right now, he saw all of that. And he was the first to see it.

So for me, that is a philosophical psychological quarter, which will be emotional, it is somebody stepping out of the cave into the sunlight as it were to pursue the metaphor and blinking in the light and going, Oh, my God, what's this? What's this that's out here? What is this? He was the first to do it at incredible risk.

It happened because of the politics. It happened because of the race. It happened because of the iron curtain. We know all of those things are valid at all that but actually, in the end, the event, the achievement, better than that the moment is bigger than all of those things way, way, way bigger than all of those things, three and a half billion years. And something changes on April the 12th 1961, at you know, ten past nine in the morning, Moscow time. And that's this. And that's the story.

So for me, it's everything. That's the first thing that kind of animated me to write the book. And I felt that I even had a sign above my desk saying, “remember, Stephen, three and a half billion years, remember,” I kept thinking that when I started to get into the politics too much or got a bit lost in whatever details, as one always does, and pull back from it. What is this really about?

And the other thing that I thought was really important about this. And it animated my writing too. I'm not interested in writing history books that end up in library stacks for decades. I mean, I'm a filmmaker. I want to reach people. And what I tried to do in this story was tell people about people. What interests me most of all, I'm interested, obviously in the technical achievement and really interested in the politics. Of course I am. I couldn't write this book if I wasn't. But what I'm really, really interested in people.

Who was this guy? What was this rivalry like between him and this guy, Titov? He was [the Soviet] number two.

There's an incredible story there, which I kind of talked about, where you get these two men who are both competing to be the first human in space. They are best friends. They are next door neighbors. And they have a child each the same kind of age little infant child, but Titov's child Igor dies at the age of eight months, right in the middle of their Cosmonaut Training, and the Gagarin husband and wife with their own child about the same age, a little girl ...  they are incredible to him. They are and his wife, Tamara, they are locked in embrace, they are supportive, they are wonderful. And I know this because I interviewed Titov's wife in Moscow. And she told me all of this, it was quite incredible. She was in tears when she told me this stuff.

And yet, these two men with this love with this tragedy that they kind of shared and helped each other through living next door and on adjoining balconies and crossing over each other's balconies to spend time with each other and late nights talking and drinking vodka and all those sorts of things. They're also rivals for immortality, effectively. And we're not really talking about Titov today, we're talking about Yuri Gagarin. So he lost, he lost. And yet underlying that rivalry is love.

And to me, that becomes human that becomes rich and interesting. It's not just ‘Oh, who came first,’ it's actually a real, it's a relationship of brothers, with all the complexities that fraternal relationships like that would have, you know, the rivalry, the kind of male rivalry, but also the love and the connection in the background. So it's complicated, difficult, it doesn't fit easily into boxes, but a very, very human mix of emotions that drives forward. So characters, people who make the story, this pivotal moment in human history happen, is what really excites me.

Pakinam Amer: Stephen painted an interesting picture of the world where Gagarin’s extraordinary mission happened. How back then, the Soviet Union and the United States were head to head, taking colossal risks in the race to be first in space.

Before Gagarin’s mission, the Soviet Union had already blasted the first satellite in into space, Sputnik 1.

Only three weeks after Gagarin’s earth orbit, American astronaut Alan Shepard--part of the so-called Mercury-7--was launched into space aboard a rocket called Freedom 7.

Less than a year later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962.

But Gagarin’s leap into the unknown, being a first, was terrifying.

No one knew what would happen to a person once they’re launched into space. Would they go mad? Can their body withstand it?

Like Stephen aptly describes, there was no textbook for that mission … anywhere. So what exactly were the challenges …

Stephen Walker: The challenges are physiological and psychological, the physiological challenges, some of which had been kind of looked at and dealt with some of the animal flights they do, which I write about in the book with dogs in a Soviet Union and with monkeys, and then finally, obviously a chimpanzee called Ham in the United States. But what actually, they didn't know really was what a human physiology would do in that environment.

So what you're talking about are unbelievable, first of all, acceleration forces in a rocket. Nobody, let's just get this really clear. From the beginning. Nobody had sat on top of a nuclear missile, replacing the nuclear bomb, and then firing it upwards, nobody.

And this particular missile, the R-7, was the biggest missile in the world, it was much bigger than any missile the Americans had, it was powerful enough to fly from Kazakhstan, to New York with a thermonuclear weapon on top of it... It was astonishingly radically advanced for its time. And no human had sat on top of one with a million pounds of thrust and lit the fuse and see what happens.

So they didn't know. I mean, it could blow up straight there on the pad. It could be that the physiological experiences, the actual acceleration, or G-forces could be too much for a body to withstand. And once this rocket had actually got into orbit, and the capsules there, nobody knew what weightlessness would do to a human body.

There were real fears that a human wouldn't be able to breathe properly, even obviously, in an oxygenated atmosphere. The human being wouldn't be able to swallow, for example, that weightlessness would do really, really strange things to the heart, they wouldn't beat properly. You know, nobody knew because nobody experienced weightlessness of any kind for more than a few seconds in one of those aeroplanes that simulated weightlessness with his parabolas, they kept flying. But that was only for about 20 seconds. This is going to be much, much longer than that.

So they just didn't know. They were tremendous concerns about how he'd get down again, everybody knew that a capsule returning through the atmosphere would build up massive amounts of friction, the temperatures would reach 1500 degrees centigrade, even more, you know, would it burn away? Would whatever protection he had in the form of a heat shield, or in the design of the capsule itself? Would it work already burn up as he came down? You know, would that be a problem?

And then, beyond all of those problems, there was, as I said, the psychological problem. And the psychological problem basically boiled down to very simple sentence, or rather a very simple question, but with a very simple answer. And that was, would he go insane? Was he going mad in space, because the real fear, and it was a real fear at that time.

And there were, there was psychological textbooks that were written about something called space horror , was that the first human being divorced from the planet below divorce from life or life as we know it divorce for all of that sailing alone, and this is ultimate loneliness or isolation, in the vacuum of space in his little sphere, might go mad.

So they had to think about that, too. And what they thought about as I described in my book was a very Soviet response, they decided that flight will be completely automated. So the guy wouldn't have to do anything at all inside it, except essentially endure it, whatever “endure” actually meant. But they then decided at the last moment, that if actually, something did go wrong, and he needed to take manual control, then how are they going to let him have manual control.

And they came up with this extraordinary solution, which is just utterly mad, where they basically had a three digit code, which you press on, like, the kind of thing you have in a hotel safe on the side of his capsule, and you press these three numbers, which I think will one to five; it's in the book, and that would unlock the manual controls. But then they worried that he might go so crazy that he might just do that anyway, take control, and God knows what he'll do, you know, destroy himself, defect to America, in his spacecraft.

These were proper discussions that took place, literally a few days before he flew. And in the end, what they decided to do was to put the code in an envelope, and seal the envelope, and glue it somewhere in the lining of the inside of his spacecraft. The idea being somehow-- this is crazy logic, it's not even logic-- that if he was able to find it, open it, read the code and press the correct numbers, then he won't be insane. And that was seriously discussed in a state commission of the top politicians, KGB people and space engineers, one week before Yuri Gagarin flew in space.

That's, that's what they dealt with, because they were they didn't know space, horror, insanity. So you're, again, it comes back to my saying at the very beginning, everything here is a first everything is an unknown, nobody's done it before. Nobody. And what increases that feeling of isolation that would have made the possibility of insanity a real one. Why they were so frightened was because they didn't have reliable radio communications with the ground.

They didn't have what the [American] Mercury astronauts would have, which was a chain of stations basically, in circling the globe, where they would always have somebody to talk to, and we're very used to the moon landings and there's all those, you know, communications with beeps on the end, and even with Apollo 13, the one that went wrong, they're always communicating with Mission Control in Houston. But for Gagarin's flight, I would say a substantial part of his flight.

I'm not sure if you'd actually say the majority, but a substantial part of his flight hidden nobody's talked to. He had nobody to talk to, except a microphone with a tape recorder that was installed inside his cabin. And as I say, in the book, it turns out that whoever installed the tape in the tape recorder didn't put enough tape in. So he ran out halfway around the world. And he sat there and made probably one of the few independent decisions that he made in the cabinet, in that Vostok spacecraft, which was to rewind the tape to the beginning, and then record over everything he just said. This is the first mind in space and that's what happened.

You can't really make this stuff up.

Although the radio communication with the first human who stepped beyond our planet involved few words, what we know for instance was that Yuri’s first spoken words were, “The Earth is blue, how wonderful,” Stephen includes part of the transcript of the tape that Yuri recorded during orbit aboard the capsule, as he looked out of the porthole of his capsule.

“The Earth was moving to the left, then upwards, then to the right, and downwards … I could see the horizon, the stars, the Sky,” Gagarin said. “I could see the very beautiful horizon, I could see the curvature of the Earth.”

Pakinam Amer: You’ve heard from Stephen Walker, filmmaker and author of Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space. His book is on sale today. You can get it through HarperCollins, its publisher, or wherever you buy your books. For more information visit www.stephenwalkerbeyond.com

That was Science Talk, and this is your host Pakinam Amer. Thank you for listening.

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, ORDER YOUR COPY Here.

“a thrilling piece of storytelling” the sunday times, 12 april 1961.

“Always thrilling … brings a huge amount that is fresh and new to our understanding of the Space Race.”

Daily telegraph, explore humanity’s greatest adventure.

Twenty-seven-years old, a loyal communist and father of two, Yuri Gagarin blasts into the skies inside a tiny cannonball-shaped capsule at the top of a modified Soviet R-7 missile – replacing the nuclear warhead it was originally designed for.  

“The most gripping, exciting and intense book I have read in the year that I have been interviewing writers on this show. Just a wonderful book, I can't recommend it enough."

The darkest days of the cold war. the usa and ussr confront each other across an iron curtain.   their new battleground is space., two teams are training  towards that  goal, in the us there are seven  astronauts, in the ussr there are twenty cosmonauts, two teams are training  towards that goal, in the usa there are seven  astronauts.

AND The race will come down to the wire

“Exciting and fascinating. I loved every word."

“ beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller - brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.", "an exhilarating journey into space. beyond is a dramatic tour de force.", “vivid... dramatic. this entertaining history achieves lift off.", “gripping, rich in novelistic detail… highly recommended.”, “outstanding”, "cinematic.", the spectator, "scintillating.", financial times, discover the inside story of the event that shook the world.

"This book is a triumph."

Beyond  is available to order today.

Stepping into the 'Beyond': New book celebrates 60th anniversary of first man in space

Today (April 12) marks the 60th anniversary of the daring launch that sent the first human into space, paving the way for manned space exploration of the cosmos. 

On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first person to leave Earth's orbit and travel into space. His historic flight lasted 108 minutes, during which he orbited Earth in the Soviet Union's Vostok spacecraft , guided entirely by an automatic control system. This amazing feat set a significant milestone in the space race, as competition grew between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop more advanced spaceflight capabilities. With the success of Gagarin's flight, the Soviet Union had beaten the United States at putting a human in space by just about three weeks, with American astronaut Alan Shepard's suborbital flight on May 5, 1961 

In his new book, " Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space " (Harper, 2021), author and documentary filmmaker Stephen Walker recounts intimate details of the months, and years, leading up to Gagarin's historic flight, revealing the true stories of the Soviet space program as the agency prepared to launch the first human into space. Walker also explores the many parallels between the Soviet space program and NASA as the two space agencies worked separately toward a common goal: to be the first.

Related: Yuri Gagarin, first man in space (photo gallery)

Space.com sat down with Walker to discuss his new book, the early days of the space race and the historical impact of Gagarin's flight. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the book on Amazon here , on sale starting April 12. 

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Space.com: Could you talk a little bit about your research on the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States?

Stephen Walker: I was asked to develop a movie [based on] some of the secret footage that we knew had been shot in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, early 1960s, specifically about [Yuri Gagarin's] incredible flight. I knew that this stuff had all been shot secretly and so I thought, 'well, where's the footage? I've got to find this footage.' When I was commissioned to go to Russia, starting in 2012, I found some of [the footage]. Some of it is absolutely incredible — it's stuff that's never been seen before ... So our idea was going to be that we were going to press it so that it could be put on the big screen. 

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However, it became more and more difficult to secure this material, and we don't know to this day why that actually happened — it got to the point where I thought I would have to let [the movie] go. But whilst I was doing it, I was also interviewing some incredible people. I found this wonderful couple who'd been rocket engineers in Baikonur in the late 1950s and early sixties, and they were right there — not just for Yuri Gagarin, but for Sputnik — for everything. They were husband and wife who had relocated to the middle of nowhere and they were working on this secret program that they couldn't tell their parents or anyone about. I had all these amazing interviews shot in high definition for the big screen, but we didn't have enough to make the film, so I had to let it go and it was absolutely heartbreaking.

About a year and a half, two years ago, I suddenly thought, "the anniversary is coming up — the 60th anniversary of the first human in space is a kind of big deal." It's not just a Russian thing, it's not just an American thing — it's a human thing. And when you think of it like that, it becomes terribly pivotal in all of our history. We have been on this planet for millions of years, and on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first to escape the biosphere and look at it from the outside. So I saw and met and interviewed a lot more people, and I delved into a lot more archives and read a lot more books and came back. On the first day of lockdown in London in March of last year, I started writing this book. 

Related: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1: How the 1st human spaceflight worked (infographic)

Space.com: Many of your books have relied on extensive research, interviews and personal artifacts. What do you find most rewarding about this style of writing?

Walker: It's the confluence of ideas, places and things that are happening. Putting the two sides together so that you're in America [for one chapter] — you might be in Houston, Washington or Cape Canaveral — and then you're in Moscow or the Baikonur Cosmodrome . I was amazed when I put the timelines together: something was happening in Moscow at the same time something else was happening on the other side of the world in America. One example I wrote about was two days after Yuri Gagarin's flight, there was this massive party — the biggest party in Moscow's entire history. As that party takes place, president Kennedy is sitting in the White House, grim-faced, tapping his teeth with a pencil and saying, "what can we do?" And really, the decision to go to the moon — to start a new race — starts there in that meeting.

Space.com: That's actually a great segue to my next question, which was going to be about a quote you included from President John F. Kennedy when he says during that meeting, "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let's find somebody — anybody. I don't care if it's the janitor over there if he knows how." How would you describe America's reaction to the Soviet Union's success?

Walker: I think [Kennedy] realized that, politically, he was in a bad way. Three months into the job and then suddenly this thing happens. If you actually look at the news conference that [Kennedy] gives on the day of Yuri Gagarin's flight ... he looks broken and he "extends his congratulations to Soviet Premier Khrushchev." He can't even say Gagarin's name, he just says "I extend my congratulations to the man who was involved." So now America's on the back foot, while a nation that was so comprehensively destroyed by the second World War ... put a human into space. This was a signal to the world that America had lost. So, it's existential this moment — it's literally about changing the course of history. And Kennedy knows that, which is why he had that emergency meeting. We then see Kennedy on May 25, 1961 ask for money from Congress to support this bold adventure to get to the moon within the decade, which starts the road to Apollo .

Space.com: With that said, can you talk a bit about how Gagarin's first orbital flight in 1961 ultimately jumpstarted NASA's Apollo program?

Walker: The moon landings happened because Gagarin went first into space, not Alan Shepard , who was the man designated to go first on the American side. Gagarin gets there because the Soviets see Americans hesitating, while they were taking such huge risks to get there first. Arguably, if Shepard had gone first, Kennedy would not have committed the enormous funds to the [Apollo Program]. 

So what prevented Alan Shepard from going first? It's what went wrong with that first flight of the chimpanzee , Ham, when the fuel ran out half a second early, as a result of which, Ham's capsule aborted and the poor chimpanzee went through this horrific flight and nearly drowned in the Atlantic ocean. Literally that half a second, I argue, changed history. If the fuel had lasted 0.5 of a second longer, Ham's [capsule] would not have aborted and Alan Shepard would have likely [flown] in March ... and beaten the Soviet Union. Then, Kennedy would not have felt the humiliation and embarrassment, and therefore the need, to commit to a massively chancy and expensive manned lunar program.

Space.com: It's interesting that you say that because it is said that by landing on the moon, the United States effectively "won" the space race. What is your opinion? 

Walker: [America] won the second space race. When you say, "who was the first man in space?" A lot of people will say Neil Armstrong [the first man on the moon]. Gagarin is not well-known in the West, whereas in Russia, he is God. It is quite extraordinary how you cross a border, if you like, and you get a totally different perspective of history. So who lost what? The Soviet Union won the race to put a human in space ... and Americans won the race to put a man on the moon . One came after the other, so I think of it as a first space race, which generated the second one. 

Space.com: What was your inspiration for the book and what do you hope to convey to readers about Gagarin's historic spaceflight? 

Walker: What I really wanted to do was just tell a great story, most of all, which is about a pivotal moment in history. I was only a little boy when men went to the moon in 1969. I remember thinking when I was grown up I would take my kids to the moon on holiday — I really believed that. It felt terribly exciting, even as a small child. So there's obviously something that goes back to being a child of the space age. But I've always loved the idea of the freedom of being unbound from the Earth. I actually have a pilot's license and I've been flying for about 20 years ... so I do have a little sense of what it's like to kind of escape the surly bonds of Earth, even if it's only two or 3,000 feet, not in orbit.

I think it also ties back to " Shockwave ," a book I wrote about Hiroshima in 2005, which was about another piece of extraordinary world-changing technology. The change we're talking about there is about destruction — it's about destroying people, buildings, life, the planet, ultimately — and "Beyond" is sort of a sequel in a funny way; it's about another piece of technology that changed history. That is, the extraordinary moment when the first human steps into the beyond ... and sees what no eyes had ever seen before. It's about the greatness that we're capable of. 

Space.com: The book explores very intimate details about both the Mercury Seven astronauts and Vanguard Six cosmonauts. Can you explain some of the similarities and differences between the two groups?

Walker: The American astronauts were all experienced military test pilots. The Mercury Seven [astronauts] started their training around April 1959, at which point the Soviets had no such program, but they reacted to the American program and selected [candidates] from a much wider pool. The [cosmonauts] were younger by about 10 years, at least, and far less experienced. The reason for that is because the Americans managed to secure a level of actual control over their spacecraft, whereas the Soviet cosmonauts were actually just there to endure [spaceflight] without panicking. So you've got these two rather extraordinarily different teams. 

They were also different in terms of the way they lived. The Americans became celebrities; rock stars. They were on the cover of everything, particularly "Life" magazine. They were heroes to one and all, and everybody knew their names, whereas in the Soviet Union, no one was allowed to know who the [cosmonauts] were. Their families didn't know anything about them, either. They didn't have any money or exclusive deals. Instead, they lived in tiny Soviet apartments without a telephone, refrigerator or car. Their wives had to polish floors in order to make ends meet. It was two totally different worlds. And yet, what they shared was a burning ambition to be first. 

Space.com: Can you talk a bit about how the Soviet Union's and America's approaches to spaceflight differed in the early '60s?

Walker: I would say that the American approach was much more cautious. I think they had to be more cautious for a very simple reason: because everything was public. They didn't let Shepherd launch in March 1961, after Ham's flight, because, and I quote somebody at the time, "if anything goes wrong, this will be the most expensive public funeral in history because everyone is going to see it." Everybody [in America] had a TV by then. But when you do things in secret, as the Soviets did, you don't have to be as cautious. 

Space.com: Last year, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of continuous habitation of the International Space Station, which has been occupied by both U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. While the height of the space race in the '60s brought a lot of competition, what is your view on how the two agencies operate today?

Walker: I think there is some collaboration, definitely. But I also think the Russians are falling behind and have almost lost interest in pursuing any kind of big space endeavors. They're still putting up rockets, but if you go to Baikonur, it's falling apart. It's not like Cape Canaveral , which is pristine. And, I do see elements of a space race still. There is an economic competition, clearly, and a political competition between two parts of the world, perhaps exacerbated in recent years. 

Space.com: This year marks the 60th anniversary of Gagarin's historic flight. Can you talk a bit about the fundamental impact his flight had on space exploration and how far we have come today?

Walker: He was the first to step into the beyond, which, for me, is not just a physical space, it's a philosophical space. One of the things I write about is [Gagarin's] view [from orbit] — that's kind of the "wow" for me. That view is the beginning of everything. So every single thing that we do now, in some way, goes back to that moment.

One of the things I've started to do every day [on Twitter], as interest in the book begins to build, is a post about "this day 60 years ago." The timeline starts to build in a really weird parallel with all the stuff that's happening now. It's quite nice putting those time parallels together: then and now, as we count down to that epochal moment in 1961. 

Space.com: What do you hope to see in the next 60 years of human spaceflight?

Walker: I think we're going to get quite far into the solar system. I want to think that we're going to get to live on Mars ... and I think we're going to get to other places as well. But the most important thing of all is that we discover life, because that [will] change literally everything ... It means that when you look up at the stars, it's massively out there. It can't not be if it's in our own little weird remote corner of the solar system. 

There was a picture I saw recently from Hubble, which was just incredible. It was a picture of a galaxy so full of stars, there was almost no black. It looks like a million brilliant points of light in space. And the idea that if we find something near to home, that will change how we look at all of that. I mean, those [stars] could be civilizations. So the future is not just about exploring, it's about meeting — it's about finding. And I don't mean finding places. I mean, connecting and meeting. And to me, that is ultimately where this goes. 

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Samantha Mathewson joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She received a B.A. in Journalism and Environmental Science at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut. Previously, her work has been published in Nature World News. When not writing or reading about science, Samantha enjoys traveling to new places and taking photos! You can follow her on Twitter @Sam_Ashley13. 

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First Man Up

He was a Soviet hero, a space pioneer (and a bit of a boozehound) who risked it all to save a doomed comrade. An excerpt from “Starman,” a new biography on the rise and fall of Yuri Gagarin, featured in the pages of our upcoming Spring Men’s issue.

April 12, 1961: 108 minutes

An hour before the launch, the chief Soviet spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev came on the link. ‘‘Yuri Alexeyevich, how are you hearing me? I need to tell you something.’’

‘‘Receiving you loud and clear.’’

‘‘I just want to remind you that after the one-minute readiness is announced, there’ll be about six minutes before you actually take off, so don’t worry about it.’’

‘‘I read you. I’m absolutely not worried.’’

‘‘There’ll be six minutes for all sorts of things, you know.’’ He meant that a minor instrument problem had created a six-minute delay in the launch sequence.

Then the cosmonaut Pavel Popovich came on the line. ‘‘Hey, can you guess who’s this talking to you?’’

‘‘Sure, it’s ‘Lily of the Valley!’’’

‘‘Yuri, are you getting bored in there?’’

‘‘If there was some music, I could stand it a little better.’’

Concerned for every last detail of the flight, Korolev took care of this personally, ordering his technicians to find some tapes or records and set something up straight away.

‘‘Haven’t they given you some music yet?’’ he asked a few minutes later.

‘‘Nothing so far.’’

‘‘Damned musicians. They dither about and the whole thing is sooner said than done.’’

‘‘Oh, now they’ve done it. They’ve put on a love song.’’

‘‘Good choice, I’d say.’’

8:41 a.m. Gagarin felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut, the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. ‘‘Yuri, we’re going down to the control bunker now.’’

8:51 a.m. The music stopped. Korolev’s deep, stern voice on the link, all seriousness now. ‘‘Yuri, the 15-minute mark.’’ This was the signal for Gagarin to seal his gloves and swing down the transparent visor on his helmet. In these last minutes before liftoff there was no NASA-style 5-4-3-2-1 ‘‘countdown’’ on the public-address system (and no public-address system). The rocket would be fired at the appointed instant: 9:06 a.m., Moscow time.

‘‘Launch key to ‘go’ position.’’

‘‘Air purging.’’

‘‘Idle run.’’

‘‘Ignition.’’

All kinds of vibrations now, high whinings and low rumbles. At some point Gagarin knew he must have lifted off, but the exact moment was elusive, identified with precision only by the electrical relays of the gantry’s hold-down arms as they moved aside, the four clamps disconnecting from the rocket’s flanks within a single hundredth of a second of each other. Gagarin lay rigid in his seat and tensed his muscles. At any moment something could go wrong with the booster, the hatch above his head might fly away, and his ejection charges would punch him out into the morning sky like a bullet. This ‘‘life-saving’’ jolt might kill him — crunch his spine; snap his neck like a chicken’s; the hatchway’s rim might snag his knees and tear them right off. He had to be prepared. The G-load climbing. No emergency ejection yet. …He didn’t remember it later, but they told him he shouted out, ‘‘Poyekhali!’’

‘‘Let’s go!’’

‘‘T-plus 70.’’

‘‘I read you, 70. I feel excellent. Continuing the flight. G-load increasing. All is well.’’

‘‘T-plus 100. How do you feel?’’

‘‘I feel fine. How about you?’’

Two minutes into the flight Gagarin was finding it a little hard to speak into his radio microphone. The G-forces were pulling at his face muscles. There was a strange moment when all the weight lifted and he was thrown violently forward against his straps. A shudder told him that the rocket’s four side-slung boosters were falling away. It paused in its acceleration, as if taking a big breath before the final spurt. Then the central core picked up the pace and the sensation of great weight returned.

Five minutes up. Another jolt as the exhausted central core was dropped. Millions of rubles’ worth of complex machinery was tossed aside without a second thought, like a spent match flicked to the ground.

Nine minutes after he had left the pad, Gagarin was in orbit. The vibrations ceased, yet there was no particular sensation of silence. Only those who have never traveled into orbit are in the habit of describing ‘‘the eerie silence of outer space.’’ The ship was noisy with air fans, ventilators, pumps and valves for the life-support system.

Through a porthole Gagarin saw a sudden shock of blue, a blue more intense than he had ever seen. The earth passed across one porthole and drifted upward out of sight, then reappeared in another porthole on the other side of the ball before drifting downward out of sight. The sky was intensely black now. Gagarin tried to see the stars, but the television lamp in the cabin was glaring directly into his eyes. Suddenly the sun appeared in one of the portholes, blindingly bright. Then the earth again — the horizon not straight but curving like a big ball’s, with its layer of atmospheric haze so incredibly thin.

Traveling eastward, ever eastward, flying at eight kilometers per second, the dials indicated: 28,000 kmph, although Gagarin would not have experienced any sense of speed.

‘‘How are you feeling?’’

‘‘The flight continues well. The machine is functioning normally. Reception excellent. Am carrying out observations of the earth. Visibility good. I can see the clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful!’’

September 1961: A Bad Landing

Crimea is almost an island. It juts out into the Black Sea, connected to Ukraine by two peninsulas as delicate as veins. The northernmost territories of the island are pleasant but dull. The south is a different matter. There are beautiful mountains, sun-dappled forests, sheltered beaches speckled with palms. The weather is still fine in October, and the almond trees are back in bloom by February.

In its 1960s heyday, the Tesseli dacha at Foros was a luxury sanitarium complex designed to accommodate only the most privileged group bookings. Warm seas, fresh meat and fruit, fine wines, perhaps a certain freedom from everyday restraints: all of these pleasures were available, and more.

Call her “Anna”; perhaps there were two Annas. Anna Rumanseyeva, a young nurse, was on duty at Tesseli on Sept. 14, 1961, when Gagarin and his cosmonaut comrades came to stay. She speaks with intimate knowledge of another nurse called Anna, also working at Foros when Gagarin came to stay. Maybe the two Annas are one and the same person? It is not important.

“There are some people in life, especially men, who are constantly looking for adventure,” she says. “I would say Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was this kind of person.”

Yuri and his wife, Valentina, arrived at the sanitarium with their second daughter, Galya, 6 months old and still in need of her mother’s constant attention.

Gagarin seemed desperate for distraction. In the second week, he took some of his companions out to sea in a small motorboat. The Foros staff pleaded with him: it was against the rules, he did not know the local conditions, the wind was offshore, the weather could be difficult, he should not go. But he went anyway, taking the boat far from shore and driving it recklessly, making tight turns to splash his passengers with spray.

The swell picked up, just as he had been warned. The boat was carried over the horizon and out of sight of the shore, and a larger motorboat had to be sent out to make a rescue. When they hauled him back ashore, Gagarin went to the medical station for assistance.

In the rough conditions he had turned the boat’s steering wheel so hard that his hands were bloodied and cracked. But the pain, and the unpleasantness of his foolish adventure, did not entirely divert his attention from the pretty blond-haired nurse who attended to his blisters.

Anna Rumanseyeva recalls a party held the next day, in which Gagarin, his wife and the other “Anna” were present: “ ‘Anna’ said she went into a room and sat on a sofa. Yuri Alexeyevich — I don’t know what was on his mind. He was drunk. Perhaps he wanted to talk? I don’t think he had any other thoughts. Anyway, he went into the room. He closed the door but didn’t lock it with a key. Valentina Ivanovna went into the room immediately after him.”_

“You know, his wife Valentina was quite a complicated woman,” says the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov. “She protected Yuri from every kind of temptation which came as a result of his position. . . . Anyway, Valentina discovered that the First Cosmonaut had disappeared, and she decided to find out where he was, and he showed the true colors of goodness and of a gentleman. He showed genuine nobility and jumped out of a window on the second floor.”

Both women leaned over the balcony’s edge to take a look and saw Gagarin sprawled on the ground, motionless. “At that time, there were wild grapes growing on the balconies,” Anna Rumanseyeva explains. “They may have caught him as he jumped. He hit a curbstone with his forehead. It was not a good landing. On his return from space he landed successfully. Here, unsuccessfully.”

Then they took him inside, where the doctors applied local anesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip. The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment, and she remembers him asking her just one question. “Will I fly again?”

April 1967: Falling to Earth

By the spring of 1967, development of the Soyuz spacecraft, which was intended to eventually put a Soviet man on the moon, was moving toward that crucial first flight. On April 22, the Soviet propaganda departments felt confident enough to let slip some rumors to the international press agency UPI. “The upcoming mission will include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history — an attempted in-flight hookup between two ships and a transfer of crews.”

The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov says, “The first manned test of the Soyuz was assigned to Vladimir Komarov, with Yuri Gagarin as the backup, and another Soyuz spacecraft was being prepared for Yuri to fly at a later date.”

Komarov’s launch was supposed to be followed a day later by another Soyuz with three more crewmen aboard. It seems likely that the Brezhnev administration wanted the docking to take place on or around May Day. The year 1967 had a special significance in the Communist calendar; it was the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution. The concept of making a “union” between two spaceships collaborating in orbit was highly symbolic, especially for a ruling government obsessed with symbols.

But as the deadline for the mission drew near, technicians knew of 203 separate faults in the spacecraft that still required attention. Yuri Gagarin was closely involved in this assessment. By March 9, 1967, he and his closest cosmonaut colleagues had produced a formal 10-page document, with the help of the engineers, in which all the problems were outlined in detail. The trouble was, no one knew what to do with it. Within Soviet society, bad news always reflected badly on the messenger.

As many as 50 senior engineers knew about the report, but none of them felt sufficiently confident to go into the Kremlin and do what had to be done: request that Leonid Brezhnev play down the symbolism of the pending launch, so as to allow a decent delay for technical improvements.

The cosmonauts and bureaucrats eventually adopted an age-old technique. They recruited a nonpartisan messenger from outside the Soyuz program to deliver the document for them: Yuri Gagarin’s K.G.B. friend Venyamin Russayev.

“Komarov invited me and my wife to visit his family,” says Russayev. “Afterward, as he was seeing us off, ‘Komarov said straight out, ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight.’ As I knew the state of affairs, I asked him, ‘If you’re so convinced you’re going to die, then why don’t you refuse the mission?’ He answered, ‘If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’ . . . Komarov said he knew what he was talking about, and he burst into such bitter tears.”

Russayev could not be of much help on his own. Back at his desk in the Lubyanka the next morning, after a sleepless night, he decided to ask advice from one of his K.G.B. seniors, Major-General Konstantin Makharov, a man he respected.

“I went to Makharov’s office and told him there was a serious problem with the rocket. He listened to me very carefully, and then he said, ‘I’m going to do something. In the meantime don’t leave your desk today. Not even for one second.’ I kept my promise, and I’d only been back at my desk for a short while when he sent for me again. He gave me a letter, prepared by a team mobilized by Yuri Gagarin. Most of the cosmonauts took part in the research. Makharov told me to take the letter upstairs and see Ivan Fadyekin, head of Department Three.”

This “letter” consisted of a 10-page document describing all 203 problems in the Soyuz hardware. As soon as he saw it, Fadyekin dodged the responsibility straight away. “I don’t have the expertise for this.”

He redirected Russayev to a much more dangerous man in the Lubyanka: Georgi Tsinev. Tsinev was a close personal friend of Leonid Brezhnev; in fact, he was related by marriage, and they had fought alongside each other in the war. If anyone could deliver an important message straight into the hands of the First Secretary, Tsinev could.

Unfortunately for Russayev, things were not quite that simple. Tsinev was rising fast within the K.G.B., helped along by his powerful patron in the Kremlin. He was not going to allow any irritations to disturb that cozy relationship. “While reading the letter, Tsinev looked at me, gauging my reactions to see if I’d read it or not,” Russayev explains. “He was glaring at me very intently, watching me like a hawk, and suddenly he asked, ‘How would you like a promotion up to my department?’ He even offered me a better office.”

Tsinev kept hold of the document, and it was never seen again. Within weeks, Fadyekin was transferred to a junior consular office in Iran, merely for the crime of glancing through it. Makharov was fired immediately, without a pension, and Tsinev took over as chief of an entire counterintelligence department. Russayev was stripped of any responsibility for space affairs and transferred to an insignificant staff training department outside Moscow, well away from the Lubyanka. “I kept my head down like a hermit for the next 10 years,” he says.

April 23, 1967: Crash and Burn

Early on the morning of April 23, 1967, the Soyuz was propped up against the gantry at the Soviet launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, according to the original schedule. The journalist Golovanov noticed Gagarin behaving very strangely. “He demanded to be put into the protective spacesuit. It was already clear that Komarov was perfectly fit to fly, and there were only three or four hours remaining until liftoff time, but he suddenly burst out and started demanding this and that. It was a sudden caprice.”

Russayev and others insist that Gagarin was trying to elbow his way onto the flight in order to save Komarov from almost certain death. Rumors about the dialogue between Komarov and ground control have circulated for many years, based on reports from the National Security Agency staff monitoring the radio signals from an Air Force facility near Istanbul.

In August 1972 a former NSA analyst, interviewed under the name Winslow Peck (real name Perry Fellwock), gave a very moving account of the interception: “[The Soviet premier Alexei] Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a videophone conversation, and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero. . . . The guy’s wife got on too. He told her how to handle their affairs and what to do with the kids.”

As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey picked up his cries of rage as he plunged to his death, cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.

The parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay. A backup parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue.

Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.

Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut “requiring urgent medical attention.”

Russayev says a heel bone was found among the ashes.

Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells.

The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, “I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally.” He was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov’s launch.

Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. “I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.” Russayev goes on, “I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’ ” Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. “I told him, ‘Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.’ ”

One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.

Adapted from “Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin,” to be published in April by Walker & Company.

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Who Was The First Astronaut? Yuri Gagarin Facts and Biography.

What names come to your mind when you think of famous astronauts? Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin or Jim Lovell might come to mind. But none of these brave men was the first person to travel to outer space to become the first official astronaut in the planet. In fact, the one to get that honor was a Russian cosmonaut.

Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut when he journeyed into outer space aboard the Vostok 1 capsule on April 12th, 1961. The ship completed one lap around our planet, also making him the first human to orbit Earth.

What is an astronaut?

To make sure our answer to the question of the first astronaut is correct, let’s take a look at the official definition of an astronaut.

The Fédération aéronautique internationale (Aeronautic International Federation) defines an astronaut as the person trained for human spaceflight who have participated in flights above 100 kilometers (62 miles).

The United States agencies have a similar line. They award the Astronaut Wings medal for flights above 50 miles (80 km).

Is a cosmonaut the same as an astronaut?

Sometimes you will hear Yuri Gagarin referred to as a cosmonaut. The term comes from the Russian kosmonavt , meaning “a space traveler”.

A cosmonaut is, in essence, the same thing as an astronaut. The only difference is a cosmonaut is only employed by the Russian Space Agency or by the now extinct Soviet space program. So when you hear the word cosmonaut, it simply means a Russian astronaut.

Quick Facts

Yuri gagarin biography.

“Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!” Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was born in the Soviet Union (now Russia) in a small village named Klushino , near what is now Russia’s border with Belarus.

His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina worked as a carpenter and dairy farmer on a communal farm. He had one older brother, Valentin, and one older sister, Zoya, as well as a younger brother named Boris.

The Gagarin family went through many hardships during the Nazi occupation of Russia in the second World War. His siblings, Valentin and Zoya were deported for slave labor and the rest of them had to spent almost two years living in a mud hut. After the war, the family moved to the town of Gzhatsk .

In 1951, at the age of 17, Yuri was selected to go to the city of Saratov to enroll at the Industrial Technical School. It was during his time there he began training as a pilot on the weekends at a local flying club.

Thanks to this training, he was later accepted at the 1st Chkalovsky Higher Air Force Pilots School where after a couple more years of training he was finally named lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force in 1957.

It was during this time Yuri met his future wife, Valentina Goryacheva who worked as a medical technician. They married only a few months later in November 1957. The couple had two daughters, Yelena (1959) and Galina (1961).

In 1959. The Soviets launched the Luna 3, an unmanned spacecraft with the mission to photograph the dark side of the moon. This woke up an interest in Yuri for space exploration and he asked to be recommended for the Soviet space program where he was accepted just a few months later along with other 19 candidates.

After some more training, Gagarin became one of the best candidates in the program and was selected for a filter group of six people from which the final crew for the Volstok I mission would be chosen.

The whole project evolved really fast as there was a race between the Vostok program and the U.S. Project Mercury to become the first nation to put a man into space.

After multiple tests, training, and competition between the six candidates, the lieutenant-general Nikolai Kamanin selected Yuri Gagarin as the primary pilot for the mission with German Titov as his backup.

On April 12th, 1961, the Vostok 1 finally launched from Kazakhstan, where to this day the missions to the International Space Station are launched thanks to the country’s favorable conditions. Yuri Gagarin was aboard the spacecraft and with the words “Off we go! Goodbye, until we meet soon, dear friends” he became the first man to achieve the dream mankind has had from ancient times of going to outer space.

The whole mission lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes. After his return to Earth, Yuri became a national hero for the Soviet Union and a celebrity around the world. Parades were thrown for him in Moscow, Warsaw, and other big cities. Gagarin went to more than 30 countries during this little world tour, but due to the tensions between both nations, he never visited the United States.

In 1963 he was awarded the rank of Colonel and became Deputy Training Director of the Star City Cosmonaut Training base , now renamed to Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center .

Despite objections from Nikolai Kamanin, the man who originally selected him for the program and overseer for the space program, Gagarin continued to train as a pilot and became the backup pilot for the Soyuz program. Kamanin was worried about losing a national hero to a training accident and the Soyuz program being rushed due to the race with the United States. He was proven right when unfortunately the Soyuz crashed and its pilot, Vladimir Komarov died in the accident.

Due to this accident, Yuri was banned from training for any further space mission, but he decided to keep on flying planes. Unfortunately, that also turned to have its dangers as only a year later, on March 27th, 1968, Yuri died during a training flight when his MiG-15UTI crashed. His co-pilot, Vladimir Sergoyin also lost his life in the accident. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old at the time.

In 1968, the town of Gzhatsk was renamed to Gagarin after him.

Achievements and Awards

• On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut to travel to outer space.
• On April 14, 1961, he received the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union awards.
• On April 15, 1961, the Soviet Academy of Sciences gave him the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal
• The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded him the De la Vaulx Medal
• He received the Gold Medal by the British Interplanetary Society
• On 1963, he and Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space) were awarded the Order of Karl Marx by the German Democratic Republic
• Yuri was awarded multiple other medals and awards in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Indonesia.
• As part of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a memorial satchel on the Moon’s surface as a tribute to Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov.
• To this day, in Russia and the other countries of the former USSR, the 12th of April is celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in honor of the Vostok 1 flight.
• On the 20th and 30th anniversaries of the launch, the Soviet Union issued commemorative coins with his face on them.
• A 140 feet high monument was built in Leninsky Avenue, in the middle of Moscow.
• Many other statues, monuments and streets remembering him have been built or named after him in countries such as the UK, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Cyprus, and the U.S.

Yuri Gagarin had a way with words. He really managed to convey emotions and feelings when he talked about what it meant to him to travel beyond Earth. He left us some great quotes originally spoken in Russian, so the ones below are hopefully close translations.

“Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the Nicholas Roerich”

“The main force in man is the power of the spirit.”

“When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!”

“What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth. The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots. When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.”

A quote that is often attributed to Yuri is “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God” talking about his time up in space. However, there is no evidence he ever actually said this. It is possible the quote was misattributed after a speech by a different person who said “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.”

• The town of Gzhatsk, where Yuri’s family moved after WWII was renamed to Gagarin after his death in 1968
• The phrase Gagarin used when his spacecraft launched, “Poyehali!”, meaning something along the lines of “Let’s go!” became so popular, people in the USSR started using it as a greeting.
• He was only 27 years old when the mission took place. To this day, this still makes him the fourth youngest person to travel to space. The three people younger than him are also Russian cosmonauts and only by one or two years.
• Vostok, the name of the capsule that Gagarin orbited Earth on, is Russian for “East”.
• The Vostok spacecraft was controlled from Earth using radio transmissions and the astronaut had no control over it while he orbited Earth. However, he was given a sealed envelope with a key he could use to switch to manual controls in case of an emergency.
• At the time of the spaceflight, there was a bit of a controversy about whether or not the Vostok 1 mission counted as the first manned flight to space. The rules of the Aeronautic International Federation stated that the astronaut had to land back on Earth aboard the ship, but in the Vostok mission, Yuri parachuted out of the capsule and landed alone.
• According to some sources, one of the reasons why he never visited the U.S. was because President John F. Kennedy banned him from entering the country. I’m sure the Soviets didn’t want him visiting either due to the tensions during the Cold War.
• One of the reasons that might have helped him be picked for the mission was his height. He was only 5’2” (1.57m) which helped him not only fit in the capsule better but weight less than other candidates. When it comes to space travel, every pound saved matters.
• Gagarin only beat the U.S. to space by 3 weeks. Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American man to travel to outer space on May 5, 1961, aboard the Freedom 7.

The Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy. Was Yuri Gagarin really the first man in space?

A popular conspiracy theory alleges the Soviets tried and succeeded in sending at least two other cosmonauts into space before Yuri Gagarin. According to this conspiracy, the flights occurred as soon as 1959 and would have ended up in accidents during the trip back to Earth that resulted in the pilot’s death. The Soviets would have seen this as a failure and therefore covered the existence of these flights.

The supposed evidence for this conspiracy is based on the recording of intercepted radio transmission by two Italian radio operators, an alleged leak by a Czech official and an article by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein who said he was in the USSR at the time and was told by a cadet they had launched a man into orbit that day.

Some of the names of these supposed lost cosmonauts are Vladimir Ilyushin, Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, and Maria Gromova.

The theory has never been confirmed even though after the fall of the Soviet Union a lot of documents from that time were de-classified and made publicly available.

Where to learn more

There are multiple resources where you can delve deeper into the life and work of Yuri Gagarin. Here are a few of our favorite ones.

The book Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin ( Amazon ) is a biography written by Piers Bizony and famous documentary maker end Emmy award winner Jamie Doran. It narrates the story of Yuri’s life intertwined with the motivations of the U.S. And Soviet space programs. Interesting read of medium length.

Gagarin himself wrote an autobiography titled Road To The Stars ( Amazon ). I don’t personally know any Russian, but those who do criticize the English versions because they say it changes the tone of many phrases, specifically those making reference to communism and the USSR.

Elena is a Canadian journalist and researcher. She has been looking at the sky for years and hopes to introduce more people to the wonderful hobby that is astronomy.

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Yuri Gagarin

First human to journey into outer space

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful."

Date of birth: March 9, 1934 Date of death: March 27, 1968 Place of birth: Western Region, USSR Career: hero, cosmonaut

Yuri Gagarin is a Soviet pilot-cosmonaut, whose biography everyone knows since high school. Gagarin is the man who made the first flight into space. He became a model and a legend not only for the inhabitants of the USSR – the cosmonaut was an honorary citizen of foreign cities and an international public figure. Yuri Alekseyevich opened a new page in the exploration of space and became a symbol of the development of Soviet science and aviation.

Childhood and Youth

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the village of Klushino in the Western Region of the USSR (now Smolensk Oblast) into a family of well-to-do peasants. The boy was the third of four children. Yury’s childhood was peaceful and joyful, his father and mother paid a lot of attention to him. Alexei Ivanovich, the head of the family, was a wood craftsman and enjoyed introducing his children to it.

At six years of age Yura went to school, but managed to finish only the first grade, before the Great Patriotic War began. German troops invaded part of the USSR, they reached Klushino, so that the work of many state institutions, including the school, was discontinued. Having become a famous person, Yuri Alekseevich preferred never to recall the gloomy times of the occupation. It is known that the German soldiers drove the Gagarins family out of the house and, retreating, took the youth with them as prisoners of war. This is how his brother and sister were taken away.

In 1943 Klushino was liberated, and soon after the war ended, the Gagarins moved to Gzhatsk, where Yuri continued his studies. He was a very capable and inquisitive young man, engaged in various activities ranging from music to photography.

After graduating from 6th grade, Gagarin decided to move to Moscow, as he felt too cramped in a small town. His parents tried to dissuade the ambitious young man, but failed to do so. So in 1949, 15-year-old Yuri Gagarin moved to the capital.

The young man lived with relatives, studied at a trade school while simultaneously completing his seventh grade program at the Working Youth School. At the same time, he became interested in basketball and soon became captain of the team. In 1951, Gagarin moved to Saratov, where he began training at an industrial technical school. During his studies, his first acquaintance with the sky occurred.

In 1954, Yuri got into the club of amateur aviators, where the reports of the founding fathers of astronautics were read. Having listened to the lectures of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the young man simply fell in love with the idea of flying beyond the Earth, though he could hardly imagine how his hobby would turn out. The following year Gagarin graduated from technical school, but continued to attend the flying club and managed to make a few independent flights on a small training aircraft.

A few months after the future cosmonaut graduated, he was called up for military service at a military aviation school in Chkalov (now Orenburg). There Gagarin had a serious conflict that almost cost him his life.

Yuri Alekseyevich, appointed assistant platoon commander, was extremely strict in terms of discipline, which did not suit his fellow students. One night he was caught and severely beaten, after which the young man spent a month in hospital before he could return to duty. It is noteworthy that this incident did not break his fighting spirit at all – he did not change his attitude toward his charges.

Cadet Gagarin easily coped with any tasks, except landing an airplane. The apparatus was constantly nipping at his nose, and due to the fact that the requirements to trainees were extremely strict, it was decided to expel Gagarin.

The young man, who could not imagine his life without the sky, was about to give up on his career, but at that moment the head of the school, who was troubled by the mysterious failures of the best student, paid attention to the low height of the guy (165 cm, and according to some sources even 157) and suggested that this is the reason why he has problems with the view angle during boarding. Gagarin was given another chance, and before the flight he was given a padding that increased the height of the seat. The assumption turned out to be correct. In 1957 Yuri Gagarin graduated from the college and started serving in Murmansk region.

Cosmonautics

In 1959 Gagarin served to the rank of senior lieutenant, earning the title of military pilot 3rd class. At the same time, a decree on the search and selection of candidates for a flight beyond Earth was enshrined at the state level. Having heard about this, the pilot wrote a report to his leadership, asking to be enlisted as a candidate.

The selection was not based on skills or merit. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who headed the inspections, primarily looked at the physical data of applicants. The first rockets were limited in size and payload capacity. The figure that almost cost Gagarin his career, this time became a lucky ticket. If Gagarin were bigger, he would have been unable to fit into the rocket.

Despite the fierce competition Gagarin managed to win the sympathy even of his rivals. Reliable, strong and friendly, he envied no one, considered no one better or worse than himself, and this was evident in his behavior and manner of speech. Yuri Alekseyevich easily took the initiative, worked hard and with pleasure.

Gagarin adored the sky and gave himself wholly to his studies, for the rest he simply had no time. As a result, according to an anonymous survey conducted among the candidates for astronauts, most of them named Gagarin as the man most suitable for the first flight into space. Despite the fact that the pilot was not a leader in any area of training, he was found to be ideally suited for the journey into space based on a combination of skills, character traits and psychological stability.

After numerous checks the pilot was approved as one of the 20 would-be cosmonauts. In March 1960 he started training.

The choice of the candidate

In 1961, in view of the rivalry between the USSR and the United States there was a need as soon as possible to finally decide on the candidate and to make a flight in the beginning of the second decade of April. Then came the information that on April 20, it was planned to launch an American rocket with a man on board. Among the three proposed leaders, Gagarin was chosen as the first cosmonaut – this happened at the very last moment, less than a month before the flight. German Titov was confirmed as the backup.

The question of why the first man in space was Gagarin and not Titov worries history buffs to this day. There is a note in Korolev’s notes that Titov was more prepared than Gagarin, but at the decisive moment the latter was chosen. One version says that the political factor interfered with the choice. The first cosmonaut was to become a kind of symbol, and Yuri Alekseyevich, who had exemplary Slavic appearance and a “clean” biography of the whole family, seemed to the authorities more suitable for the role of a representative of Soviet cosmonautics.

Another theory claims that Titov was more important to the project, so they did not want to risk him in the first flight. Already at this time he was approved for the second. At the same time, work was being done on a long stay in space. Herman Titov seemed to Korolev suitable for spending a full day outside the Earth.

Another theory states that Gagarin was chosen personally by Korolev. The media claim that Yuri Alekseyevich became a favorite of his superiors after he was the only one of the preparatory group who responded to the offer to sit in the Vostok satellite ship when the group was first shown the ship.

According to the cosmonaut’s mother, Yuri passed a kind of unofficial exam arranged by Korolev.

The designer could not choose one pilot out of five similar ones. The men had almost the same height and weight, military rank. All except Captain Komarov served as senior lieutenants. Korolev conducted personal interviews with the candidates, asking a tricky question about the centrifuge.

Gagarin honestly stated that he felt bad about the test and even hated the centrifuge. The other candidates reported that their training was excellent. So Yuri passed the honesty test. It was of paramount importance to Korolev and the base command that the cosmonaut be able to talk frankly about all the problems and mistakes in the flight, rather than improvise and keep a face.

Journalists and researchers also admit that the very question of why Gagarin was the first man in space is incorrect, since Yuri Alekseyevich was not. In 1993, M. Rudenko and N. Varvarov published the names of the three pilots in the newspaper “Air Transport”. According to journalists, in 1957 during the suborbital flight pilot Alexei Ledovskikh died, in 1958 – Sergei Shaborin, and in 1959 – Andrei Mitkov.

The experiments remained classified, and in 1960, pilots were selected for the program of cosmonaut training. The article in the specialized newspaper was not challenged by any member of the space industry.

The first flight into space

The Vostok 1 space flight was fraught with enormous risks to Gagarin’s life. Due to the rush, some important systems were not duplicated, the ship was not equipped with a soft landing system, there was not even an emergency rescue system in case of malfunction during the launch. The chance that the first astronaut would die before taking off was very high.

On April 12, 1961, the spaceship “Vostok 1” took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Because there were equipment malfunctions, Gagarin took off 100 kilometers higher than originally planned. If there were problems with the braking system, the astronaut would have had to return to Earth for more than a month, with a supply of water and food for only 10 days.

Despite the many problems, Yuri Alekseyevich descended safely to Earth. His apparatus did not land where it was supposed to. The cosmonaut was taken to a nearby village, and from there Gagarin called his superiors to report a successful landing and the absence of injuries. Since the flight was secret, even the Soviet media did not learn about the technological breakthrough of the home country until the next day.

As soon as the information became available, Gagarin became a global star. Khrushchev had a hand in this, insisting on a worthy reception for the hero. On April 14, 1961 there was a grand celebration in honor of the cosmonaut, during which Yuri Alekseyevich was given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

A month later, Gagarin was sent abroad on a “peace mission” where he was to visit more than 20 countries, working also in a diplomatic capacity. On all these trips, Gagarin proved himself to be a tactful and charming man. The personal charisma of Yuri Alekseyevich did much to enhance the positive image of the USSR.

The next few years Yuri Gagarin was mostly engaged in public activities. The famous cosmonaut put a lot of effort into popularizing the cosmonautics, he himself was preparing to become a member of the lunar space crew. Also Major Gagarin entered the Military Air Engineering Academy, from which he graduated with the rank of colonel a month before his death.

Personal life

The pilot’s personal life also developed under the influence of his profession. In 1957, Yuri Gagarin married Valentina Goryacheva, an employee of the medical department at the Mission Control Center.

In this marriage they had two daughters: Lena was born in 1959 and Galia was born a month before her father’s legendary flight in March of 1961. Yuri always had time for their children. The cosmonaut and his daughters adored animals, so there were ducks, chickens, squirrels and a fallow deer in the Gagarins’ house. The pilot’s wife resisted fascination with the zoo, but later put up with it.

After the death of her husband, Valentina Goryacheva never married again.

Gagarin’s eldest daughter Elena chose the profession of art historian, for many years she has been the director of the Moscow Kremlin Museum, and Galina became an economist. After the cosmonaut’s death, the Gagarins had grandchildren: Yelena had a daughter, Yekaterina, and Galina had a son, Yuri. The granddaughter of the cosmonaut decided to become an art critic, and his grandson – to tie his life with the state administration.

On March 27, 1968, Gagarin was performing a training flight and for unknown reasons, he performed a maneuver from which he was unable to exit. The plane crashed into the ground, and Gagarin and his instructor Vladimir Seregin died. The bodies of the pilots were cremated and the urns with ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall.

One of the possible causes of the tragedy is named as approaching another plane and abrupt deviation from it, as a result of which the MiG-15UTI of Gagarin went into a spin. Because of incorrect data on weather conditions and instrument readings pilots simply did not have time to bring the plane out of the fall. For many years the truth has remained unknown.

The lack of a coherent official explanation gave rise to numerous speculations on the cause of death of the first astronaut. The conspiracy theories gained popularity. There were rumors that Gagarin himself staged his own death and escaped. Another version claimed that the pilot died while testing a new rocket, and the training flight covered the traces of a failed experiment in the space program.

In 2013, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov shared with the press declassified information about Gagarin’s last flight. The first version was fully confirmed. Unclearly, an SU-15 fighter jet happened to be next to Gagarin’s and Seregin’s plane, which drove the MiG-15UTI into a spiral with its flow. The pilots died before they could get the plane out of the fall.

Remembrance

Seven years later, a memorial was erected at the crash site to commemorate the pilots who died. It was not the only reminder of Gagarin – various institutions, vehicles and territorial units were named after the first cosmonaut.

Gagarin’s name was given to a ridge in Antarctica and many streets, for example, in the city of Ufa in the Sipailovo Microdistrict, Gagarin Avenue is in the Moscow District of St. Petersburg. Monuments dedicated to the cosmonaut have been erected in different cities of Russia and the world.

Yuri Alekseyevich was personally acquainted with Alexandra Pakhmutova and Nikol Dobronravov.In memory of the cosmonaut, the creative family couple created the cycle “Gagarin’s Constellation”, of which the song “You Know What a Boy He Was” was especially popular. It included the famous phrase “Let’s go!”.

The research vessel (NSR), built in 1971 to control the flight of spacecraft, was named after Yuri Alexeyevich. Together with Gagarin’s profile, it was inscribed on a postage stamp.

The original spacesuit in which the cosmonaut made his famous flight became an exhibit in the museum of OAO NPP Zvezda, located in the village of Tomilino, Moscow Region. Fifty-two years after the flight Pavel Parkhomenko’s biographical feature film “Gagarin. The first in space”, on the creation of which the family of the cosmonaut gave permission. Yaroslav Zhalnin was lucky to bring the famous pilot to the screen.

• 1961 – Hero of the Soviet Union
• 1961 – Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR.
• 1961 – Hero of Socialist Labor
• 1961 Honored Master of Sports of the USSR
• 1961 – Order of Lenin
• 1961 – Medal of the Gold Star
• 1961 – Hero of Labor
• 1966 – Medal for Distinguished Service, 3rd Class

Interesting Facts

1. Before Gagarin flew into space, TASS prepared three messages: in case of a successful flight, unsuccessful and a landing outside the territory of the USSR.

2. The call sign of the first man in space – Kedr – was known to all Soviet schoolchildren.

3. In Britain, Elizabeth II invited Yuri Alekseyevich for tea and then took a picture with him as a memento, which violated protocol. The Queen explained her action by saying that the astronaut is no longer an earthly man, but a heavenly one, so there is nothing offensive for the monarch to do in taking a photo with him.

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Road to the Stars Paperback – March 4, 2002

• Print length 232 pages
• Language English
• Publisher University Press of the Pacific
• Publication date March 4, 2002
• Dimensions 5.06 x 0.59 x 8.1 inches
• ISBN-10 0898757282
• ISBN-13 978-0898757286
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University Press of the Pacific (March 4, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0898757282
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0898757286
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.06 x 0.59 x 8.1 inches
• #2,550 in Aeronautics & Astronautics (Books)
• #2,640 in Aerospace Engineering
• #19,658 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

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