April 11, 1961. 9.07 am. Vostok 1 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and placed in an elliptical orbit with apogee 327 km and perigee 181 km. Prior to take-off, Gagarin drank water and ate some jelly. Essentially, he was little more than a passenger. Scientists feared the rigours of spaceflight might render a pilot unconscious and incapacitate him and hence, the craft was fully automated.

Did yuri gagarin actually utter these words from space? It is not easy to sift through the Soviet cold war propaganda, and what may have been lost in translation, so as to arrive at the truth. However, fact is the Soviet Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth and Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 the first human to be launched into space. The Americans recovered from the humiliation of these two triumphs of their archrivals by putting a man on the moon eight years later.

Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934, in the village of Klushino, Smolensk. During World War II he had a dramatic introduction to aviation when a crippled Soviet fighter crashed in the neighbourhood. Yuri was among the throng of children who rushed to the site of the crash and clambered all over the wreckage. Then and there Yuri decided to become a combat pilot. On November 7, 1957, he was commissioned in the Soviet Air Force. The very same day he married Valentina. Caught up in the excitement of the wedding preparations, he had failed to notice the launch of Sputnik I & II a few weeks earlier.

In 1959, Yuri volunteered for space training—one of 154 pilots to do so. The training was rigorous and demanding; the recruits were bombarded with space navigation, rocket propulsion, physiology, astronomy and upper atmospheric physics, and trained to cope with weightlessness. Yuri loved to sit in the simulated cockpit and imagine blasting off into space. The number of candidates progressively whittled down to 50, then 20, then six. Finally, a week before the scheduled date, Yuri learned that he had been selected. His short size had apparently proved advantageous for the cramped Vostok cockpit.