Yuri Gagarin

Hello Steemians!

Who was Yuri Gagarin?

Born Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, on March 9, 1934, Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and astronaut who gained his worldwide fa me by being the first man in space!

Yuri was born in the village Klushio, near Gzhatsk - which was later renamed into Gagarin in his honor, into a familly of farmers.

He learned to fly in a flying club in Saratov where he attended the Saratov Industrial Technical School.

Biplane

His first practices were in a biplane and then later he got assigned to train in a Yak-18.

Yak-18

After he graduated from the Saratov Industrial Technical School in 1955, he got drafted into the Soviet Army and sent to the First Chkalov Air Force Pilot's School in Orenburg where he learned to fly a MiG-15.

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15

He finished the pilot school on November 7, 1957 and the same day go married to Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva. a medical technician he met in Orenburg.

Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva

In 1960, Yuri Gagarin was selected as one of the 20 pilots for the Soviet space program.
He was further chosen for a group named Sochi Six, an elite group of pilots that would later be chosen as astronauts for the Vostok Programme, with the goal to put the first human into the lower orbit of the Earth and return them.

Out of the 20 selected pilots that ha e undergone training, at the end the choice was to be made between Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. The pilots were given the privilege to vote anonymously which resulted in Gagarin receiving 17 out of 20 votes.

Gherman Titov

On April 12, 1961, Gagarin made history, he boarded on the Vostok spacecraft and launched to be the first human in space.
With his famous but short sentence "Poyekhali!" he marked a new era of space exploration.

Vostok I capsule - RKK Energiya museum

His space trip lasted 108 minutes and consisted of orbiting the Earth once, after completing the mission he saftly came back to Earth with a parachute after getting ejected out of the capsule.

After his safe return, Gagarin became a national hero of the Soviet Union by Nikita Krushchev and a worldwide celebrity and was sent to tour around the world to promote the Soviet Union.

Gagarin - Warsaw, 1961

Later Gagarin started working as a flight instructor and died on March 27, 1968. together with Vladimir Seryogin while performing a routine training flight for the Chkalovsky Air Base.
His ashes were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on the Red Square

Walls of the Kremlin