On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 completed one orbit of Earth. He was the first person to travel into Space in a flight which took 108 minutes.
Yuri Gagarin was a pilot with the Soviet Air Forces. He was born on 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, in the Western Oblast, near Gzhatsk (renamed Gagarin in 1968 after his death).
Gagarin began training for his historic space flight at the Khodynka Airfield in central Moscow on 15 March 1960. On 12 April 1961, at 6:07 am UTC, the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1) spacecraft was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The five first-stage engines fired until the first separation event, when the four side-boosters fell away, leaving the core engine. The core stage then separated while the rocket was in a suborbital trajectory, and the upper stage carried it to orbit. Once the upper stage finished firing, it separated from the spacecraft, which orbited for 108 minutes before returning to Earth in Kazakhstan. Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth.
At about 7,000 metres (23,000 ft), Gagarin ejected from the descending capsule as planned and landed using a parachute.
On 14 April 1961, Gagarin was honoured with a 12-mile (19 km) parade attended by millions of people that concluded at the Red Square. After a short speech, he was bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Lenin, Merited Master of Sports of the Soviet Union and the first Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR. On 15 April, the Soviet Academy of Sciences awarded him with the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal, named after the Russian pioneer of space aeronautics. Gagarin had also been awarded four Soviet commemorative medals over the course of his career.
On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky air base, Gagarin and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died when their MiG-15UTI crashed near the town of Kirzhach. The bodies of Gagarin and Seryogin were cremated and their ashes interred in the walls of the Kremlin.