Yuri Gagarin Biography

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9 March 1934 in a small village called Klushino which is about 190km from Moscow, Russia. His parents worked on a collective farm. The father was a carpenter and bricklayer and the mother was a milkmaid. Yuri had an old sister and two brothers.

When Yuri was sixteen years old, he became an apprentice foundryman at a steel plant near Moscow and took evening classes. Then he continued his studies at the industrial college at Saratov and concurrently took a course in flying. On completing this course, he entered the Soviet Air Force cadet school at Orenburg, from which he graduated in 1957.

In 1957 Yuri Gagarin married. He has two daughters.

On 12 April 1961, he did aboard Vostok 1. Following his historic flight, where he also became the first human being to orbit the Earth, Yuri Gagarin became a national hero and a celebrity around the world. Nikita Khrushchev awarded him Hero of the Soviet Union.

He travelled quite a lot after this around Europe and visited the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Brazil and Japan among others.

In 1962 Yuri Gagarin was elected to serve as Deputy to the Soviet of the Union. In 12 June of the same year, he was also promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in 1963 then to colonel.

During this time Gagarin was the backup pilot for Vladimir Komarov. But after the Soyuz 1 crash where Komarov was killed the authorities banning Gagarin from further space flight missions due to concerns about losing a national hero in just such an accident.

Yuri Gagarin became a deputy training director at Star City on 20 December 1963 and in 1966 he began training to re-qualify as a fighter pilot. On 27 March 1968, during a training flight, the MiG-15 in which he and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were travelling crashed near to the town of Kirzhach and both men were killed. The bodies of both pilots were cremated and they are buried in the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow.

The cause of the crash still remains somewhat of a mystery. Some have blamed a combination of errors by ground crew and air traffic controllers whilst a more prominent theory in recent years involves a near miss with another aircraft, which caused Gagarin’s MiG to enter an uncontrollable spiral dive.

Since 1962, 12 April, the date he flew into space was celebrated in the Soviet Union as Cosmonautics Day.

In 1968 the town of Gzhatsk where he grew up after the war was also renamed. It is now simply called Gagarin in his honour of its hero.

I see Earth! It is so beautiful! – Yuri Gagarin

First words ever spoken by a human leaving Earth for outer space: Let’s go!