Thread by @marinamaral2

Yuri Gagarin died #OnThisDay in 1968. He became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed one orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.

Yuri Gagarin was born 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk (renamed Gagarin in 1968 after his death). His parents worked on a collective farm: Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin as a carpenter and bricklayer, and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina as a milkmaid.

Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. Klushino was occupied in November 1941 during the German advance on Moscow, and an officer took over the Gagarin residence.

The family was allowed to build a mud hut, approximately 3 by 3 metres (10 by 10 ft) inside, on the land behind their house, where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation.

His two older siblings were deported by the Germans to Poland for slave labor in 1943, and did not return until after the war in 1945. In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk, where Gagarin continued his secondary education.

After graduating in 1951 from both the seventh grade and the vocational school with honors in moldmaking and foundry work, he was selected for further training at the Saratov Industrial Technical School, where he studied tractors.

While in Saratov, Gagarin volunteered for weekend training as a Soviet air cadet at a local flying club, where he learned to fly — at first in a biplane and later in a Yak-18 trainer.

He also earned extra money as a part-time dock laborer on the Volga River.

After he graduated from the technical school in 1955, the Soviet Army drafted Gagarin. On a recommendation, he was sent to the First Chkalov Air Force Pilot's School in Orenburg, and soloed in a MiG-15 in 1957.

After graduation, he was assigned to the Luostari airbase in Murmansk Oblast, close to the Norwegian border, where terrible weather made flying risky. He became a Lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces on 5 November 1957; on 6 November 1959 he received the rank of Senior Lieutenant.

In 1960, after an extensive search and selection process, Gagarin was chosen with 19 other pilots for the Soviet space program. He was further selected for an elite training group known as the Sochi Six, from which the first cosmonauts of the Vostok programme would be chosen.

The eventual choices for the first launch were Gagarin and Gherman Titov due to their performance during training sessions as well as their physical characteristics — space was limited in the small Vostok cockpit, and both men were short. Gagarin was 5 ft 2 in tall.

On 12 April 1961, 6:07 am UTC, the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft with Gagarin aboard was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The spacecraft orbited for 108 minutes before returning to Earth, landing in Kazakhstan.

Gagarin thus became both the first human to travel into space, and the first to orbit the Earth.

Following the flight, Gagarin told the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that during reentry he had whistled the tune "The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows".

The first two lines of the song are: "The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows/Where her son flies in the sky". This patriotic song was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951, with words by Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky.

Some sources have claimed that Gagarin commented during the flight, "I don't see any God up here." However, no such words appear in the verbatim record of his conversations with Earth-based stations during the spaceflight.

Gagarin's flight was a triumph for the Soviet space program. The announcement on the Soviet radio was made by Yuri Levitan, the same speaker who announced all major events in the Great Patriotic War.

He became a national hero of the Soviet Union, and a worldwide celebrity.

Gagarin visited Italy, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Egypt and Finland to promote the Soviet Union's accomplishment of putting the first human in space. He visited the United Kingdom three months after the Vostok 1 mission, going to London and Manchester.

The sudden rise to fame took its toll on Gagarin. While acquaintances say he had been a "sensible drinker", his touring schedule placed him in social situations where he was always expected to drink.

Gagarin was also reportedly caught by his wife in a room with another woman, a nurse named Anna who had aided him after a boating incident earlier in the day, at a Black Sea resort in September 1961.

He attempted to escape by leaving through a window and jumping off her second floor balcony, hitting his face on a kerbstone and leaving a permanent scar above his left eyebrow.

In 1962, Gagarin began serving as a Deputy to the Soviet of the Union, and was elected to the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. He later returned to Star City, the cosmonaut facility, where he spent several years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft.

He became a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Forces on 12 June 1962, and received the rank of colonel on 6 November 1963. Soviet officials tried to keep him away from any flights, being worried of losing their hero in an accident

Gagarin was a backup pilot for his friend Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz 1 flight, which was launched despite Gagarin's protests that additional safety precautions were necessary.

When Komarov's flight ended in a fatal crash, Gagarin was permanently banned from training for and participating in further spaceflights.

On 27 March 1968, while on a routine training flight from Chkalovsky Air Base, he and flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died in a MiG-15UTI crash near the town of Kirzhach. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes were buried in the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square.

The cause of the crash that killed Gagarin is not entirely certain, and has been subject to speculation about conspiracy theories over the ensuing decades.

Yuri Gagarin had two daughters: Yelena Yurievna Gagarina, an art historian who has worked as the Director-General of the Moscow Kremlin Museums since 2001 and Galina Yurievna Gagarina, a professor of economics and the department chair at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.

Sergei Korolev, one of the masterminds behind the early years of the Soviet space program, later said that Gagarin possessed a smile "that lit up the darkness of the Cold War".

He was honored by the American space program during Apollo 11 in 1969 when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a memorial satchel containing medals commemorating Gagarin and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on the surface of the moon.

Gagarin is memorialized in music, vessels have been named for him, three commemorative coins have been issued in the Soviet Union to honour the anniversaries of his flight, and in 2008 the Kontinental Hockey League named their championship trophy the Gagarin Cup.

He was 34 years old.

Metal statue of Yuri Gagarin infront of the Planetarium & Astronomy Center at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.