Pics: 50 years since Yuri Gagarin went to space
 

Pics: 50 years since Yuri Gagarin went to space


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Out of the world
On April 12, 1961, the Vostok spacecraft took the first ever human being, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into space.

Photo: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin wearing his helmet for the first ever manned flight in space. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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Gagarin's spaceship made a single orbit of the earth as the experts were not willing to take a chance due to the fact that in earlier flights by dogs the problems were registered after third-fourth orbit, Rossiya 24 channel reported in its Cosmonautics programme devoted to the golden jubilee of the first human space flight.

Photo: Major Yuri Gagarin seen coming down a ladder from a spacecraft after his successful space flight, the world's first. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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Recently Russia declassified documents that shed light on Gagarin's death in a test flight onboard a new MiG-15 fighter jet in 1968.

Photo: Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, during his visit to Admiralty House, London, where he met the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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Kremlin's archives official Alexander Stepanov told a news conference last Friday that a Soviet-era commission had concluded that a sharp manoeuvre to avoid a weather balloon was the cause of crash of Gagarin's jet.

Photo: Soviet cosmonaut and the first man to travel in space, Yury Alekseyvich Gagarin (1934 - 1968) arriving in London for a Russian trade fair. (Photo by Douglas Miller/Getty Images)

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Gagarin died on March 27, 1968, when a Mig fighter jet carrying him and instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed in the Vladimir region near Moscow while on a training flight.

Photo: Yuri Gagarin on returning to earth after his historic flight to space on April 12, 1961 (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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The historic space shot turned Gagarin into an instant celebrity whose boyish charms became a powerful propaganda weapon for the Soviet Union as it scrambled to win its ideological battle against the United States during the Cold War.

Photo: The world's first cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union receives a bouquet of flowers from a little girl on arrival at the Soviet Embassy in London on July 11, 1961. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

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His boy-next-door grin and outsized helmet became a staple of Soviet stamps while his heroism turned into a subject of elementary school literature that became comparable to the teachings of Lenin.

Photo: 27-year old Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934 - 1968) on his way to his spaceship Vostok, in which he made the first ever manned space flight. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

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Gagarin is best remembered by a generation of Russian for pronouncing "Poyekhali!" as his Vostok spacecraft lifted off the ground.

Soviet President Nikita S Khrushchev (1894-1971), Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) and Major Gherman S Titov (1935-2000), the first and second Russian cosmonauts, and Titov's wife Tamara wave to the crowds in Moscow. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)