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I see Earth. It's so beautiful!'
2 These are the first words spoken by human in space. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space when he flew around the Earth in a spacecraft called Vostok 1. He was only twenty-seven at the time. The spacecraft flew at a speed of over 27,000 kilometres an hour, more than 300 kilometres above the Earth. The flight lasted 108 minutes.
3 Gagarin volunteered to become one of the first Soviet astronauts in 1959. As part of his training, he had to sit in a room without sound or light for twenty-four hours! The flight of Vostok 1 made him famous all around the world, and he became a hero in the Soviet Union. He never went into space again, but he helped train other astronauts until he died in a plane crash in 1968. 4 There were six Vostok flights. While the first lasted less than two hours, Vostok 2 stayed in space for more than twenty-five hours. It flew around the Earth seventeen times! Later Vostok flights lasted even longer and Vostok 6 took the first woman, valentina Tereshkova, into space on 16 June 1963 5 No one was certain if the astronauts who went on these flights would come back alive. But they did, and our ideas about space were changed forever.