i see earth. it's so beautiful
these are the first words spoken by a 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.
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.
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.
no one was certain if the astronauts who went on there flights would come back alive. but they did, and our ideas about space were changed forever.