His career in a Soviet Air Force
After he graduated from the technical school in 1955, the Soviet Army drafted Yuri. On a recommendation, Yuri was sent to Chkalov Air Force Pilot's School in Orenburg, and soloed in a MiG-15 in 1957. While he was there, he met Valentina Ivanovna Goryacheva, a medical technician graduate of the Orenburg Medical School. They were then married on 7 November 1975, it was the same day Yuri graduated from Orenburg. 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.
Yuri Gagarin was born on March 9, 1934.
He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.
He soon became an international celebrity, and was awarded many medals and titles.
His early life
Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino(renamed Gagarin after his death),near Gzhatsk. His parents work in a collective farm. Yuri was the third of four children.
His family suffered during, Nazi occupation in World War II. Yuri’s village was occupied in November 1941 during the German advance on Moscow, and an officer took over Gagarin residence. Yuri’s family was allowed to build a mud hut, it had to be 3 by 3 metres inside, on the land behind there house, Yuri’s family spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation. Yuri’s two older siblings were deported by the Germans to Poland for slave labour in 1943 and did not return until the war in 1945. 1 year later, Yuri’s family moved back to Gzhatsk, where Gagarin continued his secondary education.
At the age of 16 in 1950, Yuri entered into an apprenticeship as a foundry man at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant near Moscow, and he also enrolled at a “young workers” school for seventh grade evening classes. After he graduated in 1915 from both the seventh grade and the vocational school, he was selected for further training at the Saratov Industrial Technical School, where he studied tractors. Yuri 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.
Career in the Soviet space program
In 1960, after selecting and a selection process, Yuri was chosen with 19 other pilots for the Soviet space program. Yuri was further selected for an elite training group knows as the Sochi Six, where the first cosmonauts of the Vostok programme would be chosen. Yuri and the others perspective candidates were subjected to experiments designed to test physical and psychological endurance, he also went undertraining for the upcoming flight, Out of the twenty selected, 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 rather short. Gagarin was 1.57 metres (5 ft 2 in) tall.
Vostok 1
On the 12th of April 1961, the Vostok 3KA-3, spacecraft was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Yuri Gagarin, became both the first human to travel into outer space, and also the first human to complete a complete orbit around 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 (opus 86).Some have claimed that Gagarin commented during the flight, "I don't see any God up here." But Yuri’s friend Colonel Valentin Petrov said that Yuri never said such words. Yuri’s friend also said that Yuri had been baptised into the Orthodox Church as a child, and a 2011. A magazine article said that the rector of the Orthodox church in Star City saying, "Gagarin baptized his elder daughter Yelena shortly before his space flight, and his family used to celebrate Christmas and Easter and keep icons in the house.
Death
Sadly he died on 27th of March 1968 while he’s training from Chkalovsky Air Base, him and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin in a MiG 15 UTI crashed near a town called Kirzhach, Russia. There body were cremated and buried in the walls of Kremlin on Red Square.
How did the jet crashed?
The cause of the accident is not certain, there’s a lot of theories about it. One of theories is that the air vent was left accidentally open result to oxygen deprivation (it makes your skin bluish and your heart rate increases, it can cause fainting ,consciousness, coma, seizures, and brain death). Another theory is an air traffic controller given him the wrong outdated weather information.
