Pics: 50 years since Yuri Gagarin went to space

Pics: 50 years since Yuri Gagarin went to space




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)