Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in 1961, becoming the first human to travel into space.
On 12 April 1961, Gagarin launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Vostok 1. His spacecraft completed one orbit of Earth in approximately 108 minutes before landing in the Soviet Union.
The mission made Gagarin an international symbol of the Space Age and a major Cold War propaganda victory for the Soviet Union. His radio call “Poyekhali!”—often translated as “Let’s go!”—became closely associated with the flight.
Gagarin did not land inside the Vostok capsule: he ejected and parachuted separately, a detail sometimes omitted in simplified accounts. The United States’ Alan Shepard became the second person and first American in space less than a month later, but his 1961 flight was suborbital rather than an orbit.