Who was the first person to orbit Earth in space?

Yuri Gagarin was the first person to orbit Earth in space. The Soviet cosmonaut completed one orbit aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961.

The flight lasted 108 minutes from launch to landing. Gagarin’s spacecraft reached an orbit with an altitude of roughly 181 to 327 kilometres, and the mission demonstrated that a human could survive launch, weightlessness, and reentry. Because Vostok 1’s reentry capsule could not land safely with its pilot inside, Gagarin ejected and parachuted separately from the capsule.

Gagarin was 27 years old when he flew and became an international symbol of the Space Age. His achievement came less than four years after Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, launched in 1957. American astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in February 1962, after Alan Shepard became the first American in space on a suborbital flight. Neil Armstrong later became the first person to walk on the Moon, a different milestone from orbiting Earth.