When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The Vostok program was a Soviet space program project that ran from 1960 to 1963 and ...

At 06:17 GMT, Vostok 1 was in orbit at an altitude of between 91 nautical miles (169 km) and 177 nautical miles (327 km), circling the Earth once every 89.1 minutes.

On Wednesday 12 April, 1961, a tiny cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin crawled into the Vostok 1. At 9:08, he became the first man to be successfully rocketed into orbit. He was a Soviet icon, a key ...

Cosmonautics Day is celebrated on April 12 each year in Russia. It is a holiday dedicated to the first manned space flight in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth on board the Vostok 1 spaceship.

Surprising facts about Vostok 1, the mission that made Yuri Gagarin the first ... Space Exploration Doomed Soviet satellite from 1972 will tumble uncontrollably to Earth next week — and it could ...

On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. See photos of the historic flight of Vostok 1.