What really happened during Yuri Gagarin's 108 minutes in space?

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go all the way around the Earth. In 108 minutes he lifted off from Baikonur, completed one orbit, and came back. His capsule, Vostok 1, circled between 181 and 327 kilometres above the planet, and it was the first human orbital spaceflight in history.

It was a far riskier bet than the celebrations suggested. Up to that point the Soviet space launch record was 50 per cent failures: 12 of 24 launches had failed. Nobody knew how a human mind would cope with weightlessness, so the capsule's manual controls were locked and the flight was run by automatic systems and ground controllers. There was no backup retrorocket, either; the capsule carried 13 days of provisions so Gagarin could survive until his orbit decayed naturally if the one engine failed.

And Gagarin? He was famously calm. About half an hour before launch his pulse was 64 beats per minute, while his chief designer, Sergei Korolev, was reportedly suffering from chest pains and anxiety. As the rocket lifted off, he said "Poyekhali!" ("Let's go!"), a word that later came to stand for the beginning of the Space Age.

The ending was stranger than most people know. Gagarin did not land in his capsule: he ejected at 7 kilometres up and parachuted down on his own. A farm woman and her granddaughter watched an orange-suited figure walk toward them with a parachute dragging behind and backed away in fear. He told them not to be afraid: he was a Soviet citizen who had come down from space, and he needed a telephone to call Moscow.