Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) became the first human in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

There have been a lot of groundbreaking firsts in human history, but only one person can claim to be the first in outer space. That's Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut who breached Earth's atmosphere and zipped into orbit in 1961. He stood just 5 feet, 2 inches (1.57 meters). But in the lore of space exploration, Gagarin casts an enormously long.