Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was the third of four children of a carpenter and a dairy worker on a collective farm in the village of Klushino, west of Moscow. When he was seven the German army occupied the village; a soldier threw the family out of their house and they lived for nearly two years in a dugout in the garden. His two older siblings were deported to forced labour. Schooling resumed only after the war.

He trained as a foundryman at a vocational school, then at a technical college in Saratov, where he joined a flying club and made his first solo flight in a small biplane. He entered the air force pilot school at Orenburg in 1955 and was flying MiG-15s in the Arctic when the search for cosmonauts began. He was chosen partly for his calm, partly because he was short, and by the reckoning of his instructors partly because he was liked by everyone.

On 12 April 1961 he was strapped into the Vostok 1 capsule, said "Poyekhali!" ("Let's go!") as the rocket lifted, and completed one orbit in 108 minutes. The controls were locked; the flight was automatic, with a sealed envelope containing the override code in case of emergency. On the way down the service module failed to detach cleanly and the capsule spun violently before it came free. He ejected at seven kilometres and landed by parachute in a field near the Volga, where a farmer's wife and her granddaughter backed away in fright.

He became the most famous man alive, toured the world, drank too much under the pressure, and died at 34 when his training jet crashed in March 1968.