On the same day, the world is celebrating the International Day of Human Space Flight.
On April 12, 1961, a booster rocket took into orbit the Vostok spacecraft with the first cosmonaut on board — Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin.
Having travelled around the Earth once, the reentry module landed on the territory of the Soviet Union. At an altitude of several miles from the surface of the Earth, Gagarin ejected with a parachute and landed on a field near the Volga River outside the village of Smelovka in Russia's Saratov Region, at 10:55 a.m. Moscow time. The flight lasted 108 minutes.
