With the State Commission finalizing preparations at Baikonur Cosmodrome, engineers and cosmonauts made last checks before Gagarin's launch on April 12. The decision capped a fierce, secretive race between the Soviet Union and United States to be first to put a human in space.
In the first days of April 1961, the Soviet State Commission overseeing the Vostok program met at the Baikonur Cosmodrome to make the final determination of who would become the first human in space. Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Air Force pilot from a modest farming family, was selected over his backup, Gherman Titov, partly for his composure, charisma, and the simple fact that his broad smile photographed well — Soviet planners were already thinking about propaganda value.
Engineers spent these early April days running exhaustive checks on the Vostok capsule, a cramped sphere barely large enough for one man, designed by Sergei Korolev's bureau under intense secrecy and equally intense pressure, since American Mercury astronauts were racing toward their own launch. Little was left to chance, though much remained genuinely uncertain: no one knew for certain how a human body and mind would react to weightlessness or reentry forces.
On April 12, Gagarin lifted off, reportedly shouting 'Poyekhali!' ('Let's go!') and completed a single 108-minute orbit of Earth before parachuting back down near Saratov, becoming an instant global icon and handing the Soviet Union a landmark propaganda victory in the Cold War space race just weeks before Alan Shepard's suborbital flight.