Statue of Yuri Gagarin, London. The statue to cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was unveiled at its permanent location at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich on 7 March 2013. The statue shows Gagarin in his spacesuit standing on the globe and is a gift from the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, to the British People. The statue is near the Observatory’s 19th century Astronomy Centre; the area in which the statue stands has been named Yuri Gagarin Terrace in honour of the cosmonaut. Yuri Gagarin was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. He was killed in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed.