page_title: History of spaceflight
section_title: First man in space
hierarchical_section_title: History of spaceflight / Space Race / First man in space
caption_attribution_description: Svenska: Jurij Gagarin hälsar på pressen under sitt besök i Malmö 1964.English: Yuri Gagarin saying hello to the press during a visit to Malmö, Sweden 1964.
context_page_description: Spaceflight began in the 20th century following theoretical and practical breakthroughs by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert H. Goddard. The Soviet Union took the lead in the post-war Space Race, launching the first satellite, the first man and the first woman into orbit. The United States caught up with, and then passed, their Soviet rivals during the mid-1960s, landing the first man on the Moon in 1969. In the same period, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and China were concurrently developing more limited launch capabilities.
  Following the end of the Space Race, spaceflight has been characterised by greater international co-operation, cheaper access to low Earth orbit and an expansion of commercial ventures. Interplanetary probes have visited all of the planets in the Solar System, and humans have remained in orbit for long periods aboard space stations such as Mir and the ISS. Most recently, China has emerged as the third nation with the capability to launch independent crewed missions, whilst operators in the commercial sector have developed re-usable booster systems and craft launched from airborne platforms.
context_section_description: On April 12, 1961, the USSR opened the era of crewed spaceflight, with the flight of the first cosmonaut (Russian name for space travelers),  Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin's flight, part of the Soviet Vostok space exploration program, took 108 minutes and consisted of a single  orbit of the Earth.
  On August 7, 1961, Gherman Titov, another Soviet cosmonaut, became the second man in orbit during his Vostok 2 mission.
  By June 16, 1962, the Union launched a total of six Vostok cosmonauts, two pairs of them flying concurrently, and accumulating a total of 260 cosmonaut-orbits and just over sixteen cosmonaut-days in space.
  On May 5, 1961, the US launched its first suborbital Mercury astronaut, Alan Shepard, in the Freedom 7 capsule. Unlike Gagarin, Shepard manually controlled his spacecraft's attitude and landed inside it thus technically making Freedom 7 the first complete human spaceflight by FAI definitions. The US public was becoming increasingly shocked and alarmed at the widening lead obtained by the USSR, so President John F. Kennedy announced on May 25 a plan to land a man on the Moon by 1970, launching the three-man Apollo program.
  On February 20, 1962, the US succeeded in launching the third crewed orbital spaceflight in history, with John Glenn, the first US orbital astronaut, making three orbits during his Friendship 7 mission. By May 16, 1963, the US launched a total of six Project Mercury astronauts, logging a cumulative 34 Earth orbits, and 51 hours in space.
caption: Yuri Gagarin
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