On the morning of 12 April 1961, in Tyuratam in the Kazakhstan desert, now also known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a 27-year-old Russian cosmonaut by the name of Yuri Gagarin walked out to the Vostok-1 rocket (a converted ballistic missile) and was strapped into the pressurised capsule on its nose.

At 06:07 UTC (09:07 Moscow time) the rocket lifted off and just 10 minutes later, after accelerating the Vostok-1 to approximately 40,000 km/hr (27,000 mph), the final booster rocket burnt out and fell away.

Now floating weightless, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Just over a hour later, retrorockets fired to slow the capsule down for re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.

At an altitude of 7,000 metres (23,000 feet) Gagarin parachuted out of his re-entry module and 10 minutes later landed safely near Engels in the Saratov region of Russia. In just 108 minutes after take-off Gagarin had made a full orbit of the earth. For the first time, man had left our planet and returned. History was made.