Gagarin's Flight: Baikonur to Engels, 1961

Gagarin began training at Khodynka Airfield in central Moscow on 15 March 1960. He was one of an initial group of twelve cosmonauts, and the regimen of vigorous, repetitive physical exercise reminded Alexei Leonov, a fellow member of that group, of training for the Olympic Games. A month later the group moved on to parachute training in Saratov Oblast, where each man completed about 40 to 50 jumps. Saratov would matter again: it is where Gagarin's own flight ended a year later.

Launch came from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site No. 1 at 06:07 UTC. Sergei Korolev radioed his farewell, and Gagarin answered: "Let's go! (Poyekhali!)" The same pad had launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, on 4 October 1957, and it kept launching crews until 2019, when it hosted its last two crewed flights in July and September. It is now known as Gagarin's Start, and authorities have announced plans to add it to the cosmodrome's museum complex.

At 07:55 UTC, still 7 km up, the hatch was released and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected. He and the capsule came down separately by parachute, about ten minutes later, 26 km south-west of Engels in the Saratov region. A farm woman and her granddaughter watched a figure in a bright orange suit and a large white helmet land near them. Gagarin recalled telling them he was a Soviet citizen who had descended from space and had to find a telephone to call Moscow. The site is now a monument park.

Visitor guidance: The landing site is a monument park with a 25 m rocket and a statue of Gagarin in a spacesuit.

Gagarin became a national hero and a worldwide celebrity. A long motorcade of high-ranking officials escorted him through the streets of Moscow to the Kremlin, where in a lavish ceremony Nikita Khrushchev awarded him the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Other Soviet cities held mass demonstrations, on a scale second only to the World War II Victory Parades. The Kremlin was also his last stop: after he died in a training-flight crash in 1968, his ashes were interred in its walls.

The Vostok 1 re-entry capsule belongs to the S. P. Korolev RSC Energia Museum in Korolev City, near Moscow. In 2018 it was temporarily loaned to the Space Pavilion at the VDNKh exhibition park in Moscow. So the craft that carried the first human into orbit is kept neither at the launch pad nor at the landing field, but in a company museum outside Moscow.

Location precision: The pin marks the Energia company site in Korolev; the museum's exact entrance is not pinned.