Fifty years ago, on April 12, 1961, former Soviet fighter pilot Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin (March 9, 1934 – March 27, 1968) became the first man in outer space when his five ton radio controlled Vostok 1 spaceship blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan and orbited the Earth once for 108 minutes at 18,000 miles per hour at an altitude of 302 kilometers.