The day the first person went into space – level 2
12-04-1961
Yuri Gagarin was 27 years old when he was preparing for his space flight. The training for the flight took months, and he did it with five other candidates.
The training was extremely hard. They had to stay in a very hot room for 2 hours. They also had to stay alone in one room for fifteen days. They had to do parachute training.
In the end, the leaders chose Gagarin to go to space. He was a friendly person and he had a good name, Yuri, which represented the Soviet Union well.
On April 12, 1961, everything was ready at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and Vostok 1 took Gagarin into space.
The flight was 108 minutes long. Gagarin reached a height of 327 kilometers and orbited the Earth once. Then Vostok 1 began to go down. When it reached a height of 7 kilometers, Gagarin catapulted and parachuted to the ground.
Gagarin suddenly became the most famous man on the planet.
Difficult words: orbit (to fly around the Earth in space), catapult (to throw very quickly into the air), suddenly (quickly and unexpectedly).
What qualities made Gagarin stand out to the leaders and why was he chosen to go to space?
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