Who was the first person in space?

Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force pilot, became the first human in space on April 12, 1961, aboard Vostok 1. The flight lasted 108 minutes and completed a single orbit of Earth, with the spacecraft controlled automatically from the ground and Gagarin largely a passenger. He ejected from the capsule at about 7 kilometers altitude and parachuted separately to the ground, a detail the Soviet Union concealed for years because international aviation records required a pilot to land with the craft. He became a global celebrity and died in a training jet crash in 1968.

The American sequence followed closely. Alan Shepard flew a 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, reaching space without orbiting. John Glenn became the first American to orbit on February 20, 1962, completing three orbits. Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union became the first woman in space in 1963, and the first American woman, Sally Ride, did not fly until 1983. The Soviet lead in these early milestones is what prompted Kennedy's 1961 commitment to landing on the moon within the decade, which the United States achieved in 1969.

Two points of context. The boundary of space used for these records is the Kármán line at 100 kilometers, though the United States has used 80 kilometers for awarding astronaut wings, which is why some suborbital flights count under one standard and not another. And the Soviet program achieved its firsts partly by accepting risks the American program did not, a pattern that continued through the decade and is part of why the Soviet moon program, which suffered repeated launch failures, was abandoned and denied for years afterward.