[custom_adv] Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin 9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed one orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. [custom_adv] Gagarin became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, his nation's highest honour. Vostok 1 was his only spaceflight, but he served as the backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal crash. [custom_adv] Gagarin later served as the deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow, which was subsequently named after him. [custom_adv] Gagarin died in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awards the Yuri A. Gagarin Gold Medal in his honour. [custom_adv] Yuri Gagarin was born 9 March 1934 in the village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk (renamed Gagarin in 1968 after his death). His parents worked on a collective farm: Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin as a carpenter and bricklayer, and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina as a milkmaid. Yuri was the third of four children: older brother Valentin (born 1924), older sister Zoya (born 1927), and younger brother Boris (born 1936). [custom_adv] Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. Klushino was occupied in November 1941 during the German advance on Moscow, and an officer took over the Gagarin residence. [custom_adv] The family was allowed to build a mud hut, approximately 3 by 3 metres inside, on the land behind their house, where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation. His two older siblings were deported by the Germans to Poland for slave labour in 1943, and did not return until after the war in 1945. [custom_adv] In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk, where Gagarin continued his secondary education.In 1950, Gagarin entered into an apprenticeship at age 16 as a foundryman at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant near Moscow, and also enrolled at a local "young workers" school for seventh grade evening classes. [custom_adv] After graduating in 1951 from both the seventh grade and the vocational school with honours in moldmaking and foundry work, he was selected for further training at the Saratov Industrial Technical School, where he studied tractors.
