YURI GAGARIN It was at 10 am on 12th April, 1961 when Radio Moscow interrupted scheduled broadcasting to announce something truly historic and magnificent. "Here is our special news," it stated. "The first cosmic spaceship named Vostok 1 with a man on board has orbited around the Earth from the Soviet Union. He is an airman, Major Yuri Gagarin." An hour earlier the spacecraft Vostok 1, with Yuri Gagarin as its only crew, was fired from a launch pad in Baikonur in Kazakhstan. It orbited the Earth once at a speed of 27,000 kilometres per hour for a total duration of 108 minutes. The ships flight path took it up to space and over the Pacific Ocean, South America, across the equator, and the South Atlantic before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and landing at Engels. His safe return put to rest worries that space flight could be fatal to humans and opened the doors to space travel. The news quickly spread and the world was astonished. The Soviet Union had beaten the USA in the race to get the first man into space and Yuri Gagarin had become that man. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushschev congratulated Gagarin on his achievement and sent him a message from his Black Sea holiday home in which he said that the flight opened up a new page in the history of mankind in its conquest of space. Major Yuri Gagarin, a previously unknown army officer, instantly became a national hero and an international icon. Today, the landing site at Engels has become a monument park at the centre of which is a 25-meter tall sculpture of a silver metallic rocket ship and a three-meter tall statue of Yuri Gagarin. The space hero has not been forgotten and on the 50th anniversary of his voyage into space world cosmonauts honoured the hero when the Russian, American, and Italian crew of the International Space Station sent a special video message to wish the people of the world a 'Happy Yuri's Night.