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Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12,1961. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. Commenting on the first view from space he reported, "The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly"...

Very cool fun fact!

Also cool is that exactly 20 years later, on this day in 1981, NASA launched the first space shuttle, Columbia!

Yep. That's true. In Russia, April 12 is officially called "Cosmonautics day".
Yet the flight wouldn't have happened without Russian/Soviet scientists Constantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky and Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, as well as many other people, some of them unknown to general public, who helped in training and spaceship construction.
Huge celebration here, space exploration being one of the main topics on TV, radio, etc. (Well, it's our citizen who's been the first man in space, so that's understandable.)
If you want fun, here you go. Gagarin has landed near a remote village Smelovka in Saratov origin, and the first people who saw him were a little girl and her grandmother. They were planting potatoes, and then saw somebody come down from the sky and go to them. Since Yuri Alexeevich was "packed" in a space suit, you can imagine he looked very strange, and the ladies were scared. But then he started talking, and the girl said something like, "well, he speaks Russian, so he must be a human".
...Since then, every April 12th, the girl who is a grown up woman now plants potatoes to honour the first man in space.

It's a shame that Gagarin died so young... I would have loved to hear what he thought of where space flight is today. Maybe he and Glenn could have gone up to the ISS together. Those early guys were a different breed!