50th Anniversary of the First Human Spaceflight(Yuri Gagarin): Fifty years Anniversary of the First Human Spaceflight

50th Anniversary of the First Human Spaceflight(Yuri Gagarin): Fifty years Anniversary of the First Human Spaceflight: Fifty years ago, on April 12, Former Soviet fighter pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first man to have travelled in space, in a 108-minute flight, that almost ended in a disaster.
The Soviet human spaceflight project, the Vostok Programme, was an ambitious effort to confirm Soviet leadership in space.
Although several launches had successfully carried animals into space, it wasn't known how a man would react to the weightlessness and isolation of a space flight.

Alexey Leonov, Yuri Gagarin's Friend has said, "It's like dressing a man in a suit and shoving him into a blast furnace, saying, 'fear not, the suit will protect you.' But nobody knows for sure if it will actually protect you or not."

Source: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/fifty-years-since-yuri-gagarin-traveled-in-space/148966-11.html