Yuri Gagarin

April 12, 1961, was a day that changed the future of the world and sparked a new area of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was on that day that a brave young Russian cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin climbed into the Vostok 1 spacecraft and was shot into space from a lonely area of Kazakhstan. The capsule landed 108 minutes later with Gagarin parachuting the final leg of the journey, the first man to have flown in space, the first to orbit our earth.

I am among that generation of men and...