The starry sky has attracted people since time immemorial. But only in the 20th century did science begin to study outer space in earnest. The space age started in conditions of fierce competition between “two worlds”. The USA and the USSR, the leaders of two warring camps, sought to demonstrate the superiority of their social system in all areas of human activity. The sphere of space was perhaps the most visual and spectacular way to prove this. Therefore, in the 1950s, these countries were drawn into a race to send a man into space before their rivals. The Soviet Union managed to get ahead of the United States, and the first person to overcome gravity was Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin (1934-1968). This happened on April 12, 1961. In 108 minutes on the other side of the globe, Yuri Gagarin’s life ceased to belong to him. Literally every minute - from birth to death - became part of a large-scale legend about the great Soviet man who was the first to fly into space. At the same time, he himself did not consider himself great at all, and during that fateful hour and a half he did not even have time to understand his own feelings. And then an ordinary senior lieutenant, a pilot of a fighter aviation regiment, suddenly turned out to be the most famous person in the world.