How long did yuri gagarin stay in space?

Vostok 1 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 12 April 1961 with a single orbit on the flight plan. Nobody knew how a human body would cope with prolonged weightlessness, and the spacecraft had no propulsion system trustworthy enough to justify staying longer, so the profile was deliberately minimal: climb, one circuit of the planet with a peak altitude of about 327 km, then retrofire. Total time from launch to landing was 108 minutes. Gagarin's manual controls were locked, with the unlocking code sealed in an envelope, because engineers were unsure whether weightlessness would impair his judgement.

The descent module came down near Engels, in the Saratov region, but Gagarin was no longer inside it. He ejected at roughly 7 km (23,000 ft) and parachuted separately, landing in a field where a farmer and her daughter met a stranger in an orange suit. Soviet officials did not disclose the ejection for years: the sporting code then in force required a pilot to land inside the craft for a record to be homologated. The capsule itself touched down nearby under its own canopy, scorched by re-entry.

Brief as it was, the flight answered the open questions. A person could eat, drink, speak and observe in orbit, and could return without lasting harm. Within four months Gherman Titov flew Vostok 2 for 17 orbits, and the argument shifted from whether humans could survive spaceflight to how long they could usefully work there. Gagarin became a global figure and was kept away from further flights as too valuable to risk; he died in 1968 when the MiG-15UTI he was flying crashed. That single orbit remains the whole of his time in space.