The story of Gagarin’s mission is brilliantly told in the book “Beyond” by Stephen Walker. It is a must read for anyone interested in space exploration and all the Cold War politics that surrounded the scramble to put the first human into space.
“How incredibly brave those early pioneers of space travel were.”
Their bravery was off the charts. As Tom Wolfe so memorably put it, they were made of The Right Stuff.
They were following in a long tradition of bravery in exploration. In the age before longitude could be accurately measured, travelling on the high seas was almost as insanely dangerous as travelling into space.