“I see Earth! It is so beautiful!”
With those words, spoken by Yuri Gagarin, a new age for humanity was ushered in: the Space Age.
On April 12, 1961, 27-year-old Gagarin, a Russian pilot, became the first person to escape the bonds of Earth and orbit our planet.
Those words were a sharp blow to the United States who, three years earlier, had been beaten by the Soviet Union in its attempt to get a satellite into orbit.
But the Soviet Union wasn’t done yet.
While the U.S. followed Gagarin’s flight with two of its own — Alan Shepard would become
