Ejection and Landing

At an altitude of about 7 kilometers, Gagarin ejected from the capsule and completed the rest of the descent on his own parachute — as did the capsule itself, which landed under its own parachute separately, not far away.

Gagarin touched down in a field near the village of Smelovka in Saratov Oblast at approximately 07:55 UTC. Under the rules of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), a pilot had to land together with his craft for the flight to be recognized as a record — the Soviet Union therefore officially presented the flight as a landing inside the capsule and kept the fact of the ejection secret for nearly a decade.

The first witnesses to the landing were a local woman and her granddaughter, who were at first frightened by Gagarin in his spacesuit with its visor closed. News of the successful flight quickly spread around the world, and Gagarin became a global celebrity overnight.