An historic recording from 60 years ago, the voice of the first human to fly in space.

And for the next hour I'll be telling his story.

I'm Kevin Fong, and from the BBC World Service, this is Gagarin and the Lost Moon.

Today, the 12th of April, 1961, the first cosmic space ship named Vostok, and a man on board was orbited round the earth from the Soviet Union.

The motherland hears, the motherland knows,

where her son is flying through the clouds with friendly embrace with tender love she

watches over you.

He is airman Major Yuri Gagarin, an Air Force pilot, a citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic.

Yuri Gagarin 60 years ago is the first human being to escape the biosphere, to escape the cave

effectively that we have all been inhabiting since life began on this planet.

The first to step outside, the first to look down and see the earth

what it is, this sphere in space, the first to see how beautiful our planet is, the first to see its majesty,

the first to see how thin that atmosphere is, its fragility as well.

Yuri Gagarin, an explorer like none other before him, going faster and further than any human in history into what had always been the impenetrable and infinite

unknown.

Raised on a farm in the midst of the Second World War, this one-time factory worker, a citizen of the Soviet Union, became

the first human to fly above the earth in the vastness of space. In doing so it became an instrument of a new conflict, the

Cold War, an ideological battle between the superpowers, East versus West, communism versus democracy.

Today in this scene at Moscow Airport,

Yuri Gagarin was embraced by the leader of the communist world

as the hero of a communist victory.

And in a day of wild jubilation, he was embraced by the Soviet people

...