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go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts. On April the 12th, 1961, a man first looked down on the earth from space.

Here is the news. All Moscow is waiting to give a hero's welcome to the world's first

spaceman, Major Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force.

And to begin the bulletin,

hears a Moscow recording of his voice speaking to Russian scientists

as he went through space. Meijoahgarin said that the flight was going on successfully normal, visibility was good good and that he himself was feeling good as well.

I'm Richard Hollingham and in this BBC programme I'm going to look back at the events that led up to that momentous day 50 years ago and their impact on the world.

There are two heroes in our story, the first Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the second the Soviet's chief rocket designer

Sergei Corlyov. At the time his name was a state secret. A rocketry pioneer in the 1930s, Koryov had been banished to a Siberian labor camp by Stalin.

Eventually he was ordered back to Moscow where he salvaged the remains of old German V2 missiles left over from the war.

Writer on Russian space, Brian Harvey.

Kaurlef in particular was given responsibility for the R7, it was called. And this was the first entirely indigenous

large-scale Russian rocket. So this was a very very significant step way beyond anything that the Germans could have taught them.

This was really leaving the German technology behind.

But space wasn't the target, as Yuri Gagarin's biographer Pierce Bizoni explains.

Korolef's original task was to design a rocket an ICBM missile that could lug

Russian missiles into the heartland of America.

But the Russian warheads were very heavy,

so Korylliev had to design a very powerful rocket

to lift them.

...