On April 12, 1961, twenty-seven-year old Yuri Gagarin, a Russian ex-foundry worker and loyal Communist, climbed inside a tiny spherical capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile and blasted into the skies. Eleven minutes later he was in orbit, the first human ever to leave the planet. Traveling at almost 18,000 miles per hour , Gagarin circled the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he saw the earth as nobody had before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing both its beauty and its fragility. Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the heart of the drama – to the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.