Russia presented never-before-seen photos of the accident that killed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Yury Gagarin he became the soviet hero after he won the first human to travel into space. He had the charisma, the intelligence and the experience to navigate this almost unknown territory of the Soviet Unionbut a plane crash cost him his life and the hopes of his country.

Gagarin’s first major achievement was on April 12, 1961, in the middle of the Cold Warwhen he returned safely to Earth 108 minutes after liftoff and orbited the planet in the spacecraft Vostok 3KA-3.

However, his journey was not entirely successful. Due to a system error, the ship landed miles further than it should and Gagarin was parachuted in front of an old woman in the town of Smelovka. The USSR did not accept this fact until ten years later, because that little mishap could have invalidated the trip.

after being named Hero of the Soviet Union and decorated with the Order of Lenin, the cosmonaut was launched “mission of peace” advertised his trip around the world for two years and talked to famous politicians, artists and monarchs. Gagarin became one National symbolso valuable that he would never risk his life by traveling into space a second time.

But death came sooner than expected, and in circumstances completely unexpected for the Soviet Union. It was during a training flight, on March 27, 1968, that the plane of Gagarin and his partner crashed.

The accident is shrouded in mystery, like it is not known what exactly went wrong during the flight. In 2011, the Russian government released the results of an investigation in which Presidential Archives official Alexander Stepanov determined that “the most likely reason for the disaster was a sudden maneuver to avoid a collision with a weather balloon”.

Other theories are that Gagarin had a heart attack, that the plane’s cabin depressurized, or that a technical malfunction caused the fatal crash. On March 27, 55 years after the cosmonaut’s death, Russia released the photos of the collapsed plane.