The 27-year-old Soviet cosmonaut completed a single orbit around the Earth the morning of Wednesday, April 12— only 25 days before the first American crewed suborbital spaceflight. During descent, he ejected from his spacecraft and landed under his own parachute near the city of Engels. Ever since, there have been rumors and conspiracy theories that Gagarin was actually not the first person to fly in space, but rather the first to return. Though none of these stories about so-called “phantom cosmonauts” have any truthfulness, they are still an interesting piece of early space history.

Lowell was an American businessman, author, and astronomer who built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona (now known as the Lowell Observatory) in the early 1890′s. He predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune and initiated the search that would discover Pluto well after his death. Lowell is best known for this theory that an intelligent Martian race constructed a series of canals to irrigate water from Mars’s poles. What began as a mistranslation of an Italian word led to more than a century of searching for life beyond Earth. 

Ivan was an anthropomorphic test dummy, or lifelike mannequin used to test the ejection seat of the Vostok spacecraft before crewed flight. His body housed small rodents and a radio transmitter. Ivan flew with Chernushka on March 9th and again with the dog Zvezdochka on March 25 in the final test flight before Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight. Though the most famous, Ivan was only one of multiple “dummies” used in space exploration.

Interkosmos was a Soviet program that flew citizens from other pro-Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and socialist states into space. A total of 18 research cosmonauts from 16 countries flew to the Salyut 6, Salyut 7, and Mir space stations from 1978 to 1991. While onboard the station, Remek took pictures of his home country of Czechoslovakia, performed life science experiments, and used the onboard furnace for materials processing.

In an effort to prove the Soviet Union valued all citizens and believed men and women were equals, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomareva, Irina Solovyova, Valentina Tereshkova, and Zhanna Yorkina are selected to be the world’s first female space travelers. Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space on June 16, 1963. Although a planned two-women Voskhod mission was planned, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev’s death in 1966, as well as the Soyuz 1 disaster in 1967 and a lunar program that just couldn’t seem to get off the ground, neither of the other four cosmonauts ever flew in space. 

One experiment the crew was scheduled to perform was called Chix in Space and explored the development of chicken embryos in microgravity. It was created by a Purdue student and sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken.