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On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft ''Vostok 1,'' Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into space. During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space capsule in 89 minutes. ''Vostok 1'' orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, ''Flight is proceeding normally; I am well.'' After his historic feat was announced, the attractive and unassuming Gagarin became an instant worldwide celebrity. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor. The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S. space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in ''Friendship 7''. By that time, the Soviet Union had already made another leap ahead in the ''space race,'' with the August 1961 flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov in ''Vostok 2''. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more than 25 hours in space. Yuri Gagarin was killed in a jet-aircraft test flight in 1968.