Vostok 1: 60th Anniversary of Historic First Human Spaceflight

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Vostok 1: 60th anniversary of historic first human spaceflight:

Sixty years ago on Monday, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a variation of a rocket originally designed to launch nuclear weapons to become the first person to orbit the Earth. Though his flight lasted only one hour and 48 minutes, it was an historic event that ranks right up there with when the first fish decided to take a step on dry land.

In the early morning of April 12, 1961, a Vostok-K 8K72K rocket sat on the launch pad waiting for its pilot. In a bus some distance away, 27-year-old senior lieutenant Yuri Gagarin sat nervously in his bulky orange spacesuit with the freshly painted acronym CCCP glistening in still-wet red letters. Behind him sat backup cosmonaut Gherman Titov in a similar suit, and second backup Grigori Nelyubov.

[...] On the way to the launch pad, Gagarin asked for the bus to stop, so he could relieve himself on one of the tires, starting what became a tradition that cosmonauts follow to this day.

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