Today we are going to be discussing one of the most inspiring human achievements of the twentieth century, space travel, and its pioneer, the then Major Yuri Gagarin, who completed the historic first orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961, which is fifty years ago on Tuesday. A new edition of "Starman: the Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin" by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony is timed to this event. I will be talking in the studio to Patrick Buzzard, the head of the NASA mission in Russia, who is just back from watching a memorial launch at Baikonur, the place from which Gagarin set off into space, and on the phone to Anatoly Zak, one of Russia's leading historians of space exploration and publisher of RussianSpaceWeb.com.