Yuri Gagarin nearly washed out of flight school because he was too short to see out of his MiG-15 until an instructor handed him a seat cushion. This episode follows his life from the village of Klushino, where the Nazi occupation forced his family into a 10-by-10-foot mud hut for 21 months and he sabotaged military vehicles as a boy, through his apprenticeship as a foundryman, tractor studies in Saratov, weekend flying lessons funded by dock labor on the Volga, and his selection for the Vostok program, where his small stature became an asset.

It covers the brutal cosmonaut screening, including oxygen deprivation tests and ten days in an isolation chamber, the anonymous vote in which fellow pilots chose him, and the 108-minute flight of April 12, 1961, along with the long-hidden fact that he ejected and parachuted separately from the capsul ...