Yuri Gagarin

This week marks the anniversary of the first time a human, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, went into space. It's also the anniversary of the inaugural launch of NASA's space shuttle program. We've assembled a slideshow representing some of the spacecraft used for manned space travel in the past, present, and future. Seen here is Gagarin before he took off on his 108-minute orbit around the Earth, an event that shocked the world and accelerated the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S.