Fifty years later, relive the world's first space odyssey

'Moon Shot' recounts cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's history-making orbital trip in 1961

“If you flew 9,000 miles east from Florida’s sand spit Cape Canaveral, you would arrive at the land of the sky: the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, a flat plain where the yellowed grasslands turn green only in the spring — where at day's end one can see nothing, not even a leaf or twig, between self and setting sun.

It was this bare, unpopulated land that was chosen in the 1950s by a small army of Russian space pioneers, scientists, rocket engineers and technicians, laborers and cooks and carpenters and masons to build the great Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome — a sprawling space center located perfectly to launch rockets and land spacecraft where mishaps would do little damage to the sparse flora and fauna.  Even more importantly, the desolation would keep secrets hidden.”  Story Here