Sixty years ago on Monday cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, securing victory for Moscow in its race with Washington and marking a new chapter in the history of space exploration.

Decades later, his journey has become shrouded in myth after many details about the historic mission were for years kept secret by the Soviets.

On April 12, 1961, Gagarin's Vostok spacecraft took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union, as the 27-year-old cosmonaut exclaimed his iconic catchphrase "Let's go!".

His flight lasted just 108 minutes, the time it took to complete one loop around the Earth, before returning to home soil. 

The legend of the man who rose from humble beginnings to become a Soviet hero lives on today and the day of Gagarin's flight is celebrated every year in Russia as Cosmonautics Day.

His now rusty Vostok capsule is on display at Moscow's Museum of Cosmonautics where an exhibition dedicated to Gagarin is set to open on Tuesday. 

Visitors will be shown documents, photos and personal belongings of Gagarin, some dating back to his childhood and school years.

"This is probably the only surname that everyone knows, from four-year-old children to people over 80," Vyacheslav Klimentov, historian and the museum's deputy director of research, told AFP. 

"I would say that Gagarin's feat, that saw a man go to space for the first time, bonds all Russians together," he added.

Gagarin's flight remains a source of national pride in Russia and a symbol of the Soviet Union's dominance in space during that era. Four years before Gagarin, the USSR had already become the first country to send into orbit a satellite, called Sputnik.

Sixty years on, Russia continues to frequently send its cosmonauts to the International Space Station (ISS). On Friday, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, honouring the anniversary of Gagarin's flight, blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome with two Russians and a US astronaut on board. 

But the anniversary also comes at a difficult time for Russia's space industry, which has suffered a number of setbacks recently, from corruption scandals to an aborted take-off endangering a manned mission in 2018.

Russia's ageing Soyuz rockets are reliable and allow Moscow to remain relevant in the modern space industry, but the country is struggling to innovate and keep up with other key players.  

Five things to know about Gagarin's journey to space

- 'Let's go!' - A trained steel worker turned military pilot, Gagarin was selected from thousands of candidates to undergo the rigorous training required for a space flight.

Apart from showing excellent results in his tests, Gagarin, then aged 27, also reportedly stood out by removing his shoes before entering the Vostok spacecraft designated for the mission, a custom in Russia when entering a home.

Gagarin became an overnight Soviet hero.

On April 12, 1961, as Gagarin's flight took off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan, he exclaimed his iconic catchphrase "Poekhali!", or "Let's go!" in Russian.

- Risky business - The flight lasted just 108 minutes as the Vostok completed one loop around the Earth.

Once Gagarin safely returned home, the success of his mission outshone the fact that not everything went according to plan.

Among a dozen technical glitches, his spacecraft entered into orbit at a higher altitude than expected.

If its brakes system had malfunctioned, Gagarin would have had to wait for the spacecraft to begin descending on its own. And while the Vostok was stocked with enough food, water and oxygen to last 10 days, the higher altitude meant the wait would have been much longer and Gagarin would have run out of supplies.

Luckily for the Russian cosmonaut, the brakes worked.

- Spy suspicions - But Gagarin came down miles away from his expected landing point, ejecting from his capsule over the Saratov region in southern Russia.

He landed in a field where the first people he saw were a young girl and her grandmother digging up potatoes.

Clad in a white helmet and orange spacesuit, he struggled at first to convince them amid Cold War tensions that he was not a foreign spy.

- Urination nation - Legend has it that before takeoff Gagarin asked the bus driver bringing him to the launchpad to pull over so he could relieve himself, before urinating on the back right tyre. 

For years Russian cosmonauts repeated the ritual before launching into space, but the decades-old superstition may soon be forced into retirement: the new design of the Russian spacesuit presented in 2019 is not equipped with a fly and is too heavy to nimbly remove.

- The man behind Gagarin - While Gagarin became a household name in the Soviet Union, for years nobody knew about the mastermind of the country's space programme: Sergei Korolyov.

The Soviets even rejected a Nobel prize awarded to their "Chief Designer", determined to keep his identity a secret. Only after his death in 1966 was his name revealed.

Under Korolyov's leadership, the USSR sent not only the first person to space, but later the first woman, as well as conducting the first spacewalk.