Most people think that Uri Gagarin was the first man in space, but he was actually just the first one to come back alive. In those days of the space race, the iron curtain was still in full effect. Unlike the Americans, who showed all their launches, successful or not to the public, the Russians only released footage of successful launches, but cosmonauts were dying at an alarming rate, blowing up on the launch pad, or shortly after take off. None of this was known to the western world until the age of glasnost, when the Berlin wall came down. It was then revealed that one poor guy, Boris Shnemnoski, was accidentally fired into deep space by the ships primitive computer, instead of the intended low earth orbit. They lost contact with him at an 'altitude' of six hundred miles as the communications equipment was designed for low earth orbit. He left the plane of the ecliptic at about eight miles per second, and thus is now further into interstellar space than voyager! That's far out man!