Why was Alan Shepherd technically the first man in space and not Yuri Gagarin?

Space exploration started with the launch of an artificial satellite, the Sputnik 1, by the Russians in October 1957. This unmanned artificial satellite took 98 minutes to orbit the earth. In January 1958, the Americans followed with their first unmanned satellite launch.

In April 1961, a Soviet Union cosmonaut, Yuri A. Gagarin became the first to orbit the earth successfully by circling the earth once at a maximum altitude of about 320 kilometres above the earth. Gagarin’s spaceship was not designed to land at a safe speed, so on his way back, Gagarin had to jump out of the spaceship and parachute the remaining couple of thousand meters.

In May 1961, however, the American astronaut Alan Shepard made a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in which he rode the capsule all the way back down with a splashdown in the Atlantic. Shepard piloted his mercury capsule himself, unlike Gagarin who was just a passenger in his vessel.

Gagarin is still regarded as the first to successfully orbit the globe even though he did not land with his ship. The Russians did not admit the fact that he ejected his vessel on the way back down until many years later, by which time this minor technicality did not matter any longer.