Alan Shepard, the first American to go to outer-space, talks about the space race with Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin and him during the Cold War. He talks about the problems America faced in the battle to get to space before the Soviet Union. Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He became the first person to go into outer-space in 1961 on the Vostok spacecraft. He was given the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the nation's highest honor.