Yuri Gagarin lives

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a cosmonaut who was the first human to journey into outer space and to orbit our planet, when his Vostok 1 spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. He was killed in a jet crash in 1968. But what if the tragedy didn't happen at the first place?

Key Dates
1968: The tragedy that killed Gagarin didn't happen. Point of divergence from OTL.

1969: NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong is the first to step foot on the Moon. Upon return, he received a congratulatory call from Gagarin.

1971: Launch of Salyut 1 the first space station.

1977: The Voyager space probes are launched.

1991: The Soviet Union went extinct.

1994: Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the United States. Yuri Gagarin was included in the entourage which participated in the State Dinner of the White House hosted by President Bill Clinton.

2001: September 2001 attacks. Gagarin sent his condolences to U.S. President Bush.

2006: Launch of NASA space probe "New Horizons" which will go to Pluto.

2008: Illinois senator Barack Hussein Obama won the U.S. presidential election.

2009: Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

2012: Dissatisfied with the political atmosphere under Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Gagarin and his family immigrated to the United States. They settled at Brighton Beach, New York. Voyager 1 became the first artificial object to enter interstellar medium.

2014: The Ukrainian War begins. Gagarin posted an open letter to Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin calling for both sides to pursue peace for the benefit of mankind.

2015: Yuri Gagarin and his family became dual citizens when they are officially naturalized in the United States. Astronauts John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin and the U.S. President Barack Obama were present in the ceremony. Later on the New Horizons space probe arrives at the dwarf planet. Gagarin publicly congratulated the feat. LIGO discovered gravitational waves in the same year.

2016: Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. LIGO publicly announced the gravitational waves discovery. The first man in space publicly congratulated the discovery.

2017: Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. Afterwards Gagarin expressed his disgust on Trump's behavior and called on him to focus more on space exploration with a New York Times op-ed. This drew the ire of the President who then called both Gagarin and the New York Times as "biased" during his Twitter tirade.