* 1961 – Rory Bremner, Scottish comedian

* 1961 – The Russian ( Soviet ) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 ( Vostok 1 ).

* 1961 – Enedina Arellano Félix, Mexican drug trafficker

* 1961 – Lisa Gerrard, Australian singer, musician, and composer ( Dead Can Dance )

* 1961 – Charles Mann, American football player

* 1961 – Magda Szubanski, Australian actress

* 1961 – K-19, the first Soviet nuclear submarine equipped with nuclear missiles, is commissioned.

* 1961 – Isiah Thomas, American basketball player

* 1961 – Yolanda Adams, American singer, producer, and actress

* 1961 – Tom Ford, American fashion designer and director

* 1961 – Helmut Winklhofer, German footballer

* 1881 – Leo Carrillo, American actor ( d. 1961 )

* 1961 – Brad Gilbert, American tennis player

* 1961 – John Key, New Zealand politician, 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand

* 1961 – Amy Stiller, American comedian and actress

* 1961 – East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants ' attempts to escape to the West.

* 1961 – Sam Champion, American weatherman

* 1961 – Christos Christodoulou, Greek basketball player

* 1961 – Dawnn Lewis, American actress

* 1961 – Stuart Maconie, English journalist, author, and broadcaster

* 1961 – Neil Mallender, England cricketer

* 1961 – Tom Perrotta, American novelist

* 1961 – Sunil Shetty, Indian actor and producer

* 1961 – Cary Stayner, American serial killer

* 1886 – John Alexander Douglas McCurdy Canadian pilot and engineer ( d. 1961 )

First conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a three-man spacecraft to follow the one-man Project Mercury which put the first Americans in space, Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal of " landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth " by the end of the 1960s, which he proposed in a May 25, 1961 address to Congress.

Between 1957 and 1961 the United States followed an ambitious and well-funded program to develop a nuclear-powered cruise missile, Project Pluto.

This action followed the 1958 deployment of Thor IRBMs in the UK ( Project Emily ) and Jupiter IRBMs to Italy and Turkey in 1961 – more than 100 US-built missiles having the capability to strike Moscow with nuclear warheads.

Much of this collaboration is achieved through Project Groups which study specific technical issues of common interest: for example, EBU Members have long been preparing for the revision of the 1961 Stockholm Plan.

From 1957 to 1961 he worked on the Orion Project, which proposed the possibility of space-flight using nuclear pulse propulsion.

* 1961 – Eva O, American musician, singer / song writer ( Christian Death, Shadow Project and Super Heroines )

* 1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Atlas 5 Mission – Enos, a chimpanzee, is launched into space.

* 1961 – The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther.

On July 21, 1961, Grissom was pilot of the second Project Mercury flight, Mercury-Redstone 4, popularly known as Liberty Bell 7.

* Project Vanguard, Kurt Stehling, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1961

On January 31, 1961, Ham was secured in a Project Mercury mission labeled MR-2 and launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a suborbital flight.

* The Presidency Project – Remarks at the Presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Paul Henri Spaak, Secretary General of NATO – 21 February 1961

The College has also been pioneering in other fields, making a major contribution to the School Mathematics Project ( from 1961 ) and initiating the teaching of Business Studies at A level ( from 1968 ).

* Cuban Project ( Operation Mongoose, 1961 – 1965 )

Gerald Bull and the Project HARP proved after 1961 that a cannon can shoot a projectile to an altitude of and reach 32 percent of the needed escape velocity.

The first PNE blast was Project Gnome, conducted on December 10, 1961 in a salt bed 24 mi ( 39 km ) southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Kununurra was built on land resumed from Ivanhoe Station pastoral lease before 1961, as the town for the Ord River Irrigation Area which started as the Ord River Project or Ord Scheme, with survey work starting in 1959.

There was also a report on the international commission in April 1961 entitled " Investigation of the International Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project " produced by both the US and Canadian Federal Governments.

Significant hopes were pinned on a covert program named the Cuban Project, devised under the Kennedy administration in 1961.

Project Mercury's personnel and activities were transferred there in 1961.

Spitzer was the founding director of Project Matterhorn, Princeton University's pioneering program in controlled thermonuclear research, renamed in 1961 as Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

In 1959 AT & E, later Plessey, became the Prime Contractor for a new UK Air Defence System, known by the Company under the name Plan Ahead and, from 1961, as Project Linesman.

Bitter over Soviet anti-semitism, of the five pioneer investigators of the field, Cocconi, Morrison, Cornell University's Frank Drake ( of the 1961 Project Ozma and the Drake equation ), Sagan, and Shklovsky, Shklovsky was quite aware of sharing his Jewish identity with both Morrison and Sagan.

* Project Gnome, a nuclear test in 1961