April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to enter SPACE. I would first like to thank Google for bringing this day to my attention. Now, you should know that I am highly skeptical of all space travel. Personally, I find it hard to believe that we were so gung-ho about astronauts and space shuttles in the 60’s and 70’s, but now we are more concerned with the latest iPod apps. Has our technology really gone from traveling around our galaxy to perfecting 3-D TVs? Where has our space program gone? Have we really explored all there is to see on the moon and beyond? But, I digress. Let’s address the matter at hand: Yuri Gagarin.
Allow me to set the scene: America has launched an impressive 42 satellites and the poor Soviets have only managed to launch 12. The Soviets had to prove that they were more powerful than the US; communism had to prevail over democracy. So, on April 7th, 1961 they decide to one-up us by attempting to send Vladimir Ilyushin into space (a human surely trumps a satellite). However, the mission was a failure. Vlad made it back to Mother Russia with some serious injuries. Some sources believe that he wasn’t the first and as many as three other people had died in previous attempts. The Russians wouldn’t give up though. They decide if they can’t actually make it to space then they will do the next best thing, fake it. How do the Soviets expect us to believe that they have extra capsules and thrusters and all that jazz laying around so they could just send up another cosmonaut five days after the last attempt? And so, the Russians moved their space program to a warehouse in an undisclosed location (similar to Area 51 I suppose) and 50 years later we are celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s pioneer spirit.
I, much to the dismay of Jekaterina Jurjeva, agree 100%. I also believe that NO ONE has ever been to the moon. Remember the movie Diamonds are Forever? The moon scene is almost identincal to one small leap for man one giant leap for mankind! Rewatch it!!!
ReplyDeleteMy good student just wrote a good essay :). The Competition of space technology happened due to the cold war. Thus, as you wrote, the purpose that US and Soviet spared no effort to develop space technology is to prove the advantage of their own social formation rather than improve scientific research. However, since the Soviet disappeared, with the globalization and the rapid development of economy, the environment we belong to has been changed. More and more people they start to focus to economic and business rather than politics. Hence, its understandable that a lot of people prefer the newest Apple production than space shuttles. In addition, by the way, the Competition of space technology was one of main causes that lead Soviet to disintegrate.
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