Tomorrow will be the fiftieth anniversary of the first time a human orbited the earth, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rocketed into space, made almost a complete circuit around the planet, entered the atmosphere, and returned to terra firma. By international standards in place at the time, his flight didn’t meet the technical requirements for human spaceflight, which demanded that he return to the planet with his spacecraft (he ejected and parachuted down separately), but no one knew this at the time, and it was another great propaganda victory for the Soviets in the space race with the Americans, who were still reeling from the Sputnik surprise three and a half years earlier.
It’s another human spaceflight anniversary as well. It will have been exactly thirty years since the first flight of a Space Shuttle (Columbia), on April 12th, 1981. The program is scheduled to be retired this year after three decades of service (including two periods of almost three years each when it was shut down as a result of the Challenger and Columbia losses, in 1986 and 2003, respectively). That the date is the same is a coincidence — NASA had originally scheduled the first flight for April 10th, but a computer timing glitch delayed it for two days, serendipitously resulting in the inaugural launch occurring exactly two decades after the first human spaceflight.
For several years now, the date has been celebrated by spaceflight enthusiasts all over the world, at events called Yuri’s Night parties. The fiftieth anniversary should be a blowout, particularly combined with the thirtieth of the Shuttle, but the celebrations will be tinctured with sadness that we haven’t made as much progress as many hoped at the dawn of the space age, and that the Shuttle never lived up to the early promises of making space routine, reliable, affordable and safe.
But a new space age is dawning now, a private one driven by profit and adventure, rather than national prestige and fickle politics, so the next half century is likely to be more exciting than the past one, with opportunities for all to go into space, and not just a few privileged government employees, whether Russian or American.
So find a party in your area tomorrow, and look both back on pioneers of the new high frontier, and forward to it opening, even if belatedly.
