Much note is being made today of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, inaugurating the beginning of human travel into outer space. The first decade of the Space Age remains its absolute pinnacle, while today, half a century later, it seems less and less likely all the time that we will ever explore strange new worlds.
Since 2001, people in cities across the globe have marked the anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit by celebrating “Yuri’s Night” with hundreds of parties and special events. This year there is also a downloadable movie called “First Orbit” which recreates what Gagarin might have seen on his flight by taking images recorded aboard the International Space Station and combining them with recordings of the actual radio communications between Gagarin and the Soviet space controllers at Baikonur, along with an original musical score. There is also a smartphone app you can download on your iPhone or Android phone.
Probably not in the movie: the Russian government recently released hundred of pages of declassified material about Gagarin’s flight, including a transcript of a conversation between Gagarin and Sergei Korolev, the famed “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program. It’s a fairly mundane interaction, wherein Korolev tells Gagarin where to find his rations (some sausage, tea, jam, and candy…but no Tang) and asks him to slap some tape on a broken control.
Also not widely discussed: Gagarin nearly died during the re-entry of his spacecraft. The capsule failed to detach from the instrument control module, causing a small fuel leak that resulted in the spacecraft not slowing as much as planned. The vehicle dangerously overheated, and Gagarin later reported smelling something burning inside his capsule. Six years later, another Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, would indeed die during reentry due to mechanical failures. Komarov and others in the Soviet space program knew that the spacecraft intended for that flight was defective, and when political pressure from Moscow forced them to go ahead with the flight anyway, Komarov convinced his superiors to bump Gagarin, who had been scheduled to make that flight. Komarov knowingly sacrificed himself to save Gagarin’s life. It was a sacrifice made in vain, because Gagarin himself was killed less than a year later when his test plane crashed. The cause of the crash was not fully determined until last year, and was grist for speculation of conspiracy for decades.
The United States will commemorate the beginning of its own manned space program with the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight next month. Despite, or because of, the early successes of the Soviet program, America would achieve the single greatest engineering accomplishment in human history to date — the first landing of human beings on the surface of the moon — less than a decade after Gagarin’s flight. But forty years after that milestone, the American manned space program has been diminished to almost non-existant. The final mission of the space shuttle Discovery was last month, and that shuttle is already in the decomissioning process on its way to becoming a museum piece. The shuttle Endeavour sits on the launch pad waiting to close out the last chapter of that history with its launch on April 29. Writing at Salon, New America Foundation think-tank policy head Michael Lind rather assiduously argues that manned spaceflight is unnecessary and unsupportable, and that NASA does and should continue to aggressively pursue space exploration with increasingly-capable robots and unmanned probes. Cosmos Online founder Alan Finkel argues even more deliberately that our technology has pushed our physical capabilities for spaceflight to their maximum in terms of both the physics involved in sending spacecraft into deep space and the biological limitations of human beings, and that we may not be able to exceed those limits for a long time, if ever. Even among the veteran astronauts, there is division over whether or not to continue a manned space program. Last year, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan sent a letter to President Obama encouraging him not to cut back on the manned programs still underway at NASA, while Russell Schweickart (Apollo 9) sent another letter calling for a change in direction and the increased role of private business in space.
It does seem more likely that any further human ventures into space will be incremental for some long time to come, and perhaps Alan Finkel is correct that we may simply never find a way for human beings to travel even as far as Mars without asking the future astronauts to go on their own suicide missions. Maybe that explains why, as astronomers discover dozens upon dozens of new planets all the time, there is no sign of interstellar transit by the beings that must exist somewhere out there. Half a century after one man gently peeked beyond the curtain of our world for the first time, we are still not much beyond that window.
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