50 years ago today Yuri Gagarin hurtled around the planet earth in a beat up armour plated piece of future space junk. The first man in space was blasted into and then slung around the planet at speeds of up to 30,000 kph for almost 110 minutes before being plunged back home. He was spared certain death by jettisoning and parachuting the final bit back. He got off lightly compared to the previous space dogs and later space monkeys.
Yuri’s flight path.
Space captured my imagination as a kid growing up in the new suburban developments of Eastern Christchurch in the 1960s. It was escapism that was fed and glorified by two competing superpowers looking for a military edge and propaganda fodder. I and most other kids my age lapped it up and it fed into our notions of interplanetary and intergalactic space travel – promoted in the pulp science fiction reading and Dan Dare comics of our older brothers. We were inspired, and anything and everything seemed possible.
USSR commemorative post stamp
I was one year old and oblivious to Yuri being the first to be flung around the planet but grew up thinking that space was the place (to paraphrase Sun Ra) that the Russians “owned” with their sputniks, cosmonauts and monster Soyuz rockets. And space was the place for a decade or so when anything seemed possible with rapidly developing technologies and economies that could afford the huge costs involved. To my mind Russian dominance of space as an idea was only corrected when a man landed on the moon in 1969 in the form of a “capitalist freethinking westerner” from the United States of America. And poor old Yuri died testing a Mig in 1968.
Yuri Gagarin's grave stone
But space was still the place alright and we were going to be living on the moon in no time at all. I was reminded recently of a conversation at the school gate on my last day at Aranui Primary School that year where I announced I was going to be an astronaut (no longer a cosmonaut) when I grew up.
In retrospect I think I was lucky when deciding on another career path that took me into a musical orbit. It was less rigorous training wise and more social than astronaut training but proved to be equally rewarding. The sensational moon landing in 1969 was a success that was impossible to top and led to the gradual reassessment of the potential and costs of putting people into space. Interest waned and generally the public focus in the west has shifted away from getting out there to looking more closely to what we doing here on earth. The subtle realisation has made us generally more environmentally aware. The publics’ focus has drifted away from the macro technology involved in building rockets and space stations towards personal and interpersonal technologies of computing, entertainment and communication. Lets stay here and try and tidy this place up and make use what we have seems to be the general feeling. But it took a guy in a sealed metal capsule to hurl himself around the planet 50 years ago to start the process of realising we are stuck here and we need to make the most of it.
- Roger Shepherd
NB – Guardian article about a new film, ‘First Orbit’, that will track Gagarin’s flight path.
