It’s amazing how far we’ve come, and how much farther we have to go.
The 108 minutes that changed the world
On April 12, 1961, all ears were turned to radios as Union Radio director Yuri Levitan, in his famous voice that became a symbol of Soviet victories, said: “the Soviet Union has orbited Earth’s ever-first satellite vehicle, the Vostok, with a man onboard. The Vostok is piloted by Major Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin, a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
It turns out the flight wasn’t an easy ride, either:
The liftoff and orbiting were successful enough – terrible jolts, deafening noise, and suffocating g-load did not count, as the cosmonaut had been trained to withstand them on Earth – but the first flight is always different. Engineers warned that an ink pen would not work without gravity but who could think that the lead pencil would fly somewhere so that Gagarin could not find it; the tape recorder stopped; the downlink turned out to have so much room for improvement that waving hands into the viewport seemed a better solution.
So here’s to Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin, a ballsy guy who was the first human to fly into space. Drink a toast to him today.
We could have gone so much further. Instead we wasted billions on the POS shuttle, that some astronauts had dubed the most dangerous space craft ever built. If we had stayed with Apollo, we would have already established a moon base, been to Mars and beyond. Instead we have a half finished space station, a grounded shuttle program and we are trying to do by 2018 what we already did 30 years ago.
We never lost a man in space before the shuttle. We lost men to exploding velcro once, but no American spacecraft was ever lost mid-flight. Now, every time we turn around they’re grounded again while they investigate another problem. I don’t need astronauts to tell me this is more dangerous than the capsule ever was.
And 25 years of the shuttle
Space flight is extremely risky, only reason more astronauts weren’t killed in the early days was basically down to luck. Compare the number of flights Apollo vs Shuttle, I’d rather take my chances in the shuttle. Apollo could never have transported the elements to build a moon base, well maybe a pretty small one for mice.
No, Apollo pretty much ran it’s course, but it could have been followed by so much more. The Shuttle is very limited and way past it’s prime. We could have done so much more. A good follow on to the Shuttle should have been in development from the day of the first Shuttle flight and should have succeeded the Shuttle long ago. It’s very dissappointing.
“I’d rather take my chances in the shuttle”
Just what I want to do, strap myself to several thousand gallons of highly explosive fuel with NO ESCAPE SYSTEM. With Apollo if there was a problem on lift off, the command module could be pulled clear of the exploding booster rocket. Also it didn’t depend on thousands of flimsy ceramic tiles that come off if you breath too close to them to protect the craft during re-entry. Also since the Apollo craft was modular, it could have been adapted to several tasks and it still would have been cheaper then the reusable shuttle. The shuttle was somebodies pet project, it was a mistake and it set the space program back 30 years.
I’ll take Apollo. There’s a gigantic difference of going into orbit and back than going to the moon and back safely. But as we have found out just going into orbit and back has cost more lives.
“We lost men to exploding velcro once,”
Apollo 1: Grissom, Chaffee, and White.