50 years.

I would have written this in a more timely matter, but, I was AFK for a week. So Pretend it's Tuesday okay....
The human race has been in space for a half century. Last Tuesday, April twelve, fifty years had passed since Yuri Gagarin was launched atop Vostok 1 where no man had gone before (couldn't resist:). It always amazes me how much chutzpa the space pioneers had. But no more so than the Soviets, you see we in the USA after 1958 had a centralized space effort but there was no such thing in the Soviet Union, what they had instead was a bunch of military weapons designers with big dreams. Their bosses weren't interested in manned spaceflight, but big rockets that could destroy all who opposed them. There was a great rivalry amongst the rocket designers and a government that was fond of funding and canceling, and reassigning projects on the smallest of whims. But it was in this environment that Sergei Korolev and his people made Vostok happen. By the early sixties Korolev and his people had already made the R-7 rocket, a craft that still is the back bone of the entire Russian manned space program to this day, as well as launched Sputnik 1 the worlds first artificial satellite. But Korolev was after sending a man up into space, so his team set about making the craft to do so, Object K what would come to be known as Vostok. however this was not the plans of the higher uppers. They wanted a spy satellite. So Korolev a master at working the system made a spy satellite out of Object K, so work could continue on the manned mission. As time went on however, Primier Nikita Kruschev, learned that space flights had great propaganda value, and a manned flight was put into works. The Vostok craft was far from an ideal spacecraft, essentially an artificial satellite with cargo space for a human payload. It had some basic controls and on re entry due to uncertainty of the shock of landing the Cosmonaut had to eject and parachute, at 7 km. But the mission was a success, the Soviet Union placed a manned space craft in orbit and the space age was truly born, sadly it would be many years until the anyone in the Soviet government saw space as anything more than propaganda currency, but more importantly it spurred on the Americans leading to that amazing period of technological growth that we call "the space race" eventually NASA would flounder and the Russians would become the leaders of space station technology. Eventually both programs joined forces to make the ISS. So that's 50 years down, lets hope for 50 wonderful more.

for many years the Soviet/ Russian space program was a great mystery to Americans. But these days we in the states have a great deal more available. If you want to learn more about this very interesting space program, a good essay, is the pamphlet "Russian Space Craft" by Robert Goodwin. and a good book is "Challenging Apollo" by Asif Siddiqi.

Also worth noting, April 12 was also the day of the launch of STS-1. the first of NASA's space shuttle flights, launched very purpously on the 20th anniversary of Vostok 1. I would opine about my thoughts on the Space Shuttle's demise later this year, but this is Yuri's day so I'll save it for later.

I hoped you enjoyed this quickie, I'll be back to my normal comics reviews next week. Cheers.