happy space exploration day, 2010 edition

Today is the anniversary of one of the most important days in human history; the day Yuri Gagarin, a Russian test pilot, became the first member of our species to leave the planet on which our feet have been quite firmly planted for the last 100,000 years. Think about that for a second. One minute, every moment of human history was confined to this planet and the next, a man was orbiting our world and catching a tiny glimpse of the vast expanses beyond it with his own eyes.

Since then, we’ve gone to the Moon, sent probes as far as the edge of our solar system, and kept trying to explore space and maintain a regular population floating above the Earth in space shuttles and massive space stations. And, now, we’re even getting ready to launch the precursor to cheap, efficient SSTO spaceflight, courtesy of ambitious and enthusiastic space tourism companies…

With today’s indifference about space exploration and constant cuts to NASA’s budgets, many of which are wholeheartedly approved by public, most media outlets tend to treat this day as a historical footnote and the only people who seem to truly take this date seriously are space enthusiasts who celebrate it as Yuri’s Night. In the nations of the former Soviet Union, Gagarin’s historic mission is celebrated as Space Exploration Day, or Cosmonaut’s Day.

I can still remember growing up with stories of his flight on TV, documentaries about the lives of cosmonauts and the heady days of the Space Race, and dreaming that someday, I too could manage to make it into space just like the cosmonauts and astronauts about whom I’ve heard and read so much. But unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, NASA lost its drive and our ambitions in space have been slowly winding down over the years. Instead of seizing the chance to keep pushing the technical envelope and trying to capitalize on the resulting technical and scientific advancements, we’ve been focusing on shooting down a generation of future dreamers with well meaning fallacies and anti-intellectual banalities.

Still, decades come and go, things change, and with enough driven, focused people with plans, visions, and a good idea of how to sustain space exploration, we may yet get back on track. We can see these people out in force today, entering NASA competitions awarding millions for successful proof of concept tests of the building blocks of future spacecraft and satellites. We can see them in aerospace companies like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, whose owners are concerned first and foremost with keeping human spaceflight going and building on the legacy of the Space Age, rallying their business around a grand mission to advance our sciences and engineering know how while offering space focused clients more bang for their buck.

And they’ll certainly have a good base of clients ranging from billionaire space tourists to government agencies. Here’s to hoping that one day in the future, the anniversary of the first human flight into space will be marked on every calendar and someone like me could afford to come along for the ride on an orbital SSTO plane to see what Yuri saw when he circled the planet on April 12th, 1961 with his own eyes…