Fifty Years On...

[jjpor]

You know, you can be as cynical as you like about the politics surrounding the space race (and you'd be right!) and there are certainly serious arguments as to why we just don't need manned spaceflight, but my inner space cadet can't help thinking "Fifty years, and we're still tooling around in low orbit?" Apart from the moon landings, of course, but they were a long time ago too...

Plus great big rockets are really cool! ;D

Hopefully, though, to strike a sickeningly utopian retro-sf note, when people look back in centuries to come the Cold War will seem like a curiosity and Gagarin and the other space pioneers will be remembered as great figures in human history. Hopefully.

Comments

[librarylover82.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder of the date JJ! Regardless of the politics, the astronauts and cosmonauts were and continue to be some of the bravest people in the world. I've always considered it sad that Gagarin survived this, and died in a routine plane flight.

Sometime you need to visit Moscow, and go to their space museum. (And ours too, of course! Oddly enough, I've been to theirs but not to the U.S. equivalent.)

Do you suppose the proximity to the date is what inspired Moffat for the subject matter of the opening two-parter?

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

It's one of life's bitter ironies, I gues... :( But yes, I sort of think, things like that inspire people, and in a good way, and you know, we could do with stuff like that today.

I do! I really do... I've been to just about all of the major science and aviation museums here in the UK over the years (and to the science museum in Paris), but I would dearly love to see some of the stuff that's been preserved in the US and Russia. Yes... *dreams*

Could be...could be... I always think, though, that you can never have too much retro-spaceflight stuff, and it's about time Who paid more attention to it. :D

[bacasill.livejournal.com]

Great site, very impressive.

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Cheers.

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

I went to Smithsonian Air and Space this spring... I didn't see any of the film presentations, so I don't know how comprehensive my impressions were, but I was impressed and thrilled to see that there were displays of Soviet technology (including one of Gagarin's space suits.) There was also a lot of Cold War history stuff, but it seemed to me that the space pioneers were regarded and treated with the same amount of reverence and respect whether American or Soviet.

This is a picture of the Soyuz half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project display.

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear, and I hope you enjoyed the visit. I think in a hundred or two hundred years time it will probably be seen (maybe inaccurately, but you know, print the legend as they say!) as some collective finest hour for humanity or something.

Man, I love that old space hardware in a more than slightly geeky way... :D They went into space in those things!

[akashasheiress.livejournal.com]

''The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.'' I'd say they are already remembered in an heroic light, though.

Have your read this? http://www.cracked.com/article_19142_5-soviet-space-programs-that-prove-russia-was-insane.html

No. 2 about Gagarin and Komarov is really sad.

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think that they will continue to be, and that eventually the space programmes will be seen as something more than the waste of resources and political pissing contest that they are all too often written off as. At the end of the day, the people involved directly were doing it for the best of reasons, or so I like to think, even if some of them certainly involved themselves with pretty dodgy causes and/or governments in their efforts to pursue their dreams...

But yes, the Soviet programme was pretty much ridiculously dangerous to all concerned. Poor dogs! Poor cosmonauts! I think Gagarin probably deserved all those medals and stuff just for coming back alive...

[akashasheiress.livejournal.com]

I kind of want to hug my uncle's Laika now.D: She'd never be sent to Space, though. She is one spoilt doggy.:D

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

The dog doesn't know how lucky she is! :D But yes, Laika should be a great figure in human history too, if there's any justice at all...

[gibbous.livejournal.com]

You know, I was poking around NASA's website a short while back, and while I can't seem to find it now (as is curiously the norm when it comes to things such as this - *shakes fist* curse you, interbeast!) they had a PPT or PDF that had something about fiscal policies leaning toward the colonisation of space ... perhaps I just made it up, but there you go. I did find this, though: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pdf

Loads of stuff regarding "new" approaches to how we view space exploration etc etc ... I don't know precisely what it means, but speculation is fun. I think it would be terribly exciting to move the human race spaceward; my only fears are that the advance would be for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, thank you for the video - guess we'll see how it all turns out, eh? ;)

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Well, time will tell... In my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes think that that's it as far as the great days of manned spaceflight are concerned. It's true that it's horrendously expensive - most of the money and technical difficulties experiences over the years relate to a) getting people up there alive, b) keeping them alive while they're up there and c) bringing them back down alive. With unmanned probes, you have none of that sort of hassle, and as technology advances, unmanned probes can do practically all of the things that a manned expedition could do (apart from, like, repairing themselves if they develop a minor mechanical fault, of course ;D), at a fraction of the cost and risk.

However... Without wanting to sound like some sort of dreamer, what's the point in only doing things that are practical and safe? It's not as if the governments of the world are ever spontaneously going to decide to spend their billions on ending world poverty and hunger, so they may as well spend some of what they'd only blow on more wars or nuclear weapons or whatever on doing something that will inspire people and make their lives a bit brighter. Sure, most of the big achievements in spaceflight during the 60s were done for the basest of political reasons, yet somehow they ended up being positive and poetic and inspiring almost in spite of themselves. I think it's good for the soul or whatever to hear tales of daring pioneers achieving amazing things at great risk and pushing the bleeding edge of technology. Or is that just me? ;D

Thanks for the link. It makes interesting reading. It's sad, if understandable, that the current US govt has severely cut back the Bush administration's grandiose Moon-by-2020 plans (if you can call them plans), not that they could justify going ahead with it in the current economic climate probably. So, we're waiting on China to do something amazing, then... :D

[gibbous.livejournal.com]

It's most assuredly not you alone. All over the world, fans of exploration (for exploration's sake), science, science fiction, and other associated fields are pumping their fists in agreement (or, at least, that's the way I like to see it, because I'm hopeless). Even from a logical point of view: why did we spend the money on extra weight and life-support if we don't intend on distilling further methods of supporting life in space? If the "final frontier" is only going to be tread upon by robots and the like, then why are we exploring it to begin with? Even here, sending unmanned crafts down to explore hydrothermal vents in the Earth's crust to study the life around them isn't just for the sake of biology - it's to allow us insight into other ecological systems so we know how to place ourselves if that situation ever arose whereupon we needed to place ourselves. No research or exploration, in my opinion, is done for the benefit of the hard science itself - it's to prepare us for physical advancement.

In that same vein (yet oddly contrary), I doubt any government would approve such research solely on the basis of improving human morale (as much as I would love that to be true). I'm completely fascinated and full of admiration for those who take first steps on new territory; I adore the idea of cutting paths into the unknown for future generations. (Unless you break axles, kill your oxen, die of dysentery ... ;D) But for most governments to approve such ventures, there usually has to be a promise of return - be it through territory, materials, or other goods. One example is the fumbling fight to introduce democracy to Middle Eastern nations ... I doubt the West would be so eager to persevere in humanitarian efforts if these places didn't happen to be sitting on a cubic arsetonne of oil ... but that's another rant for another time. :P (tl;dr - I'm praying for an excuse of some sort that will make manned space exploration indispensable. Because really, more kids need to say "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up ...")

It is sad that not only the US, but many other influential nations across the globe have misappropriated their funds so. We could totally have clean-burning space cars and timeshares on Ceres if everyone just got along. ;D

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm in complete agreement. All of these programmes are undertaken with at least the implication that they are preparation for bigger things. Right from the start of the space race, people like Korolev and von Braun (someone should write one of those semi-factual sort of novels about the life and times of Wernher von Braun - a man of fascinating contradictions. A blue-skies idealist who flirted with people like Heinrich Himmler to get his dreams realised...) were dreaming of Mars. Well, Mars is still just as far away... But yes, what's the point if only the robots get to see any of this at close quarters?

Well yeah, applications, strategy, profit etc. The thing is, all the stuff that's militarily useful or commercially profitable takes place in low orbit - satellites, and more satellites. There's been talk over the years, of course, of orbiting solar power arrays and mining and low-g manufacturing, but the fact remains that the costs to get to orbit are so astronomical that there's practically nothing you can do in space that you can't do more profitably here on Earth... So unless someone invents some radical launch technology that massively reduces the costs (which is hard to see in the short term)...

The thing a lot of space cadets talk about nowadays is Helium 3 - the great solution to our energy problems, allegedly. The thing is, not only is it unclear that we will ever develop practical fusion reactors, given that it's something that's been "twenty years away" since about 1950, He3 reactors are actually probably more technically complex and inefficient than many of the less kewl (less space-reliant) designs. And even if someone did develop a practical He3 reactor and sell the world on it, it's probably more efficient and less costly to extract He3 from seawater than mining it on the Moon or from gas giant atmospheres... So, another dream punctured...

I'm starting to think that space tourism for the mega-rich might be the thing that drives any serious manned space exploration/colonisation effort. You know, as technology becomes cheaper over time and if/when these space tourism companies become more established and generate more capital, you could see them eventually offering trips to the Moon, maybe even Mars by the end of the century... But again, it's like the robots - what's the point of commercial flights to Mars if you have to be Bill Gates to afford the fare?

Hey maybe the Singularity will happen and we'll all become cyborg demigods who can have their own individual Mars ships? Nah... XD

Yes, if people could just get along! ;D No, really. I sort of hope China will see the prestige and bragging rights as sufficient justification for at least a Lunar programme, just to see honest-to-god people walking around there in my own lifetime. Maybe they could get caught up in another ridiculous decade-long space race with India and Japan... We might even get a Mars flight out of it this time... That's not too much to ask for surely? :D