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

[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...