Yuri's Night

In a weird intersection of historical anniversaries, today also marks the 50th Anniversary of human spaceflight. 50 years ago today, the Soviets beat us into space and Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth for 108 minutes.

I hope the Russians get their groove back, I really do. I admire the Russians when it comes to their space achievements, I really do. America put Skylab up and it fell down- Russia had the Mir Station up for at least 20 years after its sell by date and held the thing together with duct tape and spit for at least 5 years towards the end before, reluctantly letting it fall down and to me, it may have become a floating tin can death trap, but it was one hell of a technical achievement that it stayed up for as long as it did.

But really, the Russians can be summed up in this wonderful little story: America spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that would write in zero gravity. What did the Russians do? They used a pencil.

See? Those are the kind of scrappy, sensible people I can admire. A lot of our Apollo astronauts were the same way of course, but something went weirdly awry somewhere and we ran the car off the tracks by dicking around in low earth orbit with the shuttle for as long as we did. NASA needs vision, NASA needs ambition and more importantly, NASA needs a swift kick in the ass from the burgeoning private space industry- and I hope like hell they get it. Because America needs to get its space groove back too.

Time to explore the Final Frontier, kids. Let's make the next 50 years as amazing as the first have been... (Interesting question posed by the Beeb: what if the Soviets would have beaten us to the moon? Hmmmm...)

UPDATED: The super-weirdness continues- it's also the 30th Anniversary of the first flight of the Space Shuttle- April 12th, 1981. I had no idea. Shows you how much of a nerd I really am...