As NASA
celebrates the silver anniversary of its first
shuttle launch, the overall effort of human spaceflight hits its own
landmark today.
Forty-five
years ago in 1961, a young cosmonaut became first human ever to slip the bonds
of Earth when his Vostok 1 spacecraft roared skyward to usher in the age of
human spaceflight.
Then
27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth for 108 minutes on a
computer-controlled flight that placed the mantle of First Man in Space firmly in
the hands of the then-Soviet Union, which had already made in history in 1957 with
its launch of Sputnik.
Alan
Shepard, the first U.S. astronaut to reach space, launched 23 days later in
a race that culminated with NASA's Apollo Moon landings. Since then, NASA
shuttles, Russian
Soyuz and China's
Shenzhou vehicles - not to mention a series of ever-larger
space stations - have maintained a human presence in space.
"It's
amazing to me that we've been in the space business for nearly half a century,"
said NASA associate administrator Rex Geveden recently after watching a
Russian-built Soyuz rocket launch three astronauts toward the International
Space Station (ISS) from the very same pad that saw Gagarin's historic 1961 liftoff
at Baikonur Cosmodrome
in what is now Kazakhstan. "Your sense of history...it's a remarkable feeling."
Gagarin's
flight ended not with him riding his spacecraft down to Earth, but with a
parachute landing after he ejected from his descent capsule.
Twenty
years later, in 1981, NASA launched
its first space shuttle Columbia into orbit on April 12 with STS-1 commander John Young
and pilot Robert
Crippen aboard.
"It was
purely coincidence," Crippen told SPACE.com of the spaceflight link. "We
actually tried to launch on the 10th but ran into some computer
problems...Two days later we went out to try it again and it happened to be
Gagarin's anniversary."
For
Gagarin, cosmonaut success turned into world fame after his orbital trek and
space aficionados hold an annual Yuri's Night
in his honor. The cosmonaut was later killed in a plane crash while training in a UTI-MiG-15 aircraft on March 27, 1968.
"There're lots
of things that go through my mind," said NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who
serves as space station flight engineer for the Expedition
13 mission, of Gagarin's anniversary during a recent space-to-ground link. "It's
a great day to remember all the work that's gone before us."
Williams,
Expedition 13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and Brazil's
first astronaut Marcos Pontes launched toward the ISS from Gagarin's
former launch pad on March 29
EST. Pontes returned
to Earth on April 8 with the Expedition
12 crew, leaving Vinogradov and Williams aboard the ISS for a six-month
mission.
"It reminds
us now that we're in the middle of the current chapter of space exploration,
which doesn't end here," Williams said of the joint flight anniversaries of
Gagarin and NASA's Columbia orbiter. "This is only a stepping stone to the
future, back to the Moon and on to Mars."
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