Question by Unfaithful…: How do you feel while we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight?
I do think that Gagarin’s flight had a huge impact on our society. Gagarin after all is the most famous person in the world. When I was a kid we studied poems about Gagain at school.
However it looks like the huge promises made in the beginning of the space era turned out to be illusions. We haven’t been on the Moon since 1972. We don’t dare think about lunar base because it’s more expensive than the ISS and no government will fund it. There were no human missions to Mars and there aren’t human missions to Mars planned in the foreseeable future. A human return to the Moon seems always 10 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 year in the future.
On the other side we’ve sent dozens of robots to the Solar system – in fact, with the current orbiter around Mercury we’re about to fully explore ALL inner planets robotically.
So how do you feel 50 years after Gagarin? And is human spaceflight obsolete?
Answers and Views:
Answer by GeoffG
Very sad, because my high hopes of 50 years ago have been dashed as short-sighted politicians and bureaucrats have ground space travel to a halt.
Read all the answers in the comments.
What do you think?
Paula says
Disappointed.
The problem :
No long term plan.
The "long term plan in the 70s was to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth.
That done, there was no longer any goal, or plan.
And our manned space program floundered. True for the Russians as well.
Now I wait in awe as "3rd world country" China puts its own GPS satellites in orbit and announces plans for manned missions.
Nyx says
http://yurisnight.net/
Were still just learning to crawl far as human spaceflight.
Banker John says
Personally, I'm disappointed. We have lost the momentum we had for human space exploration in the 1960's and early 1970's, and I don't see it returning. Robotic missions are much, much less expensive and yield very good science, so I think that will remain our focus. Government debt and budget deficits are going to make it politically impossible for any one nation, or even a group of nations, to undertake manned missions to Mars.
In 1969, the world's population was 3.6 billion. Today, it is 6.9 Billion, an increase of 92%. It is estimated that by 2050, the World's population may be as high as 10.5 billion. As a society, we are unable to meet the basic needs of our people. Only 62% of the people on Earth today have access to clean, safe drinking water. As population continues to grow and our limited natural resources become even more stressed, I don't believe any government or group of governments will be able to justify the huge financial commitment required to undertake meaningful manned space exploration. So yes, from that standpoint human spaceflight is obsolete.
Beau Garrett says
"…how do you feel 50 years after Gagarin…"
Fifty years older : (
Thankyoumam says
Since the robots can do all the exploration that man can, with no loss of life, and no systems to support human life, it ends up being much cheaper to do without astronauts (cosmonauts).
unmasked says
I agree. If you think about how much the aeronautics advanced 50 years after the first powerd flight, I think it highlights how spaceflight didn't live up to its early promise. It's 50 years later and aside from a few side trips to the moon, man still hasn't gone beyond low earth orbit.
As for Gagarin being the most famous man in the world, that might be true in Russia, but here in the US even Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, isn't so famous anymore.
Hopefully we will keep their memories alive and people will know that we are capable of much more.
Paul says
Human space flight is most definitely not obsolete, I do wish we'd done a lot more than we have done though. If we could learn to be more peaceful and cooperate more instead of fighting all the time we'd make so much more progress. Imagine if all the money we waste on fighting and killing each other was spent on scientific research instead.
When Neil Armstrong said "we come in peace for all mankind" and those shots of one tiny blue marble earth, I hoped it might move the world towards peace but sadly we need defence because people keep fighting. I'm not in any way advocating the unilateral laying down of arms – that's just stupid and irresponsible. I only lament that a military budget is necessary because in however many millennia we've been living on this planet we still haven't learned to get along.