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Celebrating Yuri Gagarin's 1961 Flight Into Space
DeviceGuru writes "The 50th anniversary of the first-ever manned space flight, by Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, is being celebrated on April 12 with a two-day early activation of the ARISSat-1 ham radio satellite aboard the International Space Station. If you can get your hands on a scanner or ham handy-talkie you can join in the celebration by listening to prerecorded messages from the satellite as it orbits the globe tonight and tomorrow."
Good to see other people other countries joining what I though to be a purely Soviet holiday up till now. A person well worth celebrating, mind you!
;)
But I suppose the internet helps...
Enjoy, and don't get too drunk today
Ura! Yuri Alekseevich!
It was this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Ilyushin
I think the inventory of satellite changed our life a lot, it is worthy of celebrating.
Here's a free comic book related to this event: CBZ or PDF
Bending spoons in heaven.
I think this is the primary scientific/engineering landmark of the 20th century, followed distantly by the Internet.
not as the much celebrated moon missions by the US
... bending spoons in zero G heaven.
Wan Hu was the first man in space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu :)
The page http://www.arissat1.org/v3/ includes the transmission time in UTC and information on some of the other telemtry channels. They begin Monday 11 April 2011 at 14:30 UTC and continue until 10:30 UTC on 13 April 2011. I just tried the 145.950 MHz FM downlink as it passed over Australia without luck, but was using a fairly crappy wideband scanner antenna indoors. I might give it a try tomorrow with a 150MHz antenna which is closest narrowband antenna I've got.
Doesn't it seem strange to celebrate what was, after all, a major loss for our civilization? The fact that we lost both opening chapters of the space race (Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1) is a national shame, which should be burned into our memory to be sure, but celebrated? Hardly.
Celebrating the victories of our enemies is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Happy 50th space anniversary... (although I think that it's a little hypocritical to celebrate 50 revolutions of the earth around the sun, when the whole point of it is to be less earth-bound).
-- In Soviet Russia...Rockets launch you!
This video recreation is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKs6ikmrLgg
Some translation of conversation just before flight between Korolev an Gagarin:
Korolev: Yuri, then I want you just to recall that after a moment's willingness to take place six minutes and will start before the flight so that you do not worry. Reception.
Gagarin: I understand, I am perfectly calm!
Queens: There's a packing tube - lunch, dinner and breakfast.
Gagarin: Clear
Korolev: Sausage, Bean there, and jam for tea. 63 pieces, you will be thick.
Gagarin: heh heh
Korolev: After arrival, eat everything at once - instructs Korolev.
->>Gagarin retains a sense of humor:
Gagarin: Main thing there is sausages to vodka drink with.
Everyone laughs
Korolev: Damn, and he writes all, the bastard! - Jokingly resents Korolev, knowing that the tape of Gagarin captures every word.
Everyone laughs
Original you can find in http://www.x-libri.ru/elib/innet170/00000001.htm ;))
sorry for bad translation
... listening to prerecorded messages from the satellite as it orbits ...
It was all a fake! Well, at least we have Buzz Aldrin, ready to turn any impertinent folk's face into a Picasso, if the journalist claims that the Moon Landing was a fake. If I had traveled to the Moon and back, I would also be so onery, in case someone asked me if it was a fake. Oh, you could check it yourselves . . . one of the Moon missions left a mirror on the surface of the Moon. All you need to do, is to shine a laser on it.
Oh, and one more thing. The US Space Program was really tits up . . . even Werner von Braun had to turn to Walt Disney for support. When Sputnik and Gagarin went up, JFK got his ass in gear.
Something to the state of the times in the world way back when, from Ice Station Zebra:
David Jones: The Russians put our camera made by *our* German scientists and your film made by *your* German scientists into their satellite made by *their* German scientists.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There is a song about commemorating the event here http://geekpop.bandcamp.com/track/radio-gagarin
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Or, if you don't want to sit at home listening to the radio, you can see if there is a Yuri's Night party near you. Most were over the weekend, but there are still a few the night of.
Also, it's the anniversary of the first US space shuttle launch.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Today is the day NASA is expected to announce who will receive the retired space shuttles.
I would also like to recognize Sergei Korolev, a name that's sadly unknown in the United States, Without him, there might never have been a space race, or satellites, or a man on the moon, etc. He's the guy who achieved the miracle of talking Kruschev into a space program. He also taught himself rocketry, worked his way through school as a common laborer, served time in Stalin's gulags, and headed the team that recreated the V-2 rocket in the Soviet Union after the War.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sergei Korolev
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's pretty much only the Russians still launching men/women into space. The US Space program is essentially, over.
NASA's plans are up in the air, muddled and without focus, liable to change on political whim, and even when they go forward, it will be hopelessly underfunded and probably a disaster.
Meanwhile, the Russians are using pretty much the exact same technology they were 50 years ago, and continuing to launch. NASA has to buy seats on the next few years of flights if we want to get anybody into or out of the ISS.
Maybe SpaceX will change things for the better, but what I find so sad is that the USA went to the moon, and now our country is just a shadow of it's former self, bloated, dull, and stupid. We're the Roman Empire waiting to fall. Nero is fiddling.
Here's to Yuri and Valentina though. I remember pointing out on Slashdot years ago, when Star Trek Enterprise premeired, how the title sequence avoided the Russians, even though it was trying to show the advancement of human space flight.
I suggest someone change that title sequence, because all the advancement in that area is coming from someplace else, Russia, China, India -- but likely NOT the USA.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Not to take away from Gagarin and the rest of the Soviet space program's accomplishment of putting a man in space, orbiting the earth, and returning safely, but it's important to remember he may not have been the first man in space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts
Considering the memory hole that the Soviet Union was, it's impossible to say if any of those are real or not (some are obviously hoaxes); but it's equally impossible to disprove at least some of them.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
When is that going to happen?
(Obviously without the aid of NON-AFRICANS)...
Yuri's Night folks are giving up copies of Martian Summer for a limited time. They're trying to create a space review mob to get space topics trending. Here is the link if you are interested: http://yurisnight.net/2011/04/yuri%E2%80%99s-night-and-martian-summer-the-millions-and-millions-give-away/
Eagerly hoping to hear something!
73, KB7UJR
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
If there is one thing that is amazing is there are (were) celebrations of a Russian (or precisely Soviet) space accomplishment at a NASA facility. This was last year at NASA Ames Research Center, this year budget issues prevented this year's Yuri's Night but they had Yuri's Education Day (http://ynba.org/2011/).
Last year's event had all kinds of people you typically don't see at a NASA facility. Plus the music was really loud with all the flashing lights, etc. in same building that housed research aircraft (XV15, ER-2, QSRA which are all now long gone). And sometimes the smoke you smell coming from certain groups that is not cigarette or stage smoke. I asked some 20-somethings of what they think of it all, generally they see Gagarin's flight not as a competition between two countries but his flight was the evolutionary step of all mankind.
So here we are 50 years since Yuri's flight, and the big announcement is what museums will contain the Space Shuttles! It seems we all succumbed to being flatlanders. Only looking straight ahead (for profits) or looking down (for oil) instead of looking up, out, and beyond.
mfwright@batnet.com
True
"Can Aliens destroy earth before we even realize it.? Noot. But humans can!!!"
Not true. Orthodox Church existed just fine during the USSR. It even had official state support, even during Stalin's reign.
"No I didn't see God.I looked and looked, but I didn't see God." - Yuri Gagarin, answering a question of a foreign journalist about the flight.
I tried to pick it up as it went over Portland, OR tonight (23:34 local time) with a 2 Meter radio and a 4 element 144 MHz yagi sitting indoors on a tripod. ISS got up to 40 degrees elevation but no sign of a signal. Checking a few forums, nobody seems to have heard anything from the satellite so you're not alone. There seems to be an unconfirmed report on the funcube group that the batteries went flat, but I have yet to see any official statement from AMSAT or the arissat home page.