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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."
FTFWPA: "The entire early history of the Soviet manned space program has been declassified and we have piles of memoirs of cosmonauts, engineers, etc., who participated. We know who was in the original cosmonaut team, who never flew, was dismissed, or was killed in ground tests. Ilyushin is not one of them."
Yes, he jumped from a balloon at 31,200 m up, this is nowhere near the Kármán line at 100,000 m which is commonly defined as the edge of space.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I think this is the primary scientific/engineering landmark of the 20th century, followed distantly by the Internet.
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.
They're no longer your enemy. And Yuri did an amazing thing, the soviets performed an amazing feat. Yes, that should be celebrated, and the thousands who died in the cold war wouldn't think otherwise (I am equally able to spout unfounded statements about what soldiers would or would not do).
If it rhymes it must be true.
Some people don't have their head so far up their ass that they can't celebrate a great achievement of mankind unless they did it. The Soviets one-upped you. You one-upped them with Apollo. The world moved forward. Not everything has to be about you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
'Our civilization'? I was under the impression that everyone on this planet belongs to 'our civilization' and thus all our great accomplishments are worthy of celebration. Space race? Enemies? What time are you living in exactly? Would you prefer for scientific and engineering achievements not to happen, unless they belong to your country, serving your 'nation'? I better stop, this is getting too close to Godwin territory.
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!
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
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.
I suppose you're still pissed off that the Chinese invented gunpowder three thousand years ago?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yuri did an amazing thing
Not to be pedantic, but Yuri didn't actually do anything. Vostok 1 was fully automatic from lift-off to bail out.
Yeah, and Neil Armstrong was just a glorified pilot. I've been on holidays several times on planes, what's so special about the Moon?
Talk about sour grapes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
His balloon was not a hot air balloon. It was filled with a lifting gas, either helium or hydrogen. Operating a hot air balloon at that altitude would require bringing along oxygen for the burner, which would increase overall weight and decrease altitude. Also, Gagarin orbited the planet in space. Kitinger explored the upper atmosphere in a high-altitude balloon. Both achievements were equally dangerous and impressive, but they are not the same.
The fact that we lost both opening chapters of the space race
The fact that you had a space race is a national shame on both sides.
Imagine if engineers and scientists on each side had been allowed to say to the other, "Dude, let's work together on this one."
And before you respond with the obvious, how many of these engineers and scientists were doing it for the love and glory of mother Russia / America, rather than because they wanted to explore space?
Celebrating the victories of our enemies is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Deliberately misinterpreting the notions of both "enemy" and "cold war" is like spitting on the graves of the hundreds of thousands who died in the cold war.
Trololo, molotov 303.
On August 16, 1960, Colonel Kittinger jumped out of a hot air balloon at over 100,000 ft
Yes, he jumped from a balloon at 31,200 m up, this is nowhere near the KÃrmÃn line at 100,000 m which is commonly defined as the edge of space.
You must excuse him, he works for NASA...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Hardly evidence, given that even the biggest conspiracy theorists probably believe that there were successful unmanned moon landings. Not that I don't think men landed on the moon, but it's difficult to conclusively prove if you have zero trust in official sources and somehow discount all the photographs and video.
Just a thought: does anyone outside of your civilization regard the entire planet as "our civilization"? Western ideas aren't as universal as you might have been mislead into thinking.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Science is quite separate from cultural values and ideologies.
Another Western idea. Seriously, you don't even think to question the foundations of your thinking...such as if members of other cultures think the same way as you and share your Western values.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Imagine if engineers and scientists on each side had been allowed to say to the other, "Dude, let's work together on this one."
They wouldn't have received any funding. Let's recap. Goddard basically created modern rocketry. No one would fund him. He created the then definitive works on the subject. WWII started and his work was basically ignored by the allies despite his efforts. Germany took his efforts and created the stepping stones for modern missiles, rockets, and manned flight. It was funded by war. Post WWII, Germans taken in by both the US and Russia created the manned flight programs, which in turn were funded by war or the fear of war. Remember, manned flight was an excuse to justify massive spending to create ICMBs.
So basically, "working together" almost never receives funding unless there is yet another underlying cause allowing the first to be used as a public excuse.
Hell, the US-German program was so successful and the US program was so unsuccessful, the US-German program was literally mothballed and prevented from launching so as to allow the pure-US effort a chance as well as to allow the Russian's time to actually launch Sputnik to as to create an internal overflight precedence. Once Sputnik was launched, which created much ire and fear of the US public, much to the surprise of the US Cabinet, and after repeated US failures, the German program was removed from mothballs. The US-German program was taken directly from mothballs to the launch pad, and successfully launched. The US-German program was mothballed roughly a year before Sputnik was launched into space.
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
Not true. Orthodox Church existed just fine during the USSR. It even had official state support, even during Stalin's reign.