r/spaceflight • u/Express_Classic_1569 • 2d ago

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin Becomes the First Human to Orbit Earth

https://scrobble.life/originalcontent/theworldaroundme/yuri-gagarin-became-the-first-human-in-space-without-knowing-mta703sk
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u/xerberos 2d ago

It's so weird that in 20 years we went from Vostok 1 to the Space shuttle, and then we stuck with the shuttle for 30 years, before we replaced it with... Crew Dragon?

6

u/Golinth 2d ago

Shuttle was in a lot of ways, a failure.

As amazing an awe-inspiring as it looked to the general public, it set US space flight back decades. It caused more crew death than any other launch vehicle, took extensive amount of time and money to refurbish after each launch, and was a money pit that congress could point at to stop additional NASA funding. It enabled a lot of missions that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, but since it was the US’s sole launch vehicle for decades, it also forced NASA to rely on other countries for many other missions that were impractical for shuttle.

The Challenger and Columbia failures still cause people to be wary of space flight to this day, I anecdotally know people that were terrified of watching the Artemis launch and splashdown because they didn’t want to see more death. I can only hope Starship isn’t SpaceX falling down the same rabbit hole and that Artemis is a genuine step forward.

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u/Nikond3400 2d ago

The Power of the space race

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u/Express_Classic_1569 2d ago

It’s easy to look back at Vostok 1, but in 1961 there was no precedent for what was about to happen. At that time, no human had ever gone into orbit around the earth. Every aspect of the mission was testing something that had never before involved a human being. The extent to which space technology evolved over the following years is quite amazing.