49th Anniversary of Yuri Gargin's Flight

[Mike DiCenso]

On this day 12 April in 1961, Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, launching to orbit aboard the Vostok 3KA-3 (Vostok 1). Gagarin orbited the Earth once in 108 minutes. He returned unharmed, ejecting from the Vostok capsule 7 km (23,000 ft) above the ground and parachuting separately to the ground since the capsule's parachute landing was deemed too rough for cosmonauts to risk.

On this the 49th anniversary of his historic achivement, which spurred on our own manned space flight efforts, cumulating in the landing men on the Moon just 8 years laters on 20 July 1969, the U.S. and the world now faces a potentially uncertain future as the U.S. may very well have no manned space program whatsoever, and could rely indefinitely on the Russians to fly astronauts to space. Can the private sector really pull this off? Space X, the only one potential private contender in NASA's COTS program up for the task of picking up the slack is continueously postponing launch of their Falcon 9 rocket with an engineering model of the Dragon capsule as payload. Can they do it? Is Elon Musk's talk of having a manned version of their capsule in 3 years all hype?

And then there is the Chinese equation; with just a handful of missions and vague references to having a mini-space station in orbit in a couple of years, are they going too slow with just a few missions every couple years or so, and what are their real intentions? Who will they allow to ride on their Shenzhou space capsules?
-Mike

[2046]

I would love nothing more than to see a private American enterprise in competition with the Chinese government. Even if we lose, we win.

The Space Race was a grand thing for its time, and successfully demonstrated American technological prowess. For reasons of defense and diplomacy, it was fairly proper at the time for it to be a governmental activity, and of course for defense thereafter. But to my mind, the sooner it can become a private enterprise, the better.

[Mike DiCenso]

I would love nothing more than to see a private American enterprise in competition with the Chinese government. Even if we lose, we win.

And would not mind, either, except that we have only one company in any position to do anything right now, and that is Space X. This is not a good thing. We needed to have multiple companies, each competing and ready or nearly ready to take over once Shuttle is retired, but that's not the case. It will be years, if ever before anyone can take up the slack.

The Space Race was a grand thing for its time, and successfully demonstrated American technological prowess. For reasons of defense and diplomacy, it was fairly proper at the time for it to be a governmental activity, and of course for defense thereafter. But to my mind, the sooner it can become a private enterprise, the better.

Private space needs to take over and develop low Earth orbit space so that NASA can concentrate on development and exploration of manned spaceflight beyond to the rest of the solar system.
-Mike