On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go on a space flight on the spaceship Vostok 1 (photo ©Errabee).

The Vostok spacecraft was designed for space missions and for the USSR spy satellite program since 1960. Over the years the Vostok models were improved and then they also evolved into the Voshkod program. The Vostok 1 was a Vostok 3KA model and was designed by the pioneer of astronautics Sergei Korolev.

The space race had been started by the USSR in 1957 with the launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik 1, the next step was to send a man into space and for the first mission Yuri Gagarin was selected, a Soviet Air Force pilot.

In the morning of April 12, 1961 the Vostok 1 took off, went into orbit and after travelling around the world Yuri Gagarin began re-entry procedures. The service module had to come off but some of the cables kept it attached to the rest of the ship for a bit longer than expected before breaking. During the landing Gagarin ejected and opened his parachute while the Vostok service module landed with its own parachute. The latter fact was however revealed only ten years after and initially the Soviets claimed that Gagarin had landed in the Vostok capsule.

Officially the U.S.A. congratulated for the achievement but clearly it was a remarkable setback. Today the Gagarin’s flight seems trivial but at the time it was a big deal. President John F. Kennedy literally promised the Moon to pass the Soviets in the space race.

With all its ugliness the Cold War also led to something positive with the U.S.A. and USSR trying for once not to prove who was better at killing but who was the best in building spacecrafts and probes.

In 1975 there was a first attempt at collaboration between the two superpowers when the last Apollo mission docked to the Soyuz 19.

Exactly 20 years after the Yuri Gagarin’s journey, on April 12, 1981, the first flight of a Space Shuttle, the Columbia, took off.

In the ’90s there were other meetings in the space between Americans and Russians, first the Space Shuttles and the MIR space station and then the U.S.A. and Russia began to work together on the International Space Station, extending the cooperation to other nations.

Of course today’s space programs are reduced compared to the ’60s and many people consider them useless and yet the space race led to significant technological advances not only in aerospace engineering but also in many others fields, especially electronics, information technology and telecommunications.

Today’s western society, with all its computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices for telecommunications, exists because of the space race. Even our perception of the environment has been influenced by space missions because we were given a way to see the Earth from space and today there are satellites such as GOCE showing among the other things climate changes taking place on the planet.

It seems however that a lot of tension between nations is needed to push most people to accept that a budget larger than a small fraction of the military budget gets destined to space missions. It’s no coincidence that today some of the more interesting plans for a new space race come from India and China.

We’re now about seven billion human beings on an overpopulated Earth of which we’re exploiting more and more resources and we’re polluting in any way. It would be not only beautiful but also useful for us and for future generations that Yuri Gagarin’s flight was the first of many steps toward an expansion of humanity into space rather than an event from a period already ended.