Celebrating Yuri Gagarin's 1961 Flight Into Space 124
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."
Re:Strange thing to celebrate... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Strange thing to celebrate... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Strange thing to celebrate... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Food For the Moon Landing Skeptics (Score:2, Insightful)
... 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.
Re:To many more manned spaceflights. (Score:5, Insightful)
I beg to differ. I am using space flight services far more often than airplane services. I am using weather forecasts, satellite TV and GPS on a daily basis, while I don't fly that often or get airmail or are buying stuff transported by airplanes.
Re:Strange thing to celebrate... (Score:5, Insightful)