UTMC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri's_Night

(Like every year, I noticed it by accident on the WP mainpage even though I had promised myself the year before to remember it next time around)

49 years ago tonight, the first of us hairless apes went into orbit atop a nuclear missile and then rode a cannonball back into the atmosphere.

29 years ago, some other hairless apes flew the first proper spaceship that could do it again and again.

In between, others followed in their footsteps to do some properly tits stuff.

Spaceflight rocks!!

+ a lot!

I really wanted to be an astronaut.

Always watched all of the launches from the first. (I'm old, you know)

Then, my older brother said i would have to be good at math.

Schoolwork did not improve, was bummed.

Heavy sigh.

Rumor was that Yuri was not the first "hairless ape" to make it out to space, but he was the first to make it back alive. We never had live launches, it was always on the evening news "Today the rocket XX-YY was successfully launched from Baikanyr, it made X number of orbits and returned (or will remain in space to carry out experiments) All systems are working properly"

Then few days after return the Cosmonaut would be called in to Kremlin where on national TV he would be awarded the Golden Star of the Hero of Soviet Union.

Pintgudge wrote:I really wanted to be an astronaut.

Always watched all of the launches from the first. (I'm old, you know)

Then, my older brother said i would have to be good at math.

Schoolwork did not improve, was bummed.

Heavy sigh.

I feel for you. Take solace in

Man, I SO wanted to go to Yuri's Night in the bay area. It's held at a freaking NASA research center for chrissakes!!

Alas, $50 tickets do put a damper on such things sometimes.

But yeah. Hell yeah.
Happy Yuri's night!!!

MATPOC wrote:Rumor was that Yuri was not the first "hairless ape" to make it out to space, but he was the first to make it back alive. We never had live launches, it was always on the evening news "Today the rocket XX-YY was successfully launched from Baikanyr, it made X number of orbits and returned (or will remain in space to carry out experiments) All systems are working properly"

Then few days after return the Cosmonaut would be called in to Kremlin where on national TV he would be awarded the Golden Star of the Hero of Soviet Union.

Rumor also has it that Armstrong never walked on the moon.

DerGolgo wrote:

MATPOC wrote:Rumor was that Yuri was not the first "hairless ape" to make it out to space, but he was the first to make it back alive. We never had live launches, it was always on the evening news "Today the rocket XX-YY was successfully launched from Baikanyr, it made X number of orbits and returned (or will remain in space to carry out experiments) All systems are working properly"

Then few days after return the Cosmonaut would be called in to Kremlin where on national TV he would be awarded the Golden Star of the Hero of Soviet Union.

Rumor also has it that Armstrong never walked on the moon.

I have seen interviews with people involved and there was alot of cover-up, any failed mission was swept under the rug. There was a guy bound for space before Gagarin but he died in training, similar to the American crew he was in Oxygen rich environment and accidentally started fire, his own fault. It was never made public in SU and now most of the people who were there are dead.

As for Neil's Moonwalk, I remember few years ago come guy at the party was showing me "irrefutable proof" of the faked moon landing, grainy video on a screen of his smart phone, supposedly released by Stanly's widow, where the mike boom enters the screen.

I have to say that faked Moon landing will not be a big surprise, there is a shadow of a doubt, but there is no doubt that Russians covered up a whole bunch of accidents, I have seen the video of the one where rocket blew at the launch pad up and about 100 people burned up including some of the engineers, it was secret for over 50 years

MATPOC wrote:

DerGolgo wrote:

MATPOC wrote:Rumor was that Yuri was not the first "hairless ape" to make it out to space, but he was the first to make it back alive. We never had live launches, it was always on the evening news "Today the rocket XX-YY was successfully launched from Baikanyr, it made X number of orbits and returned (or will remain in space to carry out experiments) All systems are working properly"

Then few days after return the Cosmonaut would be called in to Kremlin where on national TV he would be awarded the Golden Star of the Hero of Soviet Union.

Rumor also has it that Armstrong never walked on the moon.

I have seen interviews with people involved and there was alot of cover-up, any failed mission was swept under the rug. There was a guy bound for space before Gagarin but he died in training, similar to the American crew he was in Oxygen rich environment and accidentally started fire, his own fault. It was never made public in SU and now most of the people who were there are dead.

As for Neil's Moonwalk, I remember few years ago come guy at the party was showing me "irrefutable proof" of the faked moon landing, grainy video on a screen of his smart phone, supposedly released by Stanly's widow, where the mike boom enters the screen.

I have to say that faked Moon landing will not be a big surprise, there is a shadow of a doubt, but there is no doubt that Russians covered up a whole bunch of accidents, I have seen the video of the one where rocket blew at the launch pad up and about 100 people burned up including some of the engineers, it was secret for over 50 years

If you want proof that people landed on the moon, talk to the observatories. There's the laser reflectors that were put there and that are used to measure the distance between the earth and the moon. Also, recent probes have photographed the landing sites.
While it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that NASA produced some fake moon-landing footage just so they could cover it up in case something went wrong, all the "evidence" I've seen for a moon-landing-hoax has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere.

As for the Russians covering stuff up, well, consider this: all those other accident stories have gotten out over the last 20 years. While not impossible, it's at least improbable that such a biggie as someone else reaching space but dying on the way back would have remained hidden. Accidents, yes, very many, but hundreds, if not thousands of people would have been involved in the launch preparations for a manned space mission. There would have been dozens who had some form of contact with the cosmonaut, directly involved in crew operations, and none of them ever talked? These people were highly-skilled experts in the post-Stalin USSR, they wouldn't have been made to disappear just to keep a secret, some of them would have stayed around till after the cold war ended. Not to mention tons and tons and tons of documents relating to anything from supplies to health-checks to training to what have you, all the film shot documenting the operation, telemetry data, etc. Shooting a man into space is not a fly-by-night affair, and had there been a accident, even one kept secrets, there would have been an investigation, with more reports and documents and witnesses (the soviets did do accident investigations, if only to figure out how to avoid repeated losses of expensive material).

On the subject of space-flight:



Yes, that is the ISS transiting the sun. Used to be all we earthlings could observe doing that were other planets. Look what we can do!

Although I think that theories about the moon landing being fake are themselves, pretty damn bogus, I don't think it matters so much at this point. Us humans are famous for telling each-other and ourselves bullshit stories all the time. Most of us still believe that the idea that space exploration was some sort of great moment in human history where we were actually trying to explore just for the sake of enriching our society.

We were reaching for the stars, because humanity knows no limits and can achieve anything.

It isn't a bullshit story for us, we believe it. It sure as hell wasn't what the people with the money and the power were thinking though. Of course the cold war ended, we all built enough ICBMs to boil the seas and lots and lots of war profiteers got rich as hell, but that's not really what lasted. The bad shit might be part of the history, but it's not so much the legacy.

It doesn't matter that the space race was more about military advancement and power posturing than humans actually attempting something fantastic. We the people, all over the Earth, saw it and still see it as one of our most magnificent accomplishments. It gives us hope that we can achieve more great and fantastic things. It means that even if we are entirely insignificant in this huge universe, we're a little less insignificant than we were 100 years ago. That's all we need, a spark of hope, a hint of greatness. The gods will always be jealous of the songs we sign about our heroes, and rightfully so.