Here am I floating round my tin can | Far above the Moon | Planet Earth is blue | And there's nothing I can do
On Wednesday 12 April 1961, ten years before I was born, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human-being to leave the earth’s atmosphere, travel into space and orbit the earth in his Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft*. It was a significant milestone in human achievement.
Eight years, three months and eight days later, on Sunday 20 July 1969, the American team of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr, part of the Apollo 11 spaceflight, landed on the moon. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, indeed.
Some twenty-four or so years later, sometime in the early nineties, I received a processed film back from the chemist. It included this disappointing photograph of… who knows what. Is the blue area my jeans? What is that tremendous source of light in the top-left corner?
I took a scalpel from my dad’s desk (he used them for building models of motorbikes) and etched onto the photograph a small rocket heading back to earth, the blue planet.
It may have signified something at the time, a sense of feeling alienated, or out of control, perhaps. Or perhaps a sense of freedom and possibility. I don’t remember.
I stood outside a few nights back, staring up the sky at the stars. It was the night that we were supposed to be able to see the International Space Station passing overhead. I always feel a sense of perspective when I look up at the stars, knowing that what I’m seeing now is what has been. That I am looking back in time. I feel humbled at the enormity of space, and the simple beauty of tiny specs of light in an otherwise pitch-black sky.
I should do that more often. Except that I live in Scotland and we don’t get to see the sky without significant cloud-cover very often!
I’ve never been to space. But I know someone who wants to. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Space Kate… (@SpaceKate on Twitter).
(* As it happens the current theme of this blog is called Vostok.)
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy named Kostya after one of my finance exams two years ago. Kostya lives in Chicago but originally came from Moscow and, over the course of a couple of Saturday afternoon ales post-exam, we got to talking about his life growing up. He told me that his grandpa had been a member of the KGB and had, after an incident involving the defection of an agent, been arrested and subsequently “disappeared” without trace and with numerous parties claiming they had no knowledge of having ever met him. I expressed my surprise at this tale by way of the phrase “Oh, holy f*ck!!” to which Kostya replied, “but he wasn’t the interesting Grandpa.” By all accounts, Grandpa No 2 was the 18th cosmonaut on the Soyuz program and to this day maintains an apartment at the Space City training facility where he continues to bemoan the fall of Communism. So much so, Kostya has the best claim to fame of anyone I know; as a youngster, he was chased by Yuri Gagarin’s widow after he and his chum set fire to her fence.
True story!