Gagarin, American hero?
The 50th anniversary of the first man in space. Just let the thought, shared by countless generations over thousands of years, bounce around your head for a little while. The idea that someone broke through that most impenetrable of barriers, space, 50 years ago yesterday is awesome. In the history of human kind, its difficult to think of something that comprehensively trumps leaving the planet we call home for the first time. Yuri Gagarin’s 1 hour orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961 affirmed many things to many people, not all of which came to fruition. Most critically, however, it affirmed man’s belief in himself.
I thought about writing something commemorating the flight yesterday, but decided that I couldn’t add anything that hadn’t already been said. So I contented myself with reading other people’s articles commemorating the flight. Vadim Nikitin’s blog has a good summary of some of the more interesting tidbits (inside a good article in its own right) so if you’re looking for some fun Gagarin facts, check it out. There’s another page (Bizneslanch, clinging to some shred of an ethical sense, can’t take credit for finding it) at russianspaceweb.com about Gagarin worth checking out. Like I said, I didn’t put a whole lot effort into digging up anything original and I would be the first to admit to not being particularly well read in the history of the Soviet space program so maybe it’s for the best.
Still, one thing struck me while reading about Gagarin. There was almost no sense that Gagarin’s flight was an event shared and celebrated by everyone on the planet. Most articles made reference to the Cold War, most talked about how proud Russians are (this obviously includes Russian articles), some ruminated on the current state of the Russian space program and the Washington Post decided that its incredibly random, buried-on-A5 story should lead with an anecdote about people power washing the Gagarin statue on Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow and end with quotes from a Molodaya Gvardiya activist. It seemed to me that they all failed the see the most important aspect of the story, which is the reality that 50 years ago changed the way we look at the world around us.
The Cold War context in which Gagarin’s flight – and the Apollo 11 moon mission 8 years later – took place was undoubtedly an important factor. It lent, to a lesser or greater extent, an urgency to the effort to get a man into space. Nevertheless, the focus on this Cold War context ultimately misses the point since the success of Gagarin’s flight was one of those exceptionally rare events that transcended the context in which it took place. Do most people know – or perhaps more importantly, care – that Christopher Columbus was an Italian hired by the king and queen of Spain? Or even why he did it? No, they don’t and they won’t with Gagarin either.
Ultimately, people won’t remember the ideological competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union that is still at the center of our Gagarin narrative. A fifty-year blip in history will not overshadow the culmination of a human ambition thousands of years old as it still regretfully does today.
Gagarin didn’t build his Vostok 1 spacecraft himself and didn’t launch it himself; hell, he didn’t even fly it himself. His flight was unquestionably the product of a massively intense effort directed by the Soviet Union so its difficult to separate the flight from its national character, but us non-Russians should do just that and celebrate it as a common achievement. Russians richly deserve to celebrate Gagarin and Sergey Korolyov, the lead Soviet rocket designer, and I would be the last to advocate for this. That doesn’t in any way exclude everyone else from sharing equally in that celebration.
Gagarin’s flight deserves nothing less than this. Why label it solely as a “Soviet” achievement; this is undoubtedly true, but when we attach such a label, it strips us as a species at-large of our common ownership of the feat. Even worse is the ludicrous continuing focus on who “won” and “lost” the space race ; who “beat” whom? More to the point, who lost? You don’t even need to resort to some dialectic-driven theory of history (a la “the two diametrically opposed systems struggled against each other, thus creating a historical advance ,etc.”) to understand the general importance of Gagarin’s flight.
It’s this sentiment that should grab everyone regardless of whether your country “won” or “lost” the space race or did not even participate. True, Biznesslanch probably wouldn’t be writing about this if Gagarin had not been Russian so there is a little disingenuousness in this stance, I suppose, but the point remains. Ultimately, the first man in space wasn’t really a product of the Cold War or the space race or anything other than man’s ageless desire to explore what we could always see, but never really touch until April, 12 1961.
It’s time that we shed this image of Gagarin as a Soviet ubermensch and see him as one of us. After all, he was just that, a man. The first man in space.
