Yuri Gagarin and his flight

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Shantanu Dutta

13 April, 2011

April 12, 1961, was a day that changed the future of the world. The success of his flight secured the future of space exploration and the development of inventions and technologies that now enhance the daily lives of citizens worldwide.

IT STARTED with a doodle on Google's home page. The lttle piece of art made me wonder what it represented but it took me quite a while that today is the 12^th of April, 2011 and exactly fifty years ago, a memorable event had occured which the nerds and geeks of Google had remembered but few others did. Just to be sure, I asked my daughter and some others busy cramming up general knoweledge for competitive exams, about Yuri Gagarin. All I got of course was blank stares and looks.

Indeed, today no one remembers Yuri Gagarin, possibly because the country he represented, the Soviet Union has disentegrated. But on this day, 50 years ago, Gagarin made history by becoming the first man to go into outer space. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong made history by landing on the moon and with photographs that have beceome iconic along with his “one small step for man, but one giant step for mankind” tagline. But none of this would have been possible without Gagarin's pioneering mission into the unknown of outer space, about whom little was known till then.

April 12, 1961, was a day that changed the future of the world and sparked a new area of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was on that day that a brave young Russian cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin climbed into the Vostok 1 spacecraft and was shot into space from a lonely area of Kazakhstan. The capsule landed 108 minutes later with Gagarin parachuting the final leg of the journey, the first man to have flown in space, the first to orbit our earth. The success of his flight secured the future of space exploration and the development of inventions and technologies that now enhance the daily lives of citizens worldwide.

Yuri Gagarin, who after his brief moment of glory, faded back into the obscurity of his Air Force career and later died in an air crash, perhaps epitomised the indomitable spirit and determination of man in his bid to forever wrestle with nature – in the twentieth century , the three pivotal moments perhaps were 1903 – when the Wright brothers flew their first little plane, 1953, when Mount Everest was conquered and 1961, when the Space barrier was breached.

I am writing this piece sitting in front of a television channel showing the news, many channels I have scanned in fact, but they have no coverage of this day – one of the mythical moments in the history of the human race when surely a pinnacle was reached, a summit breached. But we are not celebrating the anniversary or commemorating this epochal event. Our celebrities are of a different kind, of the instant kind and those who have made a lasting contribution to the human legacy forgotten.

Fifty years after completing a single orbit of the Earth - his only space flight - the memory of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is all but wiped out. That largely unheralded feat, a true milestone in history, has been wiped out in the age of satellites and space gizmos, whose influence reach our living rooms and shape our lives even, is particularly ironic.