First Man in Space (Yuri Gagarin), 60 Years Ago Today

(Credit: Wikipedia.)

(Wikipedia)

Comments

[AmosArch]

If he was the first man in space where was everyone before him? The netherworld?

[bernard11]

OK Amos.

That's a good one.

[Goju]

Being as this is a lawyer's site, and given the legal profession's obsession with details; the first man is space was a pilot of the X15 experimental rocket plane. Technically, several of the flights left the Earth's limits and traveled in space for short periods of time.

[Duck916]

Actually, the X-15 flights that qualify as space flight all took place after Gagarin's historic journey.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Amazing what Communist central planning can do.

[Dr. Ed 2]

No, it's amazing what Roosevelt's sellout to Stalin could do.
Patton was denied gasoline so that the Russians could get to Berlin first and in the process it was they who captured the Nazi V-2 rocket works and all of the mid-level people.

We got Von Braun, but only because he hiked 100+ miles to our lines.

[Absaroka]

"Patton was denied gasoline so that the Russians could get to Berlin first ..."

That's ...ummmm ... not the consensus historical view, which is that the gasoline bottleneck was getting it from Jolly Olde to the front in France. It wasn't that there was a shortage of gas in England.

Alternatively, if you are saying that there was a gas shortage not because the gas went to Russia, but that gas was withheld from Patton to slow him down so the Russians got to Berlin first, that is still ... not a mainstream view. You can read Eisenhower's memoirs, where he says he wasn't interested in a race to Berlin because the postwar boundaries had already been agreed upon, and he didn't want to spend American and British lives taking territory only to later hand it over to the Russians, and he expected the battle for Berlin to be costly. IIRC Bradley's, Patton's, and Monty's memoirs agree on that being the reason for Eisenhower's reluctance to race for Berlin, even if they personally wanted to take Berlin. So, for that matter, do the memoirs of that well know Stalin fanboi, Winston Churchill.

The Russians took 70 or 80 thousand KIA in the battle for Berlin, FWIW.

[Dilan Esper]

Also, the Soviets had access to plenty of German scientists too, and not only because of the conquest of territory. Some of them, for lack of a better term, were Communists.

They would have presumably been able to figure out how to build rockets. Just as they figured out how to build a lot of things (e.g., the Soviets were decades ahead of us on space station design, which had very little to do with the V-2).

[Goju]

Another reason for German scientist going to Russia was that they were going to be immune from war crimes prosecution. They were promised safety and cushy government supported jobs.

Absaroka, the Soviet govt is entirely responsible for it's own casualties. They worked with and supported the building of the Nazi war machine. As usual, it's the people themselves that had to pay the price.

[Dilan Esper]

Obviously there's no defense of Josef Stalin on practically anything, but from a pure POV of strategy he faced a daunting issue when the USSR decided to sign the non-aggression pact with Hitler, somewhat similar to the calculus Chamberlain faced in Munich. In both cases, these were states unprepared for international warfare, negotiating with a committed and devastating German war machine. The pacts bought time for rearmament, which both countries did. Neither country behaved like it really trusted Hitler or thought the agreement would stick.

It's perfectly clear the Soviets didn't like Hitler- they were covertly supporting his communist opponents in the 1920's and 1930's. But they did eventually defeat Germany on the battlefield, and did so at great cost.

I tend to think that at the end of the day, Hitler and his cronies responsible for the destruction of Europe and the mass slaughter of the European theater of WW2. Not anyone else.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Eisenhower let the Russians take Berlin (or rather, in the famous telegram exchange of March 29, 1945, he let Stalin get away with lying that “Berlin has lost its former strategic importance”) because the Allies had already agreed that Berlin would be within the postwar Russian “zone” with Berlin having separate Allied sectors.

[bernard11]

We got Von Braun, but only because he hiked 100+ miles to our lines.

"Nazi, schmazi, says Wernher Von Braun."

Some facts.

[Don Nico]

"only because he hiked 100+ miles to our lines."
Nazi war criminals did that on occasion.

[Dilan Esper]

Mort Sahl used to joke that Von Braun titled his autobiography "I Aim At the Stars":

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

[bernard11]

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down.
It's not my department, says Wernher Von Braun."

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Don't forget the Nazi scientists. their fellow dictators.

Or Robert Goddard for that matter.

[Absaroka]

Brave man.

It makes me think of the possibly true story ... a reporter asks an astronaut 'What's going through your mind when the countdown is going 3, 2, 1 ...?', and the astronaut replies 'I reflect on the fact that I am sitting on top of a 200 ft rocket, containing 40000 lbs of highly volatile rocket fuel, and comprised of 157000 separate parts ... each made by the lowest bidder'.

Lot's to go wrong with launches, even today.

*In Gagarin's case, not the lowest bidder, but...
**the numbers aren't from any actual rocket

[Dan Schiavetta]

That was Alan Shepard, and it is decidedly not apt when talking about Gagarin, or any cosmonaut.

[Sarcastr0]

We still don't know how many cosmonauts died in the USSR Space Race effort; military classification.

Great contrast to NASA's civilian openness.

[Duck916]

The author Robert Heinlein traveled through the USSR prior to Gagarin's flight. He reported that some young Soviet military members told him and his wife (who had learned Russian in anticipation of the trip) that the USSR had successfully launched a manned space mission. There was nothing ever reported about it, so Heinlein surmised that the mission had failed. Again, this was prior to Gagarin's flight.

Of course, the men who told Heinlein this might have been mistaken.

[Dilan Esper]

The cosmonauts were definitely brave, though, and took on appalling levels of risk.

[Jimmy the Dane]

If you were to have seen what it was like living in the Soviet Union in the 1960's. A small capsule floating in space was the equivalent of an opulent residence.

[DaivdBehar]

This was pointless advertising. Machines in space are 100 times better than people, and cost 1/10 to support. See what satellites have done for us. Compare to astronauts, nothing.

Another big government stupidity. Not the lawyer's fault this time.

[Jimmy the Dane]

I'm going to go with this is probably not true....

[Sarcastr0]

How do you hoax a transmission from orbit?

[Jimmy the Dane]

We are talking about the same people who use time travel to tweak the future. Pretty sure they were able to figure out the above.