Fifty years ago, this would have been something beyond one's imagination.
It was an event which literally woke up the US from its slumber---the flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12,1961.
When Moscow Radio announced the news, a sense of disappointment and frustration enveloped the entire US. It had once again been beaten in the space race after the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 4,1957.
After the flight of Gagarin, the US rushed to send an astronaut, Alan Shepherd, to space on May 5,1961, to catch up with the Soviets, though it was a feeble attempt. Twenty days later on May 25,1961, President Kennedy proclaimed that the US will be landing on the moon by the end of the decade.
Now, apparently, the tables have turned. A country which was beaten in the space race initially is all praise for the Soviet's achievements. What an irony! Nasa has opened a special section in its website called : ``Yuri Gagarin: 50 years later.'' It contains the front page of ``The Huntsville Times, carrying the banner headlines ``Man Enters Space.'' Huntsville is an important centre for US space programme because the Marshal Space Flight Centre is located there which was headed by none other than Wernher Von Braun. It was here where the Saturn rockets were designed for the Apollo missions.
In the photo section there are also pictures of Gagarin being taken to the launch pad in a bus, a plaque in memory of Gagarin signed by John Glenn, James McDivitt and Neil Armstrong, Gemini-4 astronauts meeting Gagarin,.the Vostok-1 control panel, the Soyuz spacecraft called `Gagarin,' rolling to the launch pad at Baikonour and a cosmonaut paying homage to the statue of Yuri Gagarin.
An informative website.
``Beyond Moon and Mars (BMM)'' has downloaded a 12-minute video produced by the European Space Agency (ESA) called ``First Man In Space.''
BMM hopes that India too does something.
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