13 April 2008

Yuri's Night ~ World Space Party!

On April 12, 1961, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of Russia was the first human to escape Earth's gravity, fly in space, and orbit our planet. Amazing! To celebrate, we now have Yuri's Night, a world space party, in part to inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts and future explorers. Gagarin died young in an accident, but everyone remembers him, including US Astronauts. (In my opinion, it's perhaps even more important to salute the planners and engineers behind the mission, for instance, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, or even the inspirational thinkers who imagined the future so far before, for instance, rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who published his Rocket Equation in 1903 and left us these immortal words...
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.

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