Space is still our destiny

Saswato R. Das writes about science and technology.

Fifty years ago this week, at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet air force test pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to escape the shackles of Earth's gravity and enter space.

Only four years earlier, the Soviet Union had stunned the world (particularly the United States) by launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created NASA in response.

By the time Gagarin went into orbit, the race to prove supremacy in space had begun in earnest. It would culminate eight years later with the moon landing, when NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would proclaim American superiority to millions around the world watching the feat on television.

Half a century after Gagarin's spaceflight, the euphoria and cost-is-no-object attitude toward space exploration has worn off. What has replaced it is the sober realization that space travel is expensive -- and big voyages, such as to Mars, may be too expensive for one nation to undertake. The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union dismantled, and the Russian space program is in dire straits. Humans haven't been back to the moon in nearly 40 years.

Under a regime of fiscal conservatism, which started in the 1990s, NASA's missions have grown modest -- and robotic. The Space Shuttle fleet is being retired this year after three decades, and there are no plans for manned space travel in the near future.

If you had asked space enthusiasts back in the 1970s what we would achieve by 2011, they would have likely predicted that humans would have journeyed to some of the other planets in the solar system. Shouldn't we be vacationing on Mars, or at least the moon, by now?

Yet the lack of those markers shouldn't be cause for too much pessimism. If you examine the path of technological progress throughout human history, you'll find periods of accelerated growth, when some major invention spurs rapid development, followed by relative lulls. Such was the case with the first iron tools, the printing press and the steam engine.

To those who think the promise of space has dimmed, I would draw a parallel between the design of the first practical steam engine, by James Watt in 1769, and the first human spaceflight.

Just as Gagarin showed us it was possible to break free from gravity's pull, even if for only a short period, the steam engine allowed human machinery finally to escape the limitations of power drawn from a team of horses.

Fifty years into the Industrial Revolution, an observer may well have felt that the initial momentum had slowed down. It wasn't until 1819 -- 50 years after Watt filed his patent -- that the first steamship crossed the Atlantic. The electric motor, the telegraph machine, the first photograph, the sewing machine -- all were yet to be invented.

But the human mindset had changed forever, as it would again with the first human spaceflight.

The most exciting things in space today are the involvement of private enterprises and more nations.

Virgin Galactic is offering fee-paying passengers a chance to go to low-Earth orbit, with the first flights supposed to start in a couple of years. Last June, another private company, Space-X, successfully launched a rocket capable of carrying humans into space.

And India, China and other nations are making bold new forays into space -- in some cases doing what the United States and the Soviet Union did in the 1960s. With their rivalry and impressive fiscal power, they may spur on a new space race to the moon.

Looking back at space exploration 50 years after Gagarin's history-making flight, one thing is undeniable: Space is now part of human destiny.