Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

Iain Banks spent his last days with closest family and friends. Jay Lake decided to throw himself a pre-mortem wake and roast and you are invited. There is something nice about being able to hear all the things people say about you and actually party like there's no tomorrow when you know. Not dying is even nicer but we usually don't have that choice.

Official cause of Yuri Gagarin's death was always suspicious. Alexei Leonov (best friend and first man to go for a spacewalk) never stopped trying to find out and confirm his recollection of hearing another jet. He was finally allowed to talk about his findings when a new declassified report confirmed that an unauthorized Su-15 supersonic jet flew dangerously close to Gagarin's MiG-15 causing it to go into tailspin.

As hundreds of movies and cop shows episodes taught us dying is important part of achieving legendary fame. Mostly because cases like these - 10 famous people who died before they were household names. Doctor Who writers understood that wish to let them know how their works were appreciated. The wish they knew it before they died.

For me it's still tomorrow but it's already 12th of April in Russia and it marks the 50th anniversary of first human flight to space. Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet once in 108 minutes. He saw sun set and rise. He saw the stars without the twinkling. He didn't have much control over his flight - it was controlled from the ground by people and the automatic system but he had codes for emergency manual control. He orbited the Earth once and then parachute landed. There are many events commemorating this all over the globe and you can check the ones near you on Yuri's Night website. The actual time of day that the anniversary comes on is just after midnight here and I'll will be asleep by then but I already have my t-shirt.



Yuri Gagarin was the first person who saw Earth from space, the first one to see with his own eyes the view which we are now so familiar with, the view of a blue sphere. It's so weird to realise that it's happened so long ago. 50 years. half of the century. Suddenly the deeply buried feeling of disappointment struck me. Where are my space vacations? Hotels on the Moon? Colonisation of Mars? 50 years ago computers were the size of a room had processing power lesser then the low end calculator and just started to use transistors. Look at you cell now. Your car can almost drive itself and the could exchange your organs for a new ones but it still takes 20 million dollars to go for a holiday in space. And soon we will go one step back as last space shuttle mission is coming soon and then it'll be Russians giving everyone rides to ISS.

On the other hand the way our world changed can be traced back to the beginnings of space exploration. The satellite communication and culture of instant access. The Global Village. All the innovations and materials created for space exploration - from memory foam to water filters. The future is just a little different then we imagined. Well, maybe in next 50 years we'll get to space tourism in its vomit inducing greatness.

That very image of Earth from space he saw is so ingrained through pictures and movies this is simply what we think when we think of our planet. It's even hard to phantom what people  before space age imagined when they heard the word Earth. Our blue dot in vast blackness of space. Think how it must've felt to be the first one to see that. Here is our chance to see what we see. There is almost no footage from that first voyage but the reconstruction has been made using footage filmed from ISS when it passed the same places at the same time of day with the original voice communications between Korolev at the space center and Gagarin in Vostok 1 (Dawn) as a background. Here it is - First Orbit: