Gagarin - To the Might of Human Endeavour

On this day, sixty years past - the further sixty-year mark being the world of Victoria, her grandson Wilhelm II, or Leopold's Congo and Cixi's China, mind you - a man of humble origins stepped into a capsule with near-unmistakable thought of the poor canine which had preceded him. Yuri (Jurij, the Swedish transliteration being superior) Gagarin, "man of destiny", would not face the recognition of his American counterpart, I would say successor, Armstrong, whose death in August 2012 only just preceded my launching of my first pitiful blog post, on the question of Tintin and . But his were the first eyes to follow Tintin's own in beholding the might of the earth from above, not merely the soaring heights of birds, but beyond - as Star Trek would a few years later posit - the reach of men before him. So great was the event that 

More arses would follow in similar capsules, most notably that of Valentina Tereshkova, recognised again when young Samantha Smith toured the Soviet Union after her letter to Gagarin's namesake, then-General Secretary Andropov. Americans followed too, biting nails and subsuming shame with the ambition and long-term effort to reach the inevitable, yet seemingly impossible: Planting a pair of feet on the only celestial body in earth's orbit, or at least substantial enough to have been beheld by generations since the dawn of man... and even Lucy herself. It is thus a dream which may have seemed abstract, even to the science fiction writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but which opened a door to the , and the greatness of the 1960s,