“60 Years of Space Exploration: From Gagarin’s first flight to the Race to Mars”

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To appreciate the extraordinary nature of the accomplishments of Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts and astronauts, it helps to remember that none of the technological advances we take for granted in our modern world existed at the time.

Gagarin’s and his compatriots’ space flights happened when there were no high-performance computing clusters, no geographical positioning systems, no satellites, no high-speed internet, and not even dedicated tracking ships to monitor their flights. Computers were huge databanks using perforated cards, and communication was by telephone, telex and radio.

As I was doing some background reading for these articles, it struck me how much the world has changed since the USSR successfully launched Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957 – an event that is commonly regarded as the birth of the Space Age. The advances in technology from those early days of flight to today are quite extraordinary.

Published in the Military Despatches of May 2021.