CANZE: After 50 years of manned spaceflight, have we lost our sense of wonder?
Tuesday marked the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in the Vostok 1 out of Earth’s atmosphere — the first manned space flight in human history.
Since then, many scientific discoveries and applications of important technology, be they military, commercial or medical, have been born out of the space programs of various countries.
These people should be heroes. Gagarin, Buzz Aldrin, Zhai Zhigang – each one of these people is like Charles Lindbergh, Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth combined.
They are pioneers into space! They’re furthering human influence and understanding beyond what Christopher Columbus, Meriweather Lewis or William Clark could have ever imagined.
Why don’t young children collect pictures of astronauts on trading cards and posters? Why aren’t manned space launches as big of events as televised college basketball championships?
People can argue the reason is because space exploration is unnecessary. They can — and have — said further discovery of the bodies surrounding our planet and the knowledge that brings is not as important as spending that money on earthbound wars.
However, I think the reason is a little more intrinsic than that.
I think a large chunk of humanity has lost its sense of wonder.
We’ve been living for 50 years with the fact that man has been able to leave the planet our race has been bound to for more than 10,000 years.
We are a society of jaded people. We now have so much information and technological capabilities at our fingertips at any given moment that it takes quite a bit to wow us.
An experienced, respectable Navy captain and veteran astronaut, Mark Kelly, was not even a blip in the American pop-culture consciousness until his wife, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head in January.
Before this, it has typically taken something as tragic as a shuttle explosion to get the general public to give a hoot about space exploration, and that’s just a shame.
So we haven’t been putting our efforts into setting up a moon base or putting people on Mars — yet. The things we have and the things we know, everywhere from astronomy to everyday life, have benefited from research and exploration into space. You think your television, your cell phone, your Internet connection or your GPS would work without all those nifty satellites out in orbit?
Beyond all that, we, as humans, are able to break free from gravity, the atmosphere and all natural sources of life support in order to travel beyond where any creature on this planet would naturally be able to go. That is just awesome.
Science rules.
