Human Space Flight Turns 50

Today marks a very important day in history for all you aspiring astronauts! The very first manned space flight will have happened 50 years ago tomorrow. On April 12th, 1961 Soviet air force pilot Yuri Gagarin took off in a rocket ship bound for space and managed to orbit the Earth for 79 minutes before re-entering where both he and the capsule parachuted their way back down to Russia. Since his flight a total of 522 people from 38 different nations have flown in space! Several days after Gagarin's flight, U.S. President John F. Kennedy challenged his nation to put the first man on the moon by the end of the decade -- and they achieved that goal in 1969. Okay, so you know who Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are but you're not entirely sure you've heard of Gagarin before, right? Well chances are it's because you're not Russian. While Aldrin and Armstrong are heroes in this part of the world, Gagarin is a hero in Russia, and the city where he was born was renamed after him, shortly after his death during a test flight in 1968. The United Nations is trying to promote a more international recognition of Gagarin's accomplishment. It adopted a resolution last week declaring April 12 the International Day of Human Space Flight. So tomorrow you have two choices: You could celebrate by building yourself a cardboard rocketship and let your imagination take you into orbit around the Earth... OR you could begin your journey to becoming a real space traveler. Standing on a ladder make you nervous? Maybe you want to keep both feet on the ground. Perhaps pursuing a career in space research suits you better. It never hurts to know your options! Find a job today at ScienceCareerSite.com! Bambi Blue is a freelance writer, editor, and codemonkey living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She moonlights as a jazz musician, a social butterfly, and most apparently a weisenheimer. Loves to cook, hates to clean, and can easily be found on Twitter