Half a century ago, the formerly existing USSR pioneered human space flight with the successful orbital mission of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1. It spurred the USA into one of the greatest technical feats Hail-Mary catch-up in human history. NASA managed a successful moon mission shortly after Gagarin and his instructor were killed on a routine training flight on 27 March 1968. America went on to ultimate victory over the “Evil Empire.” Thanks to American triumphalism, in the popular imagination “Soviet achievement” has almost become an oxymoron. Even as Americans proudly mark the last “historic” flight of the disaster-prone American space shuttle (Harpoplican Canada is nervously hoping that we can get one of our Canada-Arms back “home” for museum display), there seems remarkably little curiosity about how we actually get astronauts and supplies to the international space station. Humanity’s only road to and from space now runs through the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz spacecraft powered by a Soyuz rocket—right where it all started fifty years ago.
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