What a way to spend an anniversary: stuck on Planet Earth while nine folks out of six billion look down on us from orbit and laugh at the gravity of our situation.
It was 50 years ago Tuesday that Yuri Gagarin, a village boy from the war-torn flatlands west of Moscow, crawled into a capsule the size of a tanning bed and called "Payekhali! -let's go!"
Until that moment, everyone was life-bound to the ground. But then, suddenly, we 11-year-olds all started packing our suitcases for our celestial destiny.
A true hero -the emblem of an effort that put a man in space less than two decades after the Soviet Union was nearly obliterated by Hitler's armies -Yuri Gagarin would live just seven more years. He would perish in the crash of his own training jet, and would never see a human hop in moondust.
I never met him but I know his two daughters: one a haughty museum director at the Kremlin; the other a delightful and unaffected academic in a Moscow college tower. I've visited Gagarin's birthplace in the dirtpoor hamlet of Klushino, and climbed into the Neanderthal dugout to which young Yuri's family was relegated when the Nazis seized their house. But I never sat in a rocket ship and eagerly commanded my ground crew to light the fuse.
In Washington, to mark the semi-centennial, a group of astronauts, aficionados and hangers-on like me gathered last week at the Russian Embassy in a ballroom so huge and polished that you almost could imagine Paul Henderson scoring on Vladislav Tretiak down at the far end.
On display were photographs of cosmonaut Gagarin, including the famous snap that shows him -just back from orbit, striding to be honoured at a grand parade in Red Square, bursting with pride and accomplishment -with one of his shoelaces flapping untied.
Buffet tables groaned with smoked fish, fine wine, and caviar.
A Soviet cosmonaut named Viktor Savinykh -254 days in space, total, aboard three Soyuz ships -was asked to say a few words.
"If it weren't for Yuri Gagarin, there would be no first step on the moon," he succinctly declared.
Savinykh was followed by the current director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a fourtime rocketeer named Charles Bolden, the former Marine Corps major-general now elevated (or reduced) to putting the best face on the sad fact that the Space Shuttle program is ending this summer after 30 years and 14 fatalities, that U.S. President Barack Obama has no interest in boldly going anywhere west of Benghazi and that human space travel has brought few tangible benefits to the landbased citizenry of the United States, or any other country.
"We're going to go beyond low-Earth orbit, and we're going to do it relatively soon," Bolden gamely told the audience, or at least that small portion of the audience that deigned to tear itself from the fish eggs and cabernet.
A few minutes later, I walked over to speak to Bolden and found him being interviewed by a reporter from the (ex-) Soviet news agency TASS.
"We mark an event that changed the course of humankind," Bolden was saying. "The fact that it was done by someone from the Soviet Union is immaterial."
"Do you think that, because of Yuri Gagarin, the United States will always be No. 2 in space?" the interviewer persisted.
"We think of ourselves as the leader in space exploration, and we always will be," Bolden retorted.
I introduced myself and noted that Alan Shepard -the first American to fly (sub-orbitally) in space, three weeks after Gagarin, and later the fifth of 12 men to walk on the moon -once admitted to me that he had stared back at our lonely little pinball from Luna and wept.
"Did you cry in space?" I asked NASA's big boss.
"I cried my first flight," Bolden replied. "I had spent a lot of time studying the continent of Africa, for obvious reasons. I always thought I was going to find where my ancestors came from somehow. Well, when you launch from Kennedy, the first thing you see is the British Isles and then there's this thing that looks like an island that's not an island -it's the continent of Africa.
"I looked down and there were no lines drawn on the ground down there. I couldn't find the countries. It was all one land. That's when I cried."
"How are you different from me?" I asked Bolden.
"We're not physically different," he answered. "Where we differ is our perspective of this planet. When you see the planet from above, you can never be the same."
Across the room, I found Roger K. Crouch, PhD (physics). As a Mission Specialist aboard two Space Shuttle flights that totalled 19 and onehalf days, Crouch completed 314 orbits, which was 313 more than Yuri Gagarin.
"How are people who've been to space different from those who haven't?" I asked him.
"I'd say we're luckier," Crouch replied. "And I think that a lot of astronauts are extremely persistent people, people who never give up. I think if you made a study of astronauts versus the general population, you'd find that the general population gave up more easily."
Crouch and I looked at the photos of Gagarin and I asked him if he thought that, with the Shuttle cancelled and nothing to replace it, we might be closer to the hour of the last man in space than we are to the first.
"I think that's a danger," Crouch said. "But I just find it almost impossible to believe that the leadership in our country, or some other country, won't step up and face a challenge like President Kennedy did."
(It was John F. Kennedy, pooked by Gagarin's flight nd the debacle of the Bay of igs mini-invasion of Cuba ix days later, who issued he call to land an American n the moon and bring him ome safely before the end of 969.)
"To believe that we're confined to the surface of this planet for all eternity, well, it's just unbelievable that we could be so stupid," grieved Crouch.
It was easy for him to say. He was not a fire-breathing jet jockey or a wartime ace, not one of the original Mercury Seven, not one of the 12 humble men who walked on the moon, not an especially heroic-looking man, paunchy, grey and soft at age 70, in a wacky tie with moons and stars and spacefaring creatures on it.
"Just a little old hillbilly from Tennessee," the astronaut called himself.
But he -and Yuri Gagarin -had been to space and I had not.
Given a chance at what I once was sure would be my future, I'm sure I would have cried, too.
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