A large audience gathered tonight, 18th October, to listen to Richard Fleet’s talk “50 years in space.” Richard showed some examples, from the 1940’s onwards, of what we though space may be like, some now seem quite strange, others were clearly very optimistic. Some of the early spacecraft were shown including Vanguard and Sputnik. The race to put a man in space was won by the Russians when Yuri Gagarin entered orbit in 1961. The race to get to the moon was then on!
In 1966 the Russians landed Luna 9 on the moon, at this point the Russians clearly in the lead. In 1968 the USA were catching up with Apollo 8 orbiting the moon and in 1969 Apollo 11 finally touching down on the moon and winning the race.
Richard noted though the hazards of space flight with various disasters including Challenger and the lesser known Soyuz 11 in 1971 which saw three cosmonauts die in the vacuum of space. Although manned space flight has not gone further than the moon, unmanned flight has gone much further. Venera 9 went to Venus in 1975, Viking 1 went to Mars and by 1979 the Voyage space craft had got to Jupiter.
The talk ended with questions from the audience and a vote of thanks from the chair, Nick Young.