Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
Credit: NASA
PARIS: As the world looks back at manned space flight, a trail blazed by Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute trip around the planet 50 years ago, critics wonder if it's all been just a cosmic waste of money.
Presidents and space agencies insist manned missions will always be at the heart of their space programs. Astronauts not only embody the human quest to explore, they argue, they can also act on intuition and think swiftly and creatively in ways impossible for a machine.
Opponents dismiss this as a craving for prestige, or lobbying by the space industry or astronauts themselves. Manned space flight, they contend, has sapped funds for robot probes and satellites that unlock more knowledge and practical advantages at a lower price - and put no-one's life at risk.
Doesn't affect our lives
"People get so excited about manned flight they don't start thinking about what benefit it brings," said Gerard DeGroot, a professor of history at Scotland's University of St Andrews. "Aside from the excitement, it doesn't actually affect our lives."
Each day, the International Space Station (ISS) retreads Gagarin's path in low Earth orbit. At the same time, unheralded scouts are sending home data about the mysteries of Saturn, Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Sun or race to a distant rendezvous with a comet or asteroid.
And at home, an army of satellites give us Internet and cheap phone calls, provide airliners and cars with onboard navigation, and shower scientists with data about weather systems and Earth's environmental health.
"None of these advantages came from manned flight," said DeGroot, author of Dark Side of the Moon, an iconoclastic account of the Apollo programme.
Astronomical cost of space flight
Contrarians say Apollo starkly showed that sending humans into space was dangerous, requiring feats of engineering just to keep them alive and get them home safely.
It demonstrated that the Moon was a deeply hostile place, and our primitive chemical rockets would never get us to Jupiter, let alone the stars. And above all, it showed just how astronomically costly manned spaceflight is.
"One thing that I think no-one realised, even as late as 1961, is that human spaceflight is enormously expensive. It's something that President Kennedy only realised after his announcement of the Apollo programme in May 1961," said Cathleen Lewis, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
