The space race 50 years on

It’s astonishing to realise we have only been in space for the past 50 years. The Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years, the Earth for 4.5 billion and homo sapiens for a few hundred thousand but it was only with the launch of Sputnik, 50 years ago today, that we finally made it off our ball of rock and water.

There seems to be an awful lot of space nostalgia around at the moment as a result and lots of talk about a new space race. Having only been born in 1968, I don’t really remember much about the Apollo and Soyuz programmes, apart from what I have seen in films and on TV and read in books (including the gripping  Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov).

Now it seems, there’s a new race for space. Last year, President Bush vowed that Americans would return to the Moon by 2020 and hinted at manned Mars missions (without giving a date). China and Russia are planning a Mars mission too, unmanned but they are definitely testing the water for sending cosmonauts and taikonauts at some time in the future. I am very excited.