End of Exploration?

April 12th this year was the fiftieth anniversary of one of the great events in human history. On that day, fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin blasted off in his Vostok spacecraft and became the first human being to venture into space. For people around the world it was a very exciting event which led to even more adventures and “firsts” in space. The first woman in space, the first multiple person team in orbit, the first space walk…..

The culmination of these early days of space travel was the Apollo program. I clearly remember the day when Apollo 8 and its crew of three Americans (Borman, Lowell, and Anders) left earth’s orbit and headed toward the moon. For a teenager growing up in Rajkot, India, I could not think of anything that could be more exciting.

Of course, there was something more exciting on the horizon---the actual landing on the moon. I was studying in IIT during that time and was hoping to catch the live radio broadcast of Armstrong stepping on the moon. However, he decided to step outside earlier than planned (he was too excited to sit inside) and so by the time we returned from our classes, the event had happened…and the mankind had taken a giant leap.

And, it all began on April 12th 1961 with Gagarin’s flight.

However, one would not have guessed the importance of the anniversary given the complete lack of excitement about it. There was almost no mention of it in the news papers and no one I met talked about it. My broadcast email about this or posting of a video of Gagarin’s flight on Face Book was generally met by a big yawn.

I am puzzled by such lack of enthusiasm, not just by the people that I interact with, but by our society in general. I guess we are all so tied up with the current affairs that we do not have time for such frivolous activities as space exploration. After all, there is no financial rate of return on adventures like this---they only fulfill our innate curiosity to explore.

What puzzles me is that we have always financed such explorations in the past, even when the economic conditions were worse than what we have now. So, what is different now? Are there other ways by which our desire to explore being satisfied?

Maybe I am all wrong and someday there will be a manned space flight to Mars or we will establish a colony on the moon. Those will be the adventures that would captivate human beings once again and set the imaginations of then teenagers to fire.

However, given the current lack of enthusiasm for anything like this, I doubt that I would live to see that day. We have probably already arrived at the end of the days of exploration.