April 12, 2001, marked the anniversaries of two landmark events in space travel: the 40th anniversary of the first human spaceflight—U.S.S.R. cosmonaut Yury Gagarin’s single orbit of Earth in 1961—and the 20th anniversary of the U.S. launch of the first space shuttle, Columbia, in 1981. Gagarin’s feat and the subsequent goading by Soviet leadership sparked a chain of events that started on May 25, 1961, when U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy petitioned Congress to commit the nation to landing a man on the Moon “before this decade is out.” Though that goal was achieved on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle carried astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin (“Buzz”) Aldrin to the surface of the Moon, aspirations for space travel continued to expand.
Ironically, the manned space race that had started between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. 40 years earlier was replaced by a spirit of cooperation in 2001; the former competitors worked together to build the International Space Station (ISS) with other nations that became space farers in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. On a more sombre note, the year also marked the 30th anniversary (April 19, 1971) of the first space station, the U.S.S.R.’s Salyut 1, and the death of its first three-man crew on their return to Earth (June 30, 1971); it was also the 15th anniversary (Jan. 28, 1986) of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, a tragedy that killed seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe.
The year 2001 also evoked the more ambitious vision of space activity painted by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in their 1968 motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only was the ISS far smaller than its movie counterpart, it was likely to be even less than what had been planned; budget overruns threatened to reduce its crew size and science facilities. Exploration beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth was by automated spacecraft. No plans were in sight for large-scale lunar exploration as depicted in the film. The first government-industry venture to develop a reusable space liner, somewhat similar to its film version, faltered amid technical and financial problems.
These endeavours highlighted the technical, economic, and political challenges facing space explorers. For instance, descendants of the R-7 rocket that launched Gagarin (and the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957) continued to launch the three-man Soyuz and other spacecraft for Russia. The 20-year-old Columbia remained operational along with three other shuttles, and all four were expected to remain in service through 2020 and perhaps beyond.
Nevertheless, humans continued to push at the frontier. American businessman Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he rode a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS in May 2001. In addition, Russia was considering more tourist flights, and several private American ventures were trying to develop affordable space tourism as a business.