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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023
  • I did some reading and learned a bunch of stuff, and now i see that you’re right and I’m wrong. Yuri’s first spaceflight does in fact totally qualify, completely. I was under the misunderstanding thinking that he was the first to cross the synthetic goal line into space but i assumed that previous attempts were close-ish but not quite to the same altitude. Nope. I just learned that he DEMOLISHED the previous altitude record by an order of magnitude, 32 km vs 320 km, and that all previous flights were using atmosphere conditions to power their flight. You’re totally right, Vostok1 was a totally world-changing achievement

  • Again, first satellite! Great example! And an absolute first achievement in rocketry!

    First man in space is close, but it’s not as world changing, more of a synthetic goal post that was reached. There’s no actual border between space vs not space, it’s just a synthetic line we drew arbitrarily at exactly 100 km.

    But a satellite is an altogether different thing. That’s the first thing humans ever pushed up that didn’t immediately fall back to earth after it stopped being pushed upward. A true and massive achievement, and that achievement created brand new world-changing technologies in communications, created breakthroughs in almost all branches of sciences, changed how we humans live through gps, and all the zillion other world-changing advanced that flowed as a direct immediate consequence