Top tune of wealthy elite
'Fly me to the moon'
By G.
Dunkel
The founder and organizer of the Soviet space
program--Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov--had a dream while the
Soviet Union was still a society run in the general interests
of working people. One day, he dreamt, workers would fly to
space on a ticket they could get from their union.
Multimillionaire Los Angeles businessman Dennis Tito also
had a dream about flying in space. And he could spend $20
million to satisfy it.
The Russian space program is in desperate need of finances
since the Soviet workers' state lost the Cold War and most of
the country was turned into the impoverished capitalist state
called Russia. So it sold him an empty seat on the Soyuz
capsule that rocketed up to the space station on April 29.
Tito's estimated worth is $200 million, made from advising
pension funds. He will make the full payment to Russia only if
he returns safely. He took off with two cosmonauts from a
Russian rocket facility in Kazakhstan.
Before he became a financier, Tito worked as an engineer in
the U.S. space program. He has the distinction of being the
first tourist to fly in space. But if the Russian government
has anything to do with it, he won't be the last.
Yuri I. Grigoryev, deputy general designer of Energiya Corp.
that built Russia's space station modules, told the U.S. press
at the liftoff that the Russian space program intends to court
more customers.
"There are a lot of rich people around," he said. "Why
shouldn't they go flying, enjoy themselves and help the station
at the same time?"
Triumph of a workers' state
The Soviet Union, a workers' state trying to build
socialism, was the first country to conquer space travel. It
launched the first human-made satellite, Sputnik, in October
1957.
The Soviet Union was only 40 years old, born out of an
impoverished, semi-feudal country with a numerically tiny
working class. From the earliest days of the 1917 Russian
Revolution the Soviet Union was invaded by imperialist armies,
its economy strangled by embargoes and its industrial base
decimated in WWII. Yet it survived and became a space
pioneer.
The contrast between the economic systems in the Soviet
Union and the U.S. is apparent in what type of people the two
space programs sent up.
The U.S. imperialist space program made astronauts out of
the sons of privilege, who then went on to become
multimillionaires or senators.
But the first person in space was cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin,
who flew a Soviet craft on April 12, 1961.
Gagarin was the child of a carpenter on a collective farm
and graduated from a trade school as a foundry worker. While
working, he continued his studies at an industrial college and
took a course in flying. He graduated from the Soviet Air Force
cadet school in 1957.
The Soviet space program sent the first woman into space in
June 1963. She, too, had been an industrial worker. Valentina
Tereshkova was a textile mill worker who was active in the
Young Communist League. Her hobby was parachuting. She had no
experience as a test pilot.
Yet from June 16-19, 1963, she made 45 revolutions around
the earth, operating her spacecraft by manual controls.
The Soviet Union also trained and sent into space
representatives from oppressed and formerly oppressed nations
that had been kept technologically underdeveloped by
colonialism and imperialism.
These cosmonauts included Armando Tamayo Mendez from Cuba in
1980, Pham Tuan from Vietnam in 1980, Jugderdemidiyn Gurragchi
from Mongolia in 1981 and Abdol Ahad Mohmand from Afghanistan
in 1988.
The high point and culmination of the Soviet space program
was the Mir space station launched in February 1985. Cosmonauts
occupied it almost continuously for the next 15 years until it
was brought down in March 2001.
After years of imperialist Cold War coupled with internal
erosion overturned the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the
Soviet space program collapsed. Now Russia's space program is
not much more than a low-budget appendage of the U.S.
program.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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