Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, one of the founders of Yuri’s Night, sent me a note saying that there will be a pretty cool party tonight at Goddard Space Flight Center, my old stomping ground in the Washington DC suburb of Greenbelt, MD. They’ll have a huge Hubble cake (made by Charm City Cakes, which was featured on the TV show “Ace of Cakes”), which sounds fantastic. Admission is ten bucks.
I wish I could go, but I’m here in Boulder. Tonight I’ll be with my in-laws, celebrating their own anniversary, but perhaps I’ll raise a glass to Yuri. At the time, his government and mine were not on the best of terms, but even then some folks had a glimmer that in the future things would be better, and those differences would pale when viewed through the other end of time’s telescope. And here we are, not even half a century later, toasting the memory of the first human in space.
May he have billions of successors.