Pub trivia: Space firsts
Space firsts
The final frontier is far from fantasy. Cold war beginnings to Apollo landings, Louis Armstrong to Buzz Lightyear... here are some space race facts that even the right stuff brotherhood would be proud to be a part of.
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Fact
Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin were the first men on the moon, on 20 July 1969. Though later missions saw their colleagues driving buggies and playing golf, Armstrong and Aldrin only spent two and a half hours on the lunar surface, mostly gathering rocks.
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Fact
Dennis Tito opened a new chapter in space exploration in April 2001 when he became the first paying space tourist, as a guest of the Russian space programme. He blasted off from Kazakhstan with two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz rocket, and visited the International Space Station.
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Fact
Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space in May 1991, when she visited the Mir Space Station as a cosmonaut of the Russian space program. Her 18-month training program included astronavigation. In an emergency she might have had to steer the spacecraft, using the stars as a map.
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Fact
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space but was estimated as having only a 50-50 chance of surviving the launch, and an even smaller chance of making it home.
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Fact
The first walk in space was by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. On March 18, 1965 he ventured outside his Voskhod spacecraft, but it nearly ended in disaster. He struggled to re-enter the airlock in his bulky, rigid spacesuit and had to bleed air in order to make it back into the ship.
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Fact
John Glenn had been the first American to orbit Earth in 1962 and, after 36 years, he returned to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. Aged 77, Glenn was the first senior citizen in space. On the mission he acted as a guinea pig for experiments examining the effects of weightlessness on the body.
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Fact
Russia's Valentina Tereshkova became the first women in space. She boarded Vostok 6 in June 1963 and orbited the earth 48 times on a mission lasting nearly three days. Her training had been kept so secret that even her mother didn't know until news of the flight was announced on radio.
Dara O'Briain interview
Suavely suited and booted, Irish wit Dara O'Briain's tongue is as sharp as a jagged razor blade. We chatted to the big man (he's 6' 4'') about college, cartoons and off-the-cuffery.
