From the archives: 50 years of human spaceflight

Here at Coffee House, we normally exhume a piece from The Spectator archives on Fridays. But we thought we’d make an exception, today, for the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. The piece below is actually the only one that the magazine ran at the time, and is by the politician/journalist/author Desmond Donnelly. If you can get past the dubious generalities about “less sophisticated peoples” and “magic carpets” — which themselves say something about the shift in what public figures may and may not commit to print — there are some thought-provoking and quite prescient points to be found within it:  

The Magic Carpet, Desmond Donnelly MP, The Spectator, 21 April 1961

Major Gagarin’s space flight was a major initiative of public relations in the Cold War and it was so intended. The plot of Soviet thought was clear — it was to show the uncommitted Afro-Asians, struggling with the practical problems of living on the breadline, the technological advantages that may come to those who throw their lot in with the Communist bloc.