"Спутник-1"

Today is Yuri Gagarin's big day. Well it was 49 years ago. For those of you not quite half a century old, Mr. Gagarin strapped himself in and went for a ride that really shocked us.  A few years before that 1958 in fact, Sputnik 1 went into orbit, an event that sent us to the bomb shelters.

It was about the same time as Yuri Day that President Kennedy announced we would go to the moon and we did. Now where are we going?

NASA may well be full of bureaucratic blockheads but they, at one point, produced a miracle or two just as the Soviets did back then and Sputnik and Yuri were miracles of sorts.  We didn't like their politics but we did admire their science. 

So what of this?  Holst wrote a suite called "The Planets" about a century ago (before Pluto was discovered) and he depicted most of them in music. Venus and Mars are perhaps the best known movements and are linked here.  One way is  to Mars the Bringer of War and the other to Venus, the Bringer of Peace. Very symbolic of Yuri Day, don't you think. Go into space and turn right or left.