Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was one of my childhood heroes.

I was obsessed with space travel when I was a kid. I built models of the space shuttle, I had posters of astronauts on my wall and I dreamed of one day going to Space Camp in America.

I borrowed books about Skylab and Mir, the Apollo missions, the various bits and bobs of space junk floating around up there... Not to mention Astronomy magazines. I think I borrowed every single one in my local library, and occasionally managed to convince my mother to buy a few for me.

I started to form a real interest in Astronomy until I hit my teens. Then I don't know what happened. I think my childhood love of all things science ran into the wall of my teenage hatred of all things involving maths. Actually, I think it had something to do with Star Trek. I started to find science fiction infinitely more interesting than science at about that time.

My interest in Space had a bit of comeback in the late Nineties when I simultaneously discovered NASA's satellite tracking website and the television series Space Island One (an uneven TV series featuring a crew of scientists working on an International Space station in the not-to-distant future) and found myself following the progress of the ISS with a lot of interest. But, by that stage in time, I had almost completely abandoned science for literature. Plus, I had worked out that I would never pass the physical to become an astronaut.

Most of what I learnt during my Space Age has subsequently fallen out of my head, which is a pity.

Yuri, though, will always rock. The man is a legend. He did the most dangerous thing in the history of the world, without knowing if there was the slightest chance he would survive. I mean, being strapped onto a giant explosive and sent outside the planet to a place where the only thing between him and certain death were a few feet of metal and electronics? With no guarantee that there would be no leaks? That takes some guts.

I always associated Russia with top-of-the-range technological development because of their Space programme. Sure, the American's made it to the Moon first (and second, and third), but everything else was Russia. Russia put the first satellite in space. Russia put the first animal in space. Russia put the first man in space. Russia put the first woman in space. The only space stations that managed to last a decent length of time were Russian (at least in part). They just seemed to do the Space Thing so much better than anyone else.

In fact, I used to harbour a secret dream to be a cosmonaut, rather than an astronaut.

It was really weird to hear about their submarines. The Russians appeared to do mechanical so much better than the US for a while, that it was really weird to find out that they didn't do electronic very well at all.

For some reason, I was never as inspired by Valentina Tereshkova. Probably because I could never remember her name. But, you'd think the first woman in space (who was also, technically, the first civilian in space) would be quite the inspirational figure for a young girl with a space fixation. She sort of was, in that I knew she existed and was the first. I just wouldn't recognise her name instantly like Yuri's.