The final frontier not just a dream for some

WORLD Space Week 2011 takes place from October 4 to 10 as an international celebration of how space has contributed to the betterment of the human condition while also educating the public about space.

Since World Space Week began in 1999 events have been held in over 50 nations each year, and as a part of this year’s activities Cork’s Blackrock Castle Observatory (www.bco.ie) will host a rocket launch with the Irish Rocketry Society and NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough will deliver a talk at Triskel Christchurch.

The theme for this year’s event is 50 Years of Human Spaceflight, charting the missions dating back to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961. Since then missions have also been conducted by the United States and the People’s Republic of China, with India, Japan, and Malaysia also engaged in developing their own space programmes. “I wanted to be an astronaut ever since I was a little boy,” Shane Kimborough recalled of an early interest in space that would eventually see him realise the dream in 2008. “Most kids my age had the same dream because we grew up watching the Apollo astronauts walk on the moon.”