![]() Although it’s really just a highly-sophisticated machine guided by its international human crew, it still reminds me of this soaringly beautiful spiritual passage from Abdu’l-Baha’s writings: I love to go outside in the dark, stand on my porch, and watch the ISS fly by. (Many apps, including this one, can tell you where and when to spot the ISS) If you look up on a clear night you can see it, the largest manmade object in space, with the naked eye. Men and women orbit our Earth every hour and a half or so, on the International Space Station (ISS), which travels continuously around the world at 17,000 miles an hour. Today, we’ve gone far beyond Gagarin’s single circumambulation. We escaped the bonds of gravity and atmosphere that have held us here since the beginning of our species. Think about it: in just a handful of decades, God’s glory in the heavens came true. In 2021, we marked 60 years since that first flight out past the planet’s atmosphere. The world now celebrates this major milestone in human history every April, initially called “Yuri’s Day” when it was first observed as a global party in 2001, then becoming the United Nations International Day of Human Space Flight ten years later in 2011. Gagarin accomplished his historic orbit of the planet in exactly the way Leitch had first proposed a hundred years before. ![]() Many ridiculed him, but exactly a century later, on April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to ride a rocket into orbit in space, making one revolution around the Earth. And the starry firmament has not been created in vain, while it teaches this great truth to all spiritual intelligences. The holy breathings of one devout heart, give to God more glory than the loudest anthems of the heavenly hosts. In his book “God’s Glory in the Heavens,” Leitch published an essay called “A Journey through Space,” where he gave the first modern scientific explanation of space flight. The first person who ever urged us humans to attempt space travel propelled by rockets – the Scottish astronomer and Church of Scotland minister William Leitch – proposed his idea in 1861.
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