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The UN General Assembly, in its resolution A/RES/65/271 of 7 April 2011, declared 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight “to celebrate each year at the international level the beginning of the space era for mankind, reaffirming the important contribution of space science and technology in achieving sustainable development goals and increasing the well-being of States and peoples, as well as ensuring the realization of their aspiration to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes.”

12 April 2011, was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space – the first manned spaceflight in history. Gagarin made a 108 minute orbit of the Earth, in Vostok 1. At the time, human spaceflight was really driven by the space race between Russia and the United States – it was more about competition and superiority than collaboration. Today, the situation has changed: the International Space Station is all about collaboration between nations and, with the end of the Shuttle Program, the US is now reliant on Russian Soyuz launchers to reach the ISS. More than 200 individuals from 15 different nations, from America, Europe and Asia have now visited the International Space Station.

The programme for the 2012 International Day of Human Spaceflight includes music from Beth Nielsen Chapman, and a talk from Dava Sobel, author of The Planets and Galileo’s Daughter. There is also a screening of a trailer for the documentary, The Last Flight of Petr Ginz. Petr was a child from Prague who was murdered in the holocaust, aged 16. He wrote numerous stories and produced many drawings and paintings about the Nazi occupation of Prague. Petr’s story became well known after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle tragedy: the Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, had carried one of Petr’s drawings, “Moon Landscape”, with him on the flight.

Teacher resources:

The ESERO-UK Human Space Exploration collection contains videos and lesson resources linked to the day. The ESA ISS Education kits are popular teaching resources, and there are a number of videos showing life and experiments on the space station.

In the resource, Cross-Curricular: History Meets Science, students can carry out an evaluation of photographic evidence from the archives of NASA. They become familiar with some of the common fake theories proposed by conspiracy theorists, and match them to common sense explanations that support the authenticity of the photographs. In the second activity, students use a game to piece together the sequence events in the US-Soviet space race. The third activity looks at the development of rockets during the Second World War. The V2 rocket was developed by Wernher von Braun, who was later the chief architect of NASA's Saturn V rocket - which was key to the Moon landings.

The full programme for the International Day of Human Space Flight, 2012, can be found on the UN website.