the first human being to set foot on the Moon Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Arkhipovich Leonov was born on this day in the small settlement of Listvyanka in the Kemerovo Oblast.

The former Air Force Major General was selected for this signature honour in part because of the outstanding Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.courage he had demonstrated in conducting the first very space walk on 18 March 1965. His spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter the airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, and was barely able to get back inside the capsule.

The other reason for his selection was the tragic accidental death of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin on 27 March 1968, seven years after he became the first human being to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth.

But in a larger sense, the triumphant conclusion of the Soyuz Programme was due to the genius of the leading rocket engineer and designer of the Soviet Union, Sergey Korolyov. Unbeknown to the rest of the world, Korolyov had his own brush with death on 5 January 1966 when after being admitted to hospital with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine a surgeon's incompetence induced a second, and near fatal cardiac arrest.

If the Soviet Union had scored a triple set of firsts in the Space Race, then surely the United States had to score next time, and big. Nothing less than a mission to Mars would enable America to take the lead in the space race.

This strategic objective fired the imagination of California Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan as he stared at the stars on the fateful night that Leonov landed on the Moon. He was a man who believed in cutting through the obfusication to arrive at an action item. His achievement in winning the Space Race, and in so doing bankcrupting the Soviet Union into losing the Cold War, would ensure that "the Gipper" became not only the greatest President in US History but also the fifth face on Mount Rushmore.

A cowboy, said the Ayatollah dismissively, a crazy, crazy old space cowboy yahooing it around outer space. Perhaps some space indians might turn up and save humanity from the Great Satan..