50 YEARS OF HISTORIC JOURNEY

Yuri Gagarin made of fire racing towards the moon, the U.S. will get years without own ship, and Russia invests little

When Yuri Gagarin took off for the first trip by a man into space, the future of manned space missions was uncertain. Exactly 50 years later, the situation is not much different.
NASA, which has the largest budget for this purpose on the planet is very close to running out of vehicles to send its astronauts into space.
The big bet of the American space agency over the past 30 years, the shuttle will turn soon, literally a museum piece. It is expected that the fleet is retired this year.
The safety of these ships was kept in check after a series of recent crashes and two fatalities, with the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, leading to the deaths of 14 astronauts.
With the reduced budget and technical difficulties to build their next generation of spacecraft, NASA will retire the shuttle still without a replacement.
In official discourse, the agency says it intends to entrust the transportation of astronauts to the private sector. This, however, does not have time to leave the paper.

LIFT
In practice, however, Americans will be totally dependent on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to carry astronauts to the ISS (International Space Station).
And the Russians, of course, are already taking advantage of the situation. The price of "free ride" by astronaut initially matched by $ 56 million (approximately $ 90 million) has been adjusted to $ 63 million ($ 100 million).
The NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, has already felt the size of the problem.
"It is urgent and essential that U.S. companies take control of transporting astronauts into space," he said after learning about the readjustment.
The Russian ship, incidentally, is a kind of galactic taxi. It was there that in 2001, took off the first space tourist, Californian billionaire Dennis Tito, and Marcos Pontes, the first and so far only Brazilian astronaut.
Despite being the most reliable spacecraft currently in operation, most of the Soyuz design is still based on a project of the late 1960s.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the budget and priority of the space program have been reduced substantially.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, used the celebrations of 50 years of flight to announce an expansion of the Russian space program.
"Russia should not be limited to the role of the international space transporter. We need to increase our global market presence back into space," he said.

EMERGING
But if for U.S. and Russian space program is no longer the same importance of the Cold War, the growing interest in emerging markets.
In 2003, China became the third country to take a man into space using its own power. The taikonaut-how is called the Chinese astronaut, Yang Liwei spent 21 hours in Earth orbit. The country plans to take a Chinese to the moon by 2020.
Also in Asia, India has announced plans for manned space exploration.