In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew higher and orbited longer than Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos combined aboard Vostok 1, the world’s first piloted space flight. Upon his return to Earth, Gagarin became a global celebrity, traveling the world and recounting what it felt like to drift weightless and see the planet from above. For a brief moment, he transcended the boundaries of the Cold War, greeting cheering crowds in both Soviet and US-allied countries, capturing our collective fascination with the cosmos.

The Vostok mission was meticulously planned and engineered, its cosmonauts trained for years. Its successor, Soyuz 1, was a different story. The 7K-OK spacecraft had been hastily constructed, its three unmanned flight tests all ending in failure. According to one account, Gagarin helped detail over two hundred structural concerns in a report urging the flight be called off. It’s rumored that he even tried to take his fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov’s place piloting the doomed mission. In the end Komarov’s parachute failed to deploy and he burst into flames on reentry, plummeting at forty meters per second into the Earth.

In aeronautics, the margin between triumph and tragedy is narrow. While hubris may have been Soyuz 1’s fatal flaw, the pursuit of profit has similarly incentivized corner cutting in the US space program. NASA, once the crown jewel of the public sector, has been slowly sold off to private contractors in the neoliberal era.