Very special day today: 50 years since the first human being orbited the earth. On 12th April 1961, Yuri Gagarin was launched by a Vostok rocket into space, and completed an orbit of the earth. He became an international celebrity and travelled the world to talk about his trip and promote the Soviet Union.

50 years on, I wonder what his legacy is? It took only 8 years – read that again, 8 years – to move from this very rudimentary flight to successfully landing men on the moon – perhaps the single most complex and awe-inspiring engineering feat humanity has achieved. It cost $24bn – the largest expenditure ever in peace time – and at its peak employed over 400,000 people.

The Apollo missions lasted just 3 years. Since then, no human has ever left the earth’s orbit. Nobody has done anything except what Gagarin basically did, which was to fly very high.

So what is the legacy of all the money and time and technology? The non-stick frying pan? A GPS system? A nice space telescope? Is that pretty much it?

My hope is that the legacy of Gagarin’s incredible flight will be this: it marked the birth of planet Earth. What he was able to see for the first time, and what all astronauts since have commented on, is Earth in its context: a precious, life-rich place in the midst of a very very empty universe.

Living on the surface of Earth it’s impossible to get this perspective. But what missions into space have given us are a sense of unity. Despite all our differences, we do inhabit the same place. We all call it home. And we should take care of it.

Though Gagarin was able to see more of earth than any human previously, it was only in the Apollo missions that the very first ‘full earth’ shot could be taken. Seeing our planet from that far away was a deeply profound experience for those on board, even more so for the twelve who saw Earth ‘rise’ as they walked on the moon.

In a way then, what we celebrate when we remember Gagarin’s trip is the birth of Earth as a unified object, and thus the birth of a ‘green’ consciousness. And for that reason our celebrations ought to take the form of looking after it as best we can.

On Saturday evening the moon was the fullest and closest it has been for twenty years. We got lucky in London – the sky was perfectly clear and the colours were quite incredible. Someone got a fabulous shot at Glastonbury Tor too, which has been doing the rounds.

I have a hunch that the moon is the beginning of all religion. In our inter-relations we have always understood the concept of the ‘other’ – a person outside of my self who is autonomous, important, valuable. But what the moon does, what it has always done, is to draw us out of this horizontal plane of ‘me + others’ into a third dimension: me + others + ‘out there.’

The existence of a ‘heavenly body’ which is close enough to be observable by the naked eye, and yet which moves and wanes and reappears, has, I think drawn us to the idea of the ‘big other’ in a way that the sun may not, for the sun is too bright, too powerful to be gazed at, while the moon is cooler, more mysterious.

I’m reminded of some lines from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, in which he equates a hard and perfectly delineated rationalism with ‘lunacy’:’

The circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

It’s a nice metaphorical twist, but I’d disagree, in that the moon has always had a greater mystery than the sun and has drawn the mystics to it. No one can bear the full force of the sun for long, but the moon draws us into close observation, out of ourselves and our flat earths, and into the realm of the above.

Perhaps this is why those lucky 12 who went to the moon all came back changed men. If you’ve not read Andrew Smith’s Moondust, you absolutely should. It tracks down all of the key figures in the Apollo missions and charts what has happened to those who walked on the moon. For every one of them it was hugely profound and has had a lasting impact on the rest of their lives, not simply in terms of their celebrity, but the way they live too.

The moon draws and releases the tides, waxes and wanes and draws our eyes into the night. There is no man on the moon – we’ve been there and seen that. He came and walked the earth instead, and has now gone further into the night. Still, we look up and wonder though.

Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album.

The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the Moon’ just seem so appropriate in these tough economic times – especially post Haiti’s earthquake – that I wondered if Obama had been listening when he made his decision:

I can’t pay no doctor bills
But Whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still
While whitey’s on the moon

You know, the man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon…

The racial context of 1974 America, into which the album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was clearly different to that of 2010. But ‘whitey’ still exists in other guises: the greedy bankers, the tight landlords, the traffickers and corrupt politicians – all of those who would divert money away from just causes to fulfil their own agendas.

Actually, I think the original Apollo missions turned out to be good value, but I can’t see that these would be. So it’s a good decision by Obama. Let’s just hope the money that is saved goes into welfare programmes, not weapons.