posted on Sep, 30 2003 @ 11:03 AM
OK, this is not what you thought, but still a good read...
Can you imagine being there on the day of the blast off???
His 1961 flight aboard a Soviet Vostok space capsule, catapulted the former air force pilot into the history books and set alarm bells ringing in the
Western world that the final frontier was about to turn a very communist shade of red.
But was he really the first?
Several centuries earlier -- legend says about 1500 AD, sometime around the middle of the Ming Dynasty -- a Chinese stargazer named Wan Hu dreamed of
going where no man had gone before and set out to turn that dream into space age reality.
According to the legend, Wan, a local government official, was obsessed by the stars and planned a rather harebrained scheme to get himself closer to
them.
Wan's pioneering spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands on.
www.cnn.com...