Six decades after Gagarin, nostalgia—and not much else—fuels Russia in space

Amid the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, the Soviets had struck a tremendous blow with this flight.

The Russians are justifiably proud of their space program and role in sending the first spacecraft, Sputnik, and first human into space.

The Russian space corporation has created a special website to mark the 60th anniversary, which details the historic flight.

The Soviet answer to NASA's space shuttle, the reusable Buran spacecraft, made just a single (uncrewed) flight into space in 1988.

After the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA agreed to rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to get its astronauts into orbit.

This reality has been made apparent by the rise of SpaceX—and particularly NASA's use of the Crew Dragon spacecraft to get its astronauts to the International Space Station now.

Last October, former cosmonaut Maxim Suraev tweeted an image comparing the interior of the Russian Soyuz vehicle with that of Dragon, with the caption, "Needless to say, you can see for yourself." The photo characterized the Soyuz as "economy class" and Dragon as "first class.".

Because NASA now has access to Crew Dragon, it can stop purchasing Soyuz seats for American and other international astronauts on Soyuz, which cost more than $90 million apiece.

Crew Dragon does have a limited run, with a single successful mission (Demo-1), a second one that will conclude later this month (Crew-1), and a third planned for launch this month (Crew-2).

After this initial success, SpaceX has already announced two private missions on Crew Dragon, flown by space tourists.

This prompted a negative response from Dmitry Loskutov, the head of a Russian space subsidiary, Glavkosmos. "Commercial space flight participants fly into space for positive emotions, priceless experience, and the opportunity of continued monetization of their time in Earth orbit, and none of them wants to feel like a crash test dummy," he said.