On April 12, 1961, the apple-cheeked cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin hurtled into orbit and became the first human being to gaze down at the misty blue ball of earth. Tucked into a cute little sphere called Vostok 1, he whipped around the planet only once before tumbling back to earth; in the transcripts of his VHF and short-wave communications with ground control he frequently notes that he's "in good spirits" and doing "very well." Twenty years later to the day, NASA launched the first space shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center. And twenty years after that, a couple of UN-level space promoters, who subsequently founded the nonprofit Space Generation Foundation, created Yuri's Night, a global celebration of Gagarin's flight that was consciously targeted at the celebration-mad and modestly cosmic youth of today.
Like the a bespectacled kid brother of Earthdance, Yuri's Night has taken off. This year there were well over 100 events around the globe, from Beijing to Prague to Lagos, and though some of them were probably little more than astrogeeks playing Moby records, the Yuri's Night held in Mountain View, something more unusual happened.
The event took place at the NASA Ames Research Center, which is where they do stuff like build space-faring robots and study microbes on extra-solar planets. The Center is an imposing, vaguely Ballardian environment: enormous hangers, wind tunnels, empty runways and defeated institutional buildings lying on the edge of the Bay. But on the evening of Friday the 13th, the center opened its doors to raw food vendors, Black Rock sculptors, feral half-nude hoopers, and the nasty electronic breakbeats of the Glitch Mob. In other words, Burning Man spilled onto the nerd turf of the military-industrial complex.
