Yuri's Night | The World Space Party – Connecting people with each other, their dreams and spaceship earth.

Yuri’s Night is pleased to announce that, directly after the conclusion of YN2010, we are officially and immediately beginning Yuri’s Night 2011 activities on a global scale.

As of this afternoon (May 29), space enthusiasts around the world will be able to register their events for YN2011. We hope that our improved and streamlined signup interface will make it significantly easier for party organizers to quickly register their events, and we plan on improving the registration process further as we continue to lay the foundations for YN11 throughout the summer. The yurisnight.net main page will retain the 2010 event counts while we wait for participants to register their YN11 events, but we plan on officially moving all tracking over to YN11 in the near future. To register your event, please visit http://www.yurisnight.net/register .

Yuri’s Night is also accepting applications for the Yuri’s Night Global Executive Team in charge of coordinating and assisting the efforts of Yuri’s Night events worldwide. Virtually all positions are open for applicants, including Director of Event Relations, Art Director, News Editor, Regional and Space Community Representatives, and the Secretary of Awesome. Assistant roles for most administrative positions are also available. Applications will be taken until June 15th, and decisions will be made by late June. Yuri’s Night welcomes people of all backgrounds, interests, and levels of experience to apply. To submit your application to join the Global Team, please visit http://www.yurisnight.net/apply .

Please stay tuned over the next few weeks as we plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight with the best year of Yuri’s Night events yet!
Yuri’s Night is a global non-profit organization that brings together the worlds of art, music and science to celebrate our future on this planet and beyond. Since 2001, we have encouraged events around April 12th, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space in 1961, and the first launch of the US Space Shuttle in 1981.

UPDATE: Due to a scheduling change, Yuri’s Night will be meeting in Avedon AB, not Avedon CD as previously announced. The time and all other information remains the same.

Yuri’s Night 2010 will be officially coming to a close this Saturday, May 29th, at the National Space Society’s annual International Space Development Conference to be held at the Intercontinental Chicago O’Hare Hotel.

Loretta Whitesides will lead a panel (alongside Yuri’s Night Exec Team members including Chris Lewicki, Ryan Kobrick, Brice Russ and Grant Atkinson) that will be presenting on some of YN10′s greatest successes and some of our future plans. Once we’re finished with that, we’ll be opening up the floor, asking Yuri’s Night event organizers, partygoers, and interested observers to share their Yuri’s Night stories and offer suggestions on how we can help make YN11 even more awesome.

“Yuri’s Night: Including Fun In The Space Movement” will run from 5 – 5:45 PM Central Time, in the Avedon CD meeting room. Our presentation is part of the “Current Events/Planning for Space” track, directly following presentations by Rusty Schweickart, Robert Zubrin and George Whitesides, so it promises to be a packed house. See you there!

(I’d also be remiss if I didn’t link to this great Fast Company piece on new Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides, which briefly mentions his role as Yuri’s Night co-founder.)

Pretty soon, we’re going to be announcing the official conclusion of YN2010 as we begin to gear up for Yuri’s Night 2011, which promises to be our biggest and most diverse celebration of space yet. Before we move on, though, let’s take a quick look back at the very first Yuri’s Night, which was a pretty big affair itself.

As you may know, Yuri’s Night was first officially announced at the Graz Conference for the United Nations’ Space Generation Advisory Council in September of 2000. There was no way that Loretta, George, and co-founder Trish Garner were going to miss out on celebrating the first YN on the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight (4/12/2001), giving them barely seven months to build a global partying organization from the ground up. But with a lot of hard work, and the help of Caltech’s Laboratory for Spacecraft and Mission Design, Yuri’s Night 2001 finally came together, with 69 events planned around the world.

Due to the International Date Line, Sydney was the first city to celebrate on Yuri’s Night 2001, as a great crowd came together on Easter weekend to celebrate at the Powerhouse Museum. (Due to scheduling issues, Stellenbosch, South Africa was actually the first city to ever celebrate Yuri’s Night, having held their party on April 5.) From there, the parties just kept coming. In Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi, they held a day-long conference on how to use space and technology to help the environment. In Istanbul, dozens of space fans danced and partied until 4 in the morning in an event that was covered by the national Turkish news. The Paris, France event brought together scientists, artists and actors in the Cafe de Flore, a renowned meeting place for great thinkers and writers such as Hemingway, Sartre, and Picasso. And in the United Kingdom, over half a dozen parties tried out events ranging from rocketry demonstrations to movie premiers to all sorts of revelry and celebration.

Of course, the flagship event was Yuri’s Night Los Angeles, which went down at the Palace (now Avalon) in downtown Hollywood. With the Lunar Rover parked out front, over 1500 partygoers showed up over the course of the evening, not including the silver-booted go-go dancers in the middle of the dance floor and the awesome technical crew who set up the continuous space-based footage displayed on the walls. Oksana Baiul, 1994 Olympic figure skating champion, was in attendance, as was Richard Hatch from the original Battlestar Galactica and other VIPs. And in one of the best embodiments of the Yuri’s Night spirit, George Whitesides became possibly the only person to be interviewed by both NPR’s Morning Edition and MTV’s Mandy Moore Summer Special in the same day.

Since then, we’ve gone on to have events on all seven continents, be part of an annual ritual on the International Space Station, host a 12-hour webcast and bring together all sorts of scientists, artists, entertainers, and space enthusiasts by the hundreds of thousands. None of this may have happened, though, had we not gotten off to such a fantastic start in 2001.