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

Fifty years ago dogs were successfully orbiting the earth; you’d think my dog could learn to stop chewing my shoes…

Before August 19, 1960 Belka (Белка) and Strelka (Стрелка) were just two regular mutts scratching out a living on the streets. The next day though, the dogs were national heroes in Russia with their photos in newspapers all over the world and their names remembered decades later as spaceflight pioneers. Well, that’s what happens when you’re the first living creatures to go to space and return safely to Earth.

Belka and Strelka (along with 42 mice, 2 rats, a rabbit, flies and plants who were perhaps less photogenic ) orbited the Earth 17 times aboard Sputnik 5 and lived to tell the tale. Post-flight checks showed the dogs did not suffer any adverse effects from their historic trip. Strelka went on to have six puppies one of which, Pushinka (Пушинка) ended up living in the White House with President Kennedy and whose descendents are still living today.

The successful flight of Belka and Strelka was a key stage in the preparations for Yuri Gagarin’s flight just 8 months later.

Yuri’s Night, the World Space Party, has officially finalized its global Executive Team responsible for the expansion, promotion and support of Yuri’s Night’s events in 2011. April 12th, 2011 will mark the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight (by Yuri Gagarin), and to prepare for this momentous occasion, the Yuri’s Night Board of Directors has brought together a top-flight team of over 25 members from around the world.

“The talent we’ve brought on board to run Yuri’s Night this year is really incredible,” said Yuri’s Night Assistant Director Brice Russ. “This is our largest Executive Team by far in the history of Yuri’s Night, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what our team can accomplish as we celebrate 50 years of humanity in space.”

The Yuri’s Night Executive Team is led by the Yuri’s Night Board of Directors, composed of Executive Director Ryan Kobrick, Assistant Directors Tim Bailey and Brice Russ, and “Master of Electrons” Chris Lewicki, with Yuri’s Night co-founder Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides in an advisory role. Each director will also be chairing one of four committees on the Executive Team.

The Yuri’s Night Operations Committee, led by Ryan Kobrick, consists of Chief Strategist Jim Keravala, Director of Content Development Holly Blessen, “Director of Awesome” Carolyn Belle, Director of Event Expansion Alan Steinberg, and Director of Marketing Gregory Wagner.

The Yuri’s Night Event Relations and Support Committee, led by Tim Bailey, includes Director of Swag Robert Pearlman, Space Community Relations Directors Grant Atkinson, Juergen Schlutz, and Manoj Pai, Outreach Directors Cat Aboudara, Milayla Diesch, and Kerry Sanz, and Regional Representatives Marianne Mader, Dorian Bozicevic, Jesper Jorgensen, Nouf Al-Jalud, Sudeep Nupane, and Marco Pirateque.

The Yuri’s Night Media Relations Committee, led by Brice Russ, includes Director of Social Media Jen Scheer, and Media Team members Jason Rhian, Rob Shannon, Mary Kerrigan, and Talal al-Bahri.

The Yuri’s Night Web Development Committee, led by Chris Lewicki, includes Ben Higginbotham, Jeffrey Alles, Mark Lopa, Robert Osband, Dennis Bonilla, and Jen Scheer.

This year’s Executive Team includes high schoolers and people with decades of experience in NASA and aerospace, participants in the first annual Yuri’s Night in 2001 and Yuri’s Night first-timers, and the founders of the Space Tweep Society, CollectSpace.com, Spacevidcast, and Astronauts4Hire, amongst many other cutting-edge groups and projects. One thing that all members share, however, is an enthusiasm for exploration, science advocacy, and the Yuri’s Night mission of bringing people together to celebrate humanity’s past and future in outer space.

Yuri’s Night is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space launch (April 12, 1961) and the first launch of the space shuttle (April 12, 1981) by hosting and sponsoring events around the world every April 12. Now in its 11th year of operation, Yuri’s Night held over 200 events in 67 countries in 2010, including the NASA Ames Research Center, the South Pole and the Second Life virtual world.

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.