Yuri Gagarin statue unveiled in London

Figure of the Russian astronaut – the first man to journey into outer space – uncovered by his daughter Elena Gagarina

Maev Kennedy

The Guardian, Thursday 14 July 2011 18.20 BST

The newly unveiled statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is seen outside the headquarters of the British Council in central London. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

The man who fell to earth has come to rest on the Mall in London. Half a century after the Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human to see our small blue globe from outer space, his daughter Elena Gagarina unveiled his statue on the spot where cheering crowds gathered to greet the hero on 14 July 1961.

The statue shows Gagarin standing on the globe in his spacesuit, and was cast from the original mould by the artist Anatoly Novikov, for a statue commissioned in the small Russian town of Lyubertsy where Gagarin trained as a foundry worker. It has come to London as a gift from the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos, and stands opposite the statue of another great explorer, Captain Cook, outside the British Council's offices where there is also an exhibition of extraordinary objects and images which have never left Russia before, including space food, a flight seat for a dog, and Gagarin's anti-gravity training harness and seat.

"It is a great event, important not only for my family and my country, but for all the people – 50 years ago a new era began," Gagarina said.

In his own account of the 108 minutes in April 1961 when his Vostok 1 space capsule orbited the earth in April 1961, Gagarin recalled his eventual safe return, parachuting down close to the capsule into a field near the village of Smelovka – the fact that they feared he would not survive landing inside the capsule was concealed at the time.

"Stepping on to firm ground again, I saw a woman and a little girl looking curiously at me. I was still in my orange spacesuit, and they were frightened. "I'm a friend," I shouted, taking off my helmet. "Have you come from outer space?" the woman asked. "As a matter of fact, I have."

He came to England as part of a triumphant world tour, and the handsome, charming cosmonaut was greeted everywhere with the rapture now given only to pop stars, footballers and newly married princesses.

He never forgot his visit, and the warmth of the crowds who greeted him, Gagarina said. "He knew from newspapers and literature they are very closed but he felt when he came to Great Britain that everybody liked him very much and they expressed their joy so that he was astonished."

The government scrambled to keep up with the rapture of the crowds: the three-day visit was extended twice so that Gagarin could lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace – passing the spot where the statue now stands, in a Rolls Royce with the number plate YG1 – and to meet the prime minister, Harold Macmillan.

In Manchester huge crowds waited for hours in the rain. Gagarin asked for the top of the car to be opened, saying "If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet, too." In London, an American correspondent reported with undisguised shock, the crowds were as large and as enthusiastic as those a month earlier for President John F Kennedy.

Gagarin's visit seemed a time of optimism and joy, the thawing at last of the cold war – but Nato allies sharply condemned the semi-official welcome given to Gagarin, and within a month the new Iron Curtain was rising, the Berlin Wall.

His celebrity grounded him, too precious to Soviet propaganda to be allowed into space again. Gagarina vividly remembers her handsome, happy, physical-fitness-fanatic father, but he was hardly ever there: "He was so busy he was at home perhaps one evening a month." He died just seven years later when a Mig fighter in which he was training, hoping to get back into the space programme, crashed.

Yesterday a small but passionate crowd gathered for the unveiling, including Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, children from the Russian International Theatre School, Prince Michael of Kent who so eerily resembles his cousins of the last of the Russian imperial family – and Lea Georgiades, who came wearing her Lenin badge three hours before the ceremony to be sure of getting a good place. She was a teenager in 1961, and remembers the impact of his visit: "He was modest, clever, charming and handsome – we just thought he was a hero." She would have liked to be an astronomer, she said wistfully, but her grammar school had never heard of such a career for a girl and so she became a teacher who inspired her pupils to look to the stars for hope for the world.

Russia To Continue Using Kazakhstan's Space Center

MOSCOW (The Associated Press) — Brushing off reports that Russia may ditch its space base in Kazakhstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow would continue to lease the space complex.

Russia has a lease deal to use Baikonur until 2050 for an annual fee of $115 million. Amid tensions over fees payments, a Russian official said in February that Russia may suspend its lease for some facilities at Baikonur.

Marking the 52nd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin making the first manned space flight, Putin toured the construction site of the Vostochny launch pad in the Far East which is designed to ease Russia's reliance on its ex-Soviet neighbor.

Officials have put the total cost of the Vostochny project at about $10 billion. Putin, however, insisted that Russia would not leave the base in Baikonur.

Although Russia has several smaller launch pads it is only from the steppes in Kazakhstan's Baikonur that the Russian space agency launches its manned mission. Gagarin made the world's first manned space flight from the Baikonur launch pad, which services manned flights to this day.

The first launch from Vostochny, which is located in the sparsely populated Amur region, 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) east of Moscow, and just about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away from the border with China, is expected in 2015 and the first manned flight in 2018.

The government would earmark some 1.6 trillion rubles ($50 billion) for the space industry through 2020 to make up for the years of under-investment, Putin said quoted by the Itar-TASS news agency.

To mark what's celebrated in Russia as the Space Day, Putin had a chat via a video link with the six-man crew of the International Space Station and assured that the new Russian space center would be open to U.S. and European space agencies.

Putin said in televised remarks the site of the new cosmodrome was carefully chosen and would allow cosmonauts land on water. The Sea of Okhotsk on Russia's Pacific coast is 600 kilometers (375 miles) east.

Leonhard Euler, longitude winner

Today's Google doodle celebrates Leonhard Euler who, among his other achievements, received a reward

Leonhard Euler, the influential Swiss mathematician, has had the 306th anniversary of his birth honoured by a Google doodle. Photograph: Google. Photograph: Kunstmuseum Basel/Wikimedia Commons

I was delighted to spot today's Google doodle, celebrating the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler. The Guardian's brief piece today states that:

Euler was arguably the most important mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time. He introduced most modern mathematical terminology and notation and was also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.

What is not noted, but is well-known to those of us working on the history of the Board of Longitude project, is that Euler is one of those who received a financial reward from the Board in 1765.

In the aftermath of a sea trial of three possible approaches to solving the problem of finding longitude at sea, two emerged as worthy of further investment. One was John Harrison's sea watch, for which the maker received £7500 in October 1765. Any further reward would depend on his showing that this was a machine that could be replicated.

Back in May 1765, however, the Board also worked out how to reward and support the lunar distance method. This, much more obviously than Harrison's work, was a method produced through the work of many individuals, several already deceased. However, as well as setting up the future publication of digested astronomical data in the form of the Nautical Almanac, they opted to flag up some key contributions.

Tobias Mayer's widow, Maria was paid £3000 as a posthumous reward to her husband "for his having constructed a Set of Lunar Tables" and to her for making them property of the Commissioners.

Catherine Price, Edmond Halley's daughter, was paid £100 for handing over several of Halley's manuscripts, which the Commissioners believed "may lead to discoveries useful to navigation".

Still living, however, was Leonhard Euler, who received £300 "for Theorums furnished by him to assist Professor Mayer in the Construction of Lunar tables".

Euler's important mathematical work had very practical applications, of which he and the Board were well aware. It was this work, building on that of Johann Bernoulli and Gottfried Leibniz that allowed Mayer to do what had always eluded Isaac Newton: produce a usable theory of the moon.

Letter from America: a memo to chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport

In the seventh of our series on scientific advice, Roger Pielke Jr identifies a few lessons for the UK's new chief scientific adviser from the experience of his counterparts in the White House

President Barack Obama with the current White House science adviser, John Holdren. Photograph: White House/Pete Souza

Congratulations Dr Walport on your appointment as the UK government's chief scientific adviser. You join a select group. Since the position of chief science adviser was established in the US in 1957 and in the UK in 1964, fewer than 30 men (yes, all men) have occupied the position. Today across Europe, only Ireland, the Czech Republic and the European Commission have formal equivalents, which also exist in Australia, New Zealand, and soon perhaps in Japan and at the United Nations.

In the United States, the science adviser is an assistant to the president with the formal title of Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. All US science advisers (except notably the first, James Killian, who had a background in public administration) have been trained in some area of physics, reflecting the cold war origins of the position.

Since 2005, the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado has brought to our campus presidential science advisers, spanning the administrations of John F Kennedy to Barack Obama. Let me distil what I consider to be a few of the most relevant insights from their experiences.

Science advisers are not superheroes

The US science adviser carries the weight of a mythology of extraordinary access to the president. The reality is more prosaic. The position was created as part of President Eisenhower's response to theSoviet launch of Sputnik, with the appointment of James Killian. One historian of the period commented that President Eisenhower, "saw more scientists in the two weeks following Sputnik than he had seen in the year before".

Eisenhower contributed to the creation of a mythology when he said that Killian "would enjoy wide latitude in action and guaranteed access to information in every corner of government". But actions can speak louder than words. Eisenhower rushed Killian's swearing in ceremony to depart for a golf vacation in Augusta, Georgia. He also left office with a warning that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite".

The idea that science advisers can carry the authority of science as a counterbalance to the messiness of politics runs deep in the expectations of many for the position. Such expectations come from politicians (for example, in the recent UK House of Lords report on chief scientific advisers) as well as from the science community (for example, in the book The Geek Manifesto).

Despite such expectations, the science adviser is an adviser just like any other in government, with a limited portfolio of responsibilities and expectations for accountability. Science advisers are not superheroes with special access and supra-political authority. Making effective use of the position within government requires the scientific community to realistically calibrate their expectations for the role.

"Science advice" is a misnomer

These days, science advice and science communication are all the rage. Unfortunately, such discussions often fall prey to the so-called "deficit model" of the relationship between science and decision making. In its most basic form, the deficit model recommends the following logic to a would-be science communicator: once you come to understand the facts as I understand them, then you will come to share my policy preferences, if not my values.

Under such a model of interaction the emphasis is on sharing (or more commonly, arguing about) scientific facts or understanding outside of any political context. We have learned, repeatedly and sometimes at a high price, that efforts to separate science and politics in such a manner may diminish the role of evidence in policymaking, and can contribute to the pathological politicisation of science. Fortunately, many in thescience policy community, both academics and practitioners, now recognise the pitfalls of the deficit model and have moved beyond it.

The actual (as opposed to mythologised) history of the US science adviser position helps to place the role in a more realistic perspective. If the science adviser isn't actually advising on science what is he doing? The science adviser is part of government, and in the US is a presidential appointee, and as such is a political adviser. It just happens that the portfolio of responsibilities of the science adviser includes matters of policy for science, including government-wide R&D budgets, and science for policy, on topics as varied as food safety and terrorism.

Political advice from a science adviser can take multiple forms

The science adviser is not unique in government in having specialised expertise or post-secondary education. Almost by definition, governing in the 21st century requires sophisticated expertise. Energy, food, conflict, economics, crime, education, environment, terrorism – the list of complex issues dealt with by governments that require the input and advice of experts knows no bounds. In one sense, the phrase "science advice" may already be redundant.

In 2004, the US Governmental Accountability Office found that across government there were 948 advisory committees with 62,497 members. President Obama famously stacked his first term Cabinet with a science "dream team", prompting the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to comment, "We have never had quite this array of scientists in federal government leadership positions." The rise of expertise in government means that the role of the science adviser has been constrained to a few areas, simply because governments are chock full of experts, agencies and advisory mechanisms.

These specialised roles unique to the position of science adviser now include:

Budget champion. The science adviser is a coordinator, and at times, a champion for research funding across the federal government.

Issue expert. The science adviser has a unique ability to assemble expertise to address specialised or cross-cutting policy issues.

Options Czar. The science adviser may also serve as what I have called an "honest broker of policy options", helping the president or prime minister to understand the scope of available choice on a particular topic.

Institution builder. A fourth role is to oversee the institutionalisation of scientific advice across government. The provision of useful advice requires a commitment from policymakers to the use of evidence, but also to the creation and maintenance of strong institutions. The science adviser has a crucial role to ensure institutional integrity by providing advice on advice.

Politics is more difficult than physics

When Albert Einstein was asked why it was that we could discover how to split the atom but had difficulty in overseeing atomic technology, he famously replied, "That is simple my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics."

I was reminded of this phrase when we interviewed Ed David, President Nixon's science adviser. He explained that in 1972, Nixon's White House was considering cancelling the Apollo 17 mission to the moon.

David explained to us that Nasa at first resisted the schedule change, claiming that they would have difficulty keeping their staff in peak form during the delay. Based on the president's unyielding political agenda, David gave them a choice that they could not refuse: launch in December, or not at all. Nasa quickly saw the merits of his perspective and adapted its mission planning.

Einstein was right: politics is more difficult than physics. Securing effective science advice depends upon creating effective institutions with clear mandates that integrate expertise into decision making. Democracy is best served by recognising that advisers advise and decision makers decide.

Parting thoughts

Writing in 1963, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin warned that, "Unless decisions about science policy are to be left to be made by eminences grises, we shall need a corresponding body of independent informed opinions about the natural history of science … research on the intellectual foundation of scientific policy." The good news for science advisers in the 21st century is that there exists a rich and growing field of research on practical questions that lie at the intersection of expertise and decision making.

The UK has more than its fair share of this expertise, which I encourage you to take full advantage of during your tenure. These experts can provide you with much useful advice on advice. Just as there are calls for policymaking across government to be more evidence-based, so too should science and technology policy.

Good luck!

Roger Pielke Jr. is professor of environmental studies in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado and author of The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science In Policy and Politics. He is on Twitter @RogerPielkeJr. This is an extract from his contribution to The Future of Scientific Advice in Whitehall, which will be free to download here from 18 April 2013.